Sudoku and peak experience
I’m reading Flow: The Psychology of Peak Experience, by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. On the one hand, I am struck by how well doing a sudoku fits his description of a peak experience:
- A challenging activity that requires skills
- Clear goals, within reach
- Immediate feedback
- Sense of control
- Total absorption
- Altered sense of time
On the other hand, a sudoku is just a logic puzzle. What does it say about modern life, that so much of it is less satisfying than a logic puzzle? Work, for example: loss of control is the whole point of a job. Television: the commercials deliberately disrupt absorption every few minutes.
Doing a sudoku is a freely chosen activity. No one does a sudoku while thinking “I’d rather be doing a crossword puzzle”. Real life requires interaction with other people, who have other agendas that don’t necessarily involve creating peak experiences for us. Sudoku’s artificiality isolates it from those other agendas and gives us total control.