Minesweeper is a wonderful game. It’s a beautiful mixture of fast reflexes, quick logic, guesswork, and general problem solving skills. In addition to being a baneful time waster, it really highlighted for me the incredible way that skill-testing games can produce an altered state of high-functioning consciousness. At a certain level of skill and familiarity with the game, it can actually transform from a linear, mechanical process into something altogether more exciting, even trancelike. Play requires all sorts of cognitive abilities from the user: deductive reasoning, spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and intuition, among other things. But the aggregation of these abilities, in combination with speed and a certain quality of – yes – mindlessness, can produce an incredible mental transformation.

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