Raph Koster’s recent post theorizes that we play games we’ve already mastered as a form of meditation, like raking sand. Again, it’s simple kinetic activity helping our brains get to a happy place.  Flow, on the other hand, is felt when we haven’t mastered the activity yet and we are in the process of doing so.

I frequently frame the world around me according to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.  In the book, Tolle describes “ego” as the voice in our heads, an unending stream of desires that always results in suffering.