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Why Windows Solitaire Eats So Much Time
An anonymous reader writes "This article suggests that Windows Solitaire may be the most-often played computer game. It's not so much an article about Solitaire, but rather an article about Windows and human nature and socialization. If you play FreeCell, there's a interesting paragraph about its inventor." Can Solitaire really eat up more hours than have been sacrificed to Tetris?
Actually, I think I'll wait until tomorrow...when I have work to do.
This sig is certified free of self-referential humour!
"Can Solitaire really eat up more hours than have been sacrificed to Tetris?"
On a Per-Person level, I think there are more people that have spent 20 hours in a day playing Tetris, than Windows Solitaire.
But, I think more people play Solitaire than play(ed) Tetris, so collectively its more hours.
Seriously though, I have Quake, SimCity2000, and Diablo on any computer that I use just in case I do get bored. Those titles will run on pretty much anything.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
... and could only have one thing, it would be a deck of cards. I would start to play solitaire and eventually somebody inevitably would come along to tell me to place that red eight on the black nine and I'd be rescued.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I prefer the spider one... and yes, Tetris doesn't come with Windows....
People waste time because they don't know how to cheat! Here are the vista Solitaire and XP Solitaire cheats.
Honestly, solitaire has the perfect assets to be the most popular computer game.
1. Anybody can figure it out. My children picked it up in 5 minutes.
2. It's available on to a huge population. Everybody with a windows box has it installed and staring them in the face. Any system is powerful enough to run it.
3. It fills downtime while other processes are loading. Need a few minutes to download that huge iso? Heck, you can probably get in a game of solitaire!
Interestingly enough, solitaire is probably the most popular card game as well... for similar reasons.
"It is the cockroach of gaming, remarkably flexible and adaptable..."
Goo goo g'joob.
I don't have any proof, but I'll still tell:
A few years ago I was cleaning out the records room where I worked. Among all the old manuals of long dead software, I found a four floppy install set of Windows 3.1 (or 3.1.1? It was a very long time ago). On its list of features was Solitaire, listed as mouse practice software of all things. Needless to say, a joke quickly circulated in the office, that we weren't playing games; we were training for better hand-eye coordination with a computer mouse.
That aside, if anyone has an old copy, or knows of an image online, I would very much appreciate the correlation of ecidence.
I loathe Freecell. I also play an average of 3 or 4 games of it a day. I don't think I get any satisfaction from the act of playing or from winning, but it has become the primary opportunity to shut off my brain for a moment or two between tasks. I cannot count the number of times I have opened the game, then closed it because I could find no motivation to play, then re-opened it and played a game 15 minutes later. In the meantime, I could be reading /. or wikipedia or playing a real game, but none of these other diversions quite fill the short-term, no thought required niche that the hated Solitaire game does. There is something seriously wrong with me ...
One virtue of solitaire over most other computer games is that it's not time-based. You can play for exactly as long as you want to. You don't need to finish a level in the time allotted, kill the aliens before they land, play a word before your opponent gets annoyed with you, or anything like that. You have complete control of the gaming schedule.
One can have similar experiences from playing board games vs. computer opponents, or from the crafting aspect of MMOs. But solitaire is by far the simplest way of achieving them.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
It was often said in days of yore that Windows was the best $80 Solitaire game one could buy. However, I believe that Sid Meir games such as Civilization dwarf Solitaire have consumed far more time. Civilization IV is epic and can take days to finish a single game.
I won't even touch the MMORPG's like Evercrack and WOW.
Can anyone get me a pre-release demo of StarCraft II ? That is the one I really want to waste a lot of time on.
Because it is hungry?
-William Brendel
Do you think GWB has admin rights on his PC? As a system administrator, would you have the guts to remove sol.exe? If you did, would it be a unilateral decision?
Just imagine, sol.exe could be the only thing to stop GWB from getting bored enough to push the Big Red Button.
