I was just talking with one of my sisters, who said she and her husband pulled out a chessboard the other night and played the game. They both thought, “Where’s the controller?”

And we’re not talking 20-, 30-, or 40-year olds, either. These are two educated people in their 50s who were infected by my son’s Xbox addiction to Halo. They are almost technophobic, but they recognized that the act of playing a game with non-digital components seemed a tad foreign.

I love the feel of a chess piece–wood, marble, agate. I love the look of the board, whether it’s a simple red-and-white cardboard one or an intricately inlaid board from the Middle East, pieced together with mother-of-pearl and ebony. I like the banter, the movement, the fun of face-to-face games.

So what happens to kinesthetic and tactile connections when we only write through keyboarding and never longhand? I journal longhand almost every morning, and I’m particular about my journal and my pen–the tactile, visual, and kinesthetic matter. But my writing becomes more and more difficult to decipher because I write mostly on my laptop. Yesterday, I was at a meeting, and I noticed that taking notes on my laptop kept me physically separated in ways that my colleagues did not experience–they took notes by pen in notebooks.

How do we achieve balance?