Before the pandemic, I identified solidly as a hater of games and puzzles. They seemed pointless to me, a waste of time, an impediment to conversation. Weren’t they just labor masquerading as fun? My former roommate, an avid gamer, would host nights for a group of friends when they would play elaborate board games, the strategies, or even basic rules, of which I could never quite parse. Eventually, I learned to opt out entirely, hiding in my room or jeering on the sidelines, and vowed to participate in his gaming schemes only on special occasions, such as his birthday.
But, with the descent into quarantine, I found myself, like many, with an unprecedented amount of idle time and its attendant restlessness. Under these conditions, I began to understand more clearly the appeal of tasks that offer the illusion of stakes but confer no real consequences if you fail at them. The point of games is that they manage to be absorbing without being productive. A crossword puzzle, I realized, is as difficult to pull away from as Twitter, but refreshingly free of the grim sense of duty that keeps its users scavenging for scraps of information and morsels of attention. A simple, nostalgic game of Uno with my co-quarantiner, over glasses of wine, managed to temporarily quiet the low thrum of dread rattling our nervous systems.
The professional puzzler Chris Ramsay, whose YouTube channel has millions of subscribers, is sensitive to the power of playful concentration. In the video above, he talks about why people are enjoying puzzles so much during isolation and how he arrived at his unusual career. A magician, he found his current calling when he recorded a video of himself using the tricks he’d picked up through magic to unlock a three-dimensional puzzle that resembled a padlock. The popularity of the video led him to solve and record similarly elaborate puzzles, which are handmade by a niche community of enthusiasts and can be deviously counterintuitive. Ramsay describes his mixture of calm and frustration as he spends hours finishing one. “I feel like I have better things to do,” he says (even though he is, technically, doing his job). Diversions like these offer the rare sensation of absolute focus and the joy of accomplishment without the exhausting requirement that they contribute to the larger goals of survival.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.