Task Mangler
if there's no doors in their house.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I admit to not having played Solitaire since Windows3.1, and then only a handful of times. I don't see where it is that interesting or challenging. What do players talk about with their friends? "oh, if only the Jack of Hearts had come up." Come on, there is no community or strategy involved.
On the other hand, several years ago my son got involved in playing Age of Empires to the extreme, and then posted hundreds of times to a AOE strategy discussion board, discussing the various ways to advance civilizations and wipe everyone out. The end result: he could type like Superman with zero errors. And he could compose logical sentences, which doesn't happen with todays teen text messaging scene. Made a difference when a summer job came along.
I doubt 5000 straight victories in Freecsll will amount to anything good.
Speaking of Tetris, here is the best version :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo
http://www.tetrisconcept.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=893
Enjoy a fine game.
i spend more time slacking on slashdot than i ever have on solitaire
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Then you, sir, have never actually played the more obscure variants which have addressed this problem. The Victorians mastered the art, and created a whole spectrum from pure luck to 100% solvable.
Windows has included the now famous Klondike variant. However, if you're a skill maven, look up the Spider family of variants which were always my favorites. I think I even saw a Windows port somewhere too. (If not, it's a snap to program them.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The tetromino game is on a lot more machines than some people might think: Open GNU Emacs. Press M-x (Emacs-ese for Alt+x) to open Emacs' command prompt. Type tetris and press Enter.
Windows Solitaire was for mouse training at first so people are still sticking to that. It is a easy to play time waster.
How did Solitaire work in a Casino? There is mode in the windows one for it Does it play like the Casino way did? and are there Casinos that still have it?
... who was playing Solitaire when this story was posted?
Was it the infinite spin[1], the T-spin triples[2], or the piece randomizer that lets you keep playing forever[3]? In fact, all three of those "features" have been mandatory in new versions of Tetris for the past half decade, including Tetris DS, Tetris Zone, and Tetris Evolution.
For me, it was the control lag that killed the joy in Tetris Worlds for GBA. It bothered me so much that I learned how to program for the GBA and made TOD.
[1] Infinity
[2] Super Rotation System
[3] Random Generator and Playing forever
Solitaire is a good thing.
Although it probably seems foreign to most of us here, mouse hand-eye coordination is not automatic.
And for new users or even new users at a business, our IT people encourage people to start with something like solitaire and just let people goof off until it becomes automatic. (Notice the stores or businesses that have mouse driven software and the users take FOREVER to move the cursor on screen to make selections. Giving them a week of play time on something like Soitaire would increase their productivity in the long run, and reduce customer frustration. (Not that I recommend a Mouse UI for checkstands or small business invoicing, but there is a lot of crap software out there in specific industries that rely on it.
It is also a good tool for users moving to touch pads, pens, thumbsticks, etc as it is simple, mindless and yet lets people master the abstract motor neural control of input devices.
Everytime we have a proficient tech that 'hates' an input device, our policies are to make them use that input device, at least for stuff like solitaire if not general work until it becomes second nature. Especially if the tech is ever going to be using it in public or assisting corporate clients where the device might be widely used. (Touchpads and Thumbsticks being #1 on this list.)
Because it's running on Windows! lololol
MS Solitaire eats up so much time because they did not ship a decent version of Maijong.... meh
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
People who use computers at home do something better with them than Solitare but it is still some kind of common lowest denominator.
Solitare is "popular" because it's on every corporate desktop at every big dumb company where people are better at looking busy than they are at getting work done ... when they have any to do. Everyone also knows that the really fun things you can do with a computer will get you fired. For some reason, people big dumb company types let anti-social wastes of time slide but anything useful is punished. Self improvement, religion, language studies and unauthorized training are explicitly prohibited at most companies looking to fire lots of people.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
don't say that too loudly. next thing you know there will be SPLA Solitaire Licensing.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I'm not kidding. Well, I was finishing my engineering degree, and had a frisky girlfriend, so it didn't consume all my time, but I swear every remaining waking moment was spent playing it. On my tricked out zero-wait-state 12 MHz 286. And it was the original Russian DOS-mode game, none of this crappy flash knockoff shite. I will bury you.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Mac OS X has had Chess for YEARS!!
