120217 Games

I suppose games have been around almost as long as there have been people on earth.

Games are good fun and are very good for us older, retired people to keep our minds working. The game called GO was invented in China 2,500 years ago and is still popular in China today. It is a complex game of strategy. Chess is popular in Europe and in the USA. It is another game of strategy. I suppose all games have some strategy involved.

The first computer game was a game called Space War, developed by Steven Russell at MIT in 1962. It was played on a PDP-1 computer the size of a car. These days there are a myriad of games played online and people love them!

I remember being in Hong Kong back in the sixties, watching elderly Chinese men sitting on the sidewalk playing Mahjong. I thought the game was interesting. Now I have found an online Mahjong game that I enjoy playing every day. I usually play 2 or 3 games a day. It is fun when I win and frustrating when I lose, but it keeps the old gray matter inside my skull working.

I used to play Pinochle aboard ship and later with my grandfather, parents, uncle and aunt, Joyce and grandma Mickey. That was a lot of fun! Joyce and I started going to the casinos in Oklahoma in 2005. We played card games at poker tables there.

Games are fun for people around the world. For a while I thought playing games on a computer was a waste of time, but not anymore. They help retired folks with not much else to do, stay busy and keep the mind occupied and most importantly, active. As Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians used to sing, “Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”