Cognitive Health – PFTR

While searching the internet for interesting topics, I ran across some articles about the benefit of playing video games to one’s cognition. Here are links to a couple of the articles. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6290198/ and

(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171212102158.htm but there are many more similiar articles.

Our cognitive abilities decrease, as we age, so finding ways to maintain our brains is an important consideration of overall health.  In fact, AARP offers free games because they too are promoting the importance of cognitive exercises. Here is the link if you are interested. https://games.aarp.org/category/all-games

When Chad was in high school, he started playing an online game called Runescape. It is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and it was first developed in 2001, but it has undergone many revisions and updates since that time. The game imitates real life in many ways. One can make, sell and buy stuff.  Players can develop skills so they can do more things and make better stuff. It’s the player’s decision what they want to develop and how they wish to progress in the game. There is a free version of the game and also a paid subscription version. I started playing the game back then too and I have to be honest, it can be a bit addictive. We both started out playing the free version but progressed to the subscription.  There are more things to do in the subscription version and it’s easier to progress to higher levels.

After reading the articles on cognitive health, I remembered how much fun I had playing Runescape. My old character was still around so I decided to log on to the free version and see if the game still interested me. Now, however, there are four versions of the game (two free and two paid). One version is called Runescape 3 which is the latest release and the other is called Old School Runescape (OSRS). The newer versions require better graphics and they look nothing like what I use to play. But OSRS looks very familiar. There was just one catch to playing OSRS, the playing character had to be developed from scratch. I spent many hours developing my old character but I really didn’t care for R3. I think it was built for the younger generation to compete with the heavy graphics kind of games kids currently play.

To make a long story short, I started redeveloping my character and it was a lot of fun. I remembered much about playing the game, so the learning curve was pretty short. I started playing in the evenings when Judy was kitting. If are a knitter, you know there is something they do called counting. When counting is occuring, no one is allowed to speak because it breaks their train of thought and you never know when they are doing it. Many, many, many times, especially when I was watching TV and Judy was knitting, I tried to start a conversation and there was no response, so I would ask again. Eventually the loud bark came, “I’m counting” which means I will answer you when I am done.

On the second day of playing Runsecape, Judy asked me a question. I was the middle of a doing something tedious, so I did not hear what she asked and there was no immediate response. After that happened twice, Judy said, “that game may have to go”!  My response of course was, “but dear I am working on my cognitive health and not playing a game.” Here the best part, unless I subscribe, this mental training costs me nothing. I wonder if there is a free version of knitting?