NY TIMES EDITORIAL: The Grand Game of Getting to Work

Eight-thirty in the morning and the subway is full. Straphangers — strapless for years now — brace themselves against stainless steel poles and overhead rails and almost half the heads on the train are bent, pewlike, over small electronic devices. You can tell who is reading and who is not by the use they make of their thumbs. (This is a grand era for thumbs.) The ones who are thumbing might be scrolling or texting or even writing an e-mail message. But many of them are gaming their way to work.

The gaming looks superficial at first — another card added to the solitaire ace-pile, another tile added to a jagged geometry. But even casual gamers will tell you that there is a psychological intensity, a focal depth, when you’re lost in even the simplest game — something subway crossword puzzlers have known for years. By the looks on their faces, some of these riders have drilled down deep into the inner worlds of games they play again and again. The risks are enormous. Whole civilizations hang in the balance. Destruction rains down from on high. The players would be adding body English to their thumbs if the train weren’t so crowded.

Few of the gamers miss their stop. They keep an inner ear out for it. Many of them slip back into the stream of real life without much trouble. But there are some — and we can empathize — who have trouble surfacing from that inward reality. They grope their way out of the car and onto the platform, still racking up points in their head or perhaps only blinded by 10 stops staring at a tiny screen. And then the day swallows them, whalelike, and they’re gone.