Personaly, i use games to think. Thats to say, dual think. Training myself to multitask. Im able to change how much attention i can divert from my thought process to the game at any time without any real consequence.

Its said games help you stretch your imagination and in ways this can be true but for it to actually be true you have to want it to be true. Many games offer you a delightful psycotic state you you can relax within the confines and absolutes that borders the games edges. They encourage you to adapt to a safe little world where you can complete repetitive tasks and gain new rewards. In ways, they isolate you from reality and shutdown your mind to the complexity of reality. Game can be incredible learning tools, indoctrination tools, isolation tools, and propaganda tools. In the end, games privide you with whatever you want to take away from them and its completely up to you how you want them to act upon you.

Abstract games are a way to avoid reality. The only practical benefit is a therapeutic effect. Those who play real world games with real goals do not need to waste time for abstract goal games.

This blog entry and the one before it deal with art and games, respectively: 'what if we had no art' & 'what' about games? I'll keep this brief. We have such faculties as creativity and imagination, allowing---no, compelling us to exercise our intellect. I submit that, were these faculties non-existant,, that contingency would suggest we possessed no intellect, or, one very different to that which we do have. In such case, we might not even be asking the questions or could be asking different ones. It is pretty rhetorical and speculative, seems to me. But, we like to think that way, especially if (or when) we grow bored with art. And games.

An extended view:
Games sharpen cognitive skills; quench our thirst for competition and superiority; relieve boredom when nothing else serves that objective. Games>>>self-esteem. Other comments expressed here are equally valid.

On a related note:
I revisited 'the trolley problem' yesterday. And noticed a parallel between such exercises and what we call games. All of these spring from motivation and purposiveness. They expand our thinking and, accordingly, our horizons. There is, as was noted in a piece from the past, no 'right' answer for the trolley problem. It only makes us think, while leading us down the garden path. Motive and purpose may be thought of, in Davidsonian fashion, as propositional attitudes. Gamesmanship is an important element of creativity, exercising our 'what if' quotient. More to come, as I work it out...

....(continued)...There is an adage which says: you can't get there from here. Puzzles, like the trolley problem and chinese room may help decide whether that is true. That garden path? It is not always the dead end it first appears to be. Likewise, puzzles and games. The objective is to find whether something is how it probably is, not how it might possibly be. As I have called it: trying harder to think better, and so on. The best thinkers have been thinking outside of the box; jumping out of the system (Doug and Dan) for some time. Those among their contemporaries, who did not arrive at the same conclusions were envious. We are human. Yes: games and puzzles DO matter. They are, roughly, algorithims.
Tools of the trade---whichever one that may be.