One of the best ways a majority of us relax, stay engaged, stave off boredom, or even blow off hours at work is to play games—video games, computer games (you do know there are a few addictive games in your word program, right?), or online games.

I own over a hundred games from the ever-wonderful bigfishgames.com.  I also play games at two gaming sites.  One, I still frequent is free (boxerjam—I love that name, never mind that these are where I played my very first games online the very first time—in the early eighties—I went online.  (Those were the days when you would dial in, wait while the screeeoooobongbongbong sound thrilled you with an electronic techno-buzz, of course.)

But to play games you can get hooked on as a middle-aged single person who prefers the nonviolent, I recommend Pogo.  The play is free if you want, provided you can sit through the intermission—which pops up every too often.  But really, paying to play games at Pogo (and I’m sure at other equally fine sites) is very affordable.  Especially if you choose to be home bound (because you really can’t stand people in person anymore), never spend money on anything other than food and shelter, and deserve (as every human does) the catharsis playing games affords.

It may be understood, obvious, of just naturally implied but never thought about too intensely, but when one plays games on such a site, one garners multiple benefits:

1.Such platforms or networks or whatever they are called these days allow games to return to their natural form.  You can play games like Checkers, a version of Scrabble, or Canasta, for example, with a robot who is as adept as or inferior to you.  And the new avatars (mini-me cartoon representations of players/members) have smiles, frowns, even funny red-faced expressions for winning a round, losing a game, conceding to a set or match.

2.In-game chat for real-time games means you get to play games and communicate with others as you play, you wherever you are, they wherever they are, and there is no time lapse.  You don’t hear from them three days after you emailed or snail mailed a message; you don’t wait ten minutes as if you are stoned and swearing you took way too long to answer that question; you type back and forth to people all over the world.  If you want to.  You can, of course, forego the robot opponent and play games with one of those people or even a whole group.

3. So the subsequent benefits of number two are many: gaming online enhances social recognition; bridges distances; encourages the human sentiments of empathy and sympathy (for anything important to the online/human acquaintances…life issues, feelings, attitudes about hard games or dull ones or games acting up); and fills the vacuum of solitary offline game playing.

4. The miracle of online game playing systems also encourages altruism and contributes to technological knowledge development, on whatever level.  People in a community help others to navigate, chat, manipulate pc commands/controls, play unfamiliar games, and, in general, help each other to learn new cyber techniques.  It’s a beautiful thing.

While we now know, too, that when you play games (of any mode and of certain types), those games help fight off senility, Alzheimer’s, and, in my coo-coo world, the insanity of such needful mental aberrations as ADD, ADHD, and OCD—though this last benefit is not necessarily empirically proven.

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So to play games is to invite motivation for beating your personal best, to perform in competition-mode (though this is very understated), to keep alive the hope of winning some dough.  To play games is to be one of the common denominator who have latched onto the versatility of appeal, the tickle of getting out of doing some work, and the joy of winning.  Something.  Even if its these tokens that are virtually real but virtually useless for anything other than virtual activities.  Whatever the case, it all translates to F-U-N.