Yet, I still like the damn game. First, it gets you into that alpha wave brain state really efficiently and smoothly. It is like Tetris in its heyday of the 1980s. It also reminds me, which brings me to my second point, of Defender on my trusty old Atari 5200. How did I get to 6,000,000 points when I was 16? (Aside, of course, from pausing the 5200 [its killer feature], turning off the old Magnavox TV, and going to school, so I could resume the game when I got home.) Maybe it was that great non-centering controller, but perhaps it was a set of mental optimizations for playing the game that gradually developed in my own head over countless hours. These adaptations and strategies were mostly unconscious (or should I say subconscious?) as that deep, relaxing alpha zone state plugged some deep part of the brain directly into that trippy controller and bypassed my teenaged conscious mind, so overstuffed with Academic Decathalon trivia, science fiction, and hormonal byproducts.

That’s the appeal of one genre of game: that it provides an escape into the autonomic, and that’s where one gradually improves. That’s perhaps why, although I have failed to really get beyond the 384 tile on Threes lately, I can get up there pretty frequently now (where a few days ago the 192 was quite a singular achievement). I’ve also tried playing with meticulous strategy, and that can indeed help, but alternating that chess-style conscious planning with series of pure alpha state games (always while watching something on the Roku with Lil [who is usually also playing Threes on her own little nearby island of digital multitasking consciousness]) is what seems to actually produce incremental improvements. I strongly suspect that if I simply quit my job, I could indeed get quite a bit better at this game.

Maybe that sense of subconsciously accumulating strategies and skills is what keeps Threes relatively non-frustrating for me. This is life’s repeated lesson taught by years gazing out the windows in Elementary School: Compulsion is bearable if you don’t have to pay all that much attention to what it is you are being compelled to do. I stared at that Pepper tree out that window for years, completely zoned out for the most part, and yet managed to osmotically absorb a fine education without even feeling the pain of it all that often. I think one’s brain needs something like Threes occasionally – something that is frustrating if you pay too much attention to any given game, but, if you deconcentrate and let it flow, lulls you into a pleasant, relaxing, and even gently ameliorating state. That’s worth 99¢ to me, at least.