So, I admit it, I bought a PSP. I hadn't planned to, but there were tons at Target yesterday, and I figured it was either now or later so might as well make it now.

I had and continue to have doubts about the device. Again and again Sony tries their hand at this notion of an integrated mobile device. Five years ago they made an investment in Palm and started rolling out Clié devices with the same promise of integrated music, productivity, movies, etc. They never seem to get it quite right. It's not an easy task to be sure, but the idea that one device can or needs to serve all those goals may underscore a kind of mobile fantasy... the idea that devices can and should service our every need, wherever we are.

If it weren't for the proprietary media format and the questionable lousy battery life, I'd say the PSP has great potential as a crossover movie/game device. The screen really is beautiful and even at $250 it's a bargain as an alternative to a portable dvd player (plus you get a gaming console). But I'm doubtful that Sony will find a way to make movies on PSP work. You'd have to un-copyprotect your DVD and rip it to Mpeg4 on a 1GB memorystick... illegal, time-consuming, and difficult for the average consumer. The only other option is to pay $20 a go for lousy action movies on UMD. Hopefully Sony will realize that more gamers have young kids now, and we'd happily use the PSP as a cheap portable DVD player if there were content to play on it.

Anyway, among my weekend spoils I picked up the game Lumines. It's a terrific puzzle game, rich with gameplay innovations even though it looks like "yet another block dropping game." I'll talk about those innovations some other time. Today, I want to talk about the weird relationship between Lumines and standardized global intelligence tests.

In addition to standard play, Lumines offers puzzle mode. Here's how one reviewer explains it:

When I started playing puzzle mode I was thrown back to memories of global intelligence tests. That probably sounds perverse to most readers, but my father was a clinical psychologist, and so I have a lot of experience with intelligence tests. He did a lot of occupational rehabilitation for state agencies, and his patients were often late. As a result, I spent a lot of time as a kid sitting around in his private practice, waiting to go home.

To bide my time, he'd often let me "play" the global intelligence measures he used for his patients. I was especially fond of one performance subtests of the popular Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS): block design. David Wechsler, author of this particular measure defined intelligence as "the global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment." The WAIS has two scales, verbal and performance. Block design is among the subtests on the performance scale, and I have fond and vivid memories of it. The test requires the subject to put sets of blocks together to match patterns on printed cards. Each face of the blocks are colored differently, and the subject has to assemble the blocks so that their aggregate arrangement reconstructs the desired pattern. It's a bit like tangrams but the pieces are cubes rather than planes (see the photo at right). I must have completed this measure dozens of times. I became very good at it. I'm sure it completely skewed my ability to take an intelligence test "in earnest," but there's no harm in that.

As I was playing Lumines puzzle mode today, I realized that it is almost exactly like the WAIS block diagrams. The player has to reconstruct a pattern using a finite number of fixed shapes. But the game adds another dimension, the ability -- and sometimes the necessity -- to clear certain blocks in order to create the final pattern. Unlike other puzzle games like Tetris and Zuma and Cubis, Lumines patterns are removed when the player forms squares, and they're only removed when a cursor passes over the proper part of the field -- not automatically.

Some reviewers are calling Lumines the best game on the PSP, a rather amusing fact given that it's not a fancy real-time rendered 3D adventure game -- the apparent preference of the PSP alpha user. As I was musing on WAIS block diagrams, a score of possible research questions streamed out of my Lumines-infected brain. I'm not a psychologist or a even social scientist of any kind, so rather than try to answer them, I'm just going to pose them provocatively here. Maybe someone knows about existing research that might answer these questions.