Funny, I always thought that the reason so many people played solitaire was because it's the only game that doesn't crash in Windows.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Haven't touched Windows Solitaire in a while, but I'm hopelessly addicted to Spiderette on DChoc Solitaire. In general, I find I play more phone games than PC games. The phone is with me most times, it's easy to carry, and it has some nice turn based games: DChoc Solitaire is one, but also a few RPG's like Orcs & Elves (way to go Carmack!).
I can honestly say that I have never once played Solitaire.
It could be because I only ever use Windows in VMware for development work and occasionally when I need to play a real game that isn't available for Linux.
I'm playing a game right now, so I'm really getting a kick out of these repli...Err umm... sorry, wrong site.
In Soviet Russia, games play YOU!
That's better.
Some might argue that the reason it's so popular is because it's bundled with Windows by default. I smell a Blizzard anti-trust case.
They need to learn Minesweeper.
Just grab GNU chess Windows port.
Funny story about GNU chess.
Back when I was in college I had two friends that were sharing an apartment. One worked in the day, the other at night. Their only communication was a chessboard on top of the TV. Each person would take a move before going to bed.
One friend cheated. He compiled GNU chess on his Linux box, inputted the board, cranked it up to nearly maximum, and left it to calculate the next move. It would take about 10 hours or so to calculate its next move.
He'd come home from work, make a sandwich, login and get his move, and go to bed. Needless to say he was kicking much ass, and his friend was mightily puzzled at his ability to do so.
He finally came clean though - it was a pretty funny scene when he did. =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
My parents started with solitare, the classic. After they played a few thousand games apiece of that, they moved on to freecell. They got that mastered too, and graduated to hearts. They're still playing hearts, and my dad even taught the game to my grandpa, uncle, and family friend who meet every second sunday night, originally to play dominos, but now domino night has become hearts night if not in name, then definitely in substance.
:D)
(going to domino night was a special treat while growing up because I couldn't go if it was a school night. my mom didn't want me going to bed at 2am for some reason
Most people I've heard say they play minesweeper.
http://worldofsolitaire.com/ is an ajax solitare site, which I know isn't windows solitare but if one checks out the stats, people have wasted 68 years, 35 days on that site alone
The really significant thing about the Windows Solitaire program is that it has probably permanently changed the name of the card game Patience to "Solitaire".
Windows versions starting with Windows ME have had Spider solitaire included with the OS (that is, if this is what you were talking about).
The GNOME project provides a Windows build for Aisleriot Solitaire- which has Spider and a few score other solitaires.
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGames/Windows
But Minesweeper is a better game, I play that more often than Solitaire.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
When I become 80 years old and too "old" to use a computer, there had better be an Unreal Tournament preinstalled in my PC.
I tend to prefer Spider Solitaire or Freecell, but do play the standard game every so often. Sad sod that I am, I also keep track of my high scores.
Solitaire, draw one card, standard scoring.
Top 5 scores.
1) 9294 time 81
2) 9007 time 84
3) 8909 time 85
4) 8819 time 86
5) 8814 time 86
For those who prefer minesweeper, there is a variant based on a hexagonal grid called (surprisingly) Hexsweeper. A cell could in fact be surrounded by 6 mines. To save you the trouble of Googling Hexsweeper, here is a page you can get the zip file from. Click. Is is so much more fun than minesweeper.
Trying to associate Microsoft with "fun" is like trying to associate Satan with aromatherapy. -Tycho
For what more your just bought computer with just windows preloaded can be used on?
IF you get a computer (since '96) it probably will have some version of windows preinstalled, and a very few applications, and of those, the one that can be used by everyone and in any moment is solitaire.
What else is there? Minesweeper? You have to THINK? If you use to do that, then why you got windows in the 1st place?
