
For my two older grandsons, living and playing online is nothing novel, even in the face of this “novel” coronavirus. Several years ago, I saw them playing high-stakes games (in their minds, at least) in cyberspace using their headphones, microphones and X-boxes. Sometimes they would play with their cousins on the other side of town, and sometimes with strangers—somewhere in the world. They are not living in the world in which I grew up, where tournaments of paramount importance for us at the time consisted primarily of physical board games such as checkers, chess, Parcheesi, Scrabble and Monopoly.