We live in the age of the games-player, Homo ludens. The Times has sponsored a world chess championship. The card game bridge will be a demonstration event at the 2002 Winter Olympics, and there is an active lobby to have it declared an Olympic sport. Carol Vorderman and Richard Whiteley have become cult figures by presiding over a moderately serious TV show requiring some verbal and arithmetical dexterity. City traders bet like fury on the number of the eventual winner of another TV show, a "general knowledge" quiz called Fifteen to One.

This diversity of cerebral interest has found a demanding but benign patron in the Mind Sports Olympiad, which takes place at the Olympia Conference Centre, London, from August 21 to 29. This is the third year of the umbrella event, covering more than 30 mind games - board, card and computer games, and mental skills - ranging from chess and Go, through Diplomacy and dominoes to Mind Mapping and quizzes. Borrowing from that other Olympics, there is a Decamentathlon (ten "sports") and Pentamind (five or more), and there is overall prize money of more than £100,000. However, poker and backgammon attract no prize money, being adjudged games of chance in Britain.

The driving forces behind this most sedentary but challenging of Olympiads are grandmaster Raymond Keene, The Times chess correspondent; Tony Buzan, poet, lecturer and inventor of Mind Mapping; David Levy, chess master and computer scientist; Lady Mary Tovey, director of the Brain Trust, and the chairman, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst.
The popularity of crossword puzzles, chess problems, verbal conundrums, mathematical tricks, logical teasers, puns and quizzes of all sorts has never been higher. A typical charity event some years ago might have been a ball or a theatre show or a bring-and-buy sale; now it's likely to be a bridge or backgammon tournament.

Toby Brereton, former head boy at Eton and Oxford scholar, made a fine living doing pub quizzes - several hundred pounds a week - before going straight and getting a proper job as a sports market-maker at spread-betters IG Index, where he is now a director.

There is a technological element to this. The personal computer screen can provide us with a challenge, or an opponent if there are no people around. Early versions of Windows on the PC included games such as Minesweepers and Solitaire, and so much office time did these consume that later versions had to be loaded with the so-called "boss keys" - keys you hit fast when you heard the boss coming and which removed Minesweepers from the screen, substituting something which looked like real work.

Computers are perfect for intellectual games such as Go, Scrabble, chess, shogi, backgammon, bridge and so on. Malcolm Pein, of the Chess and Bridge Shop in London, tells me that at any moment 15,000 people are playing chess with strangers on the Internet.

OK Bridge is a hugely successful Internet programme, where you can request a partner, play with your regular partner, or announce yourself as beginner, intermediate, advanced, unbelievably brilliant or whatever, and three other players will come online to start a game. Frauen Auken and Von Arnim, rated the top women's bridge pair in the world, actually practise on the Internet, because one lives in Germany and the other in Denmark. But the zeitgeist is not entirely technology-driven. As our leisure time increases, as we tire of watching vapid TV programmes and Mr Trollope, alas, writes novels no more, so we need to occupy our minds.

Chess problems and crossword puzzles may be perfectly measured to match the time of our commuter journeys, or the Gatwick-Barcelona flight, but maybe they're also good for us.

It has been suggested that mental stimulation may be a protection not just against cerebral sluggishness, but even against Alzheimer's disease. I believe the medical jury is still out on this one, but you have to admit it provides an A-list excuse: "Put down that crossword, get off that couch, and help with the washing-up/lawnmowing/furniture moving".

"No, no, can't possibly. Keeping fit, you know. Doctor's orders." This is all wonderful news for those of us who were always surreptitiously playing Battleships at the back of the class instead of studying French irregular verbs. We can be proud that we spent, and continue to spend, time on mind sports.

We can also agree with Carl Jung, who believed that human beings were never more human than when playing games, and whose admiration for the English centred accordingly on their unequalled talent for inventing games. Never mind that the English are not worldbeaters at some of the games they invented - football, cricket, tennis - they are number two in the world at chess and the British women's bridge team has just won gold in the General European Championships.

So roll on, mind sports. Roll the dice, cut the cards, set out the chequers, give me a clue. Ladies and gentlemen, game on.