Heheheh
http://www.flickr.com/photos/astuteobserver/396626251/
That's one thing that always made me wonder: to what length other games go to not let you just freaking (save and) quit when you want to.
E.g., the biggest madness in console gaming that I've personally experienced was a game where I didn't find a save point for 10 hours straight. Luckily it was on a Sunday, but I can tell you that by the end of it I had almost lost even the will to live, not just to play that stupid game any more.
Other games prey on people's social instincts, and essentially create situations along the lines of, "see, if you quit 39 of your guild mates will be boned, and might get really annoyed at you. It's not nice to let your guild mates down like that."
See the bloody 40-man raids of pre-BC WoW. I wouldn't know how the new endgame grind is, I have no desire to even try any endgame grind again.
Or see the "taskforces" of COH and "strikeforces" of COV, where if you quit, they can't even invite another player to replace you, so the group is really boned. It's as heavy handed as it can possibly get.
And to make it even more blatantly heavy handed, at least one of them (wossname, the Clockwork King one) contains 3 missions which are identical. In a row. It's 3 instances of the exact same mission, with the exact same maps and opponents, one after the other. For no obvious reason than to prolong the agony of that TF to a whole 12 to 14 hours. In which you can't quit without shafting the other 7 players.
E.g., even in PC games the idiocy still exists of either
A) making one replay the whole level when reloading or failing. Apparently just so that the publisher can claim X hours gameplay, on an otherwise ridiculously small game. Or
B) limited saves, so better not waste that precious save token on a quick 10 minutes gaming session.
Etc. I could give more examples, but you get the idea already.
And it just makes me wonder what do some game designers think they're gaining there.
Incidentally, I'm still convinced that this is a major factor in, well, creating conflicts and the gamer scare in some people. E.g., the parents see "OMG, he's addicted! I told him to come to dinner 10 minutes ago, and he's still glued to that damn console!" When probably the poor kid is just looking for a save point.
And, while I'm at it, when _did_ it become perfectly normal to prey on people's niceness and social instincts for a quick extra 13 Euro? (I.e., an extra month of that subscription.) Isn't that what we'd call "sociopathy" if someone did that in real life, face to face? Forget Milgram, maybe we have MMO design as a better example of how people can be turned into sociopaths.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Andy
Freecell and Patience (on XP) are typical MS programs:
- different engines
- different user interfaces (clicking vs dragging)
- way too many dialog boxes
- some often used functions don't have a hotkey (like starting over with Freecell)
Inconsistent and unpolished, just like a lot of other MS software. But hey, I can't complain about it because they're just some stupid games and they're free!
People bitching about solitaires be or not to be have not worked with computer illiterates. It is without a doubt one of the best hand-eye coordination training tools on earth...
I am also Mr. Anonymous Coward.
- CmdrTaco.
I played it intensely for a while. (Link in the post right above.)
...
I've actually beaten it at least once each at every level of handicap, even the one where the computer starts w/ stones on a 9x9 board.
THAT one took a lot of wackily played losses before I sufficiently confused the software to pull it off
IIRC, the game files store state but not history. So somewhere I should have "proof" that I did it, but not a record of how.
CAM
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
Try to delete pinball.exe from your XP computer.
Seriously.
You'll find that it comes back when you restart the computer.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
If you play FreeCell, there's a interesting paragraph about its inventor
Submitters seem to be getting more and more desperate to make the slashdot crowd read their articles.
Next stop: "There is a picture of a sexy brunette at the bottom of the page"
Inaccurate! You do not know your boolean logic!
From "If you play FreeCell, there's a interesting paragraph about its inventor." it does not follow, that if you do not play FreeCell, the interesting paragraph will not be present.
Formally if A => B then that does not mean that !A !=> B.
Now had you said you played FreeCell and that the paragraph was not interesting, the summary would be inaccurate. Of if the statement in the summary had read "Only if you play FreeCell, there's a interesting paragraph about its inventor" you would be right.
One thing I often laugh at is the number of people who are shopping for a computer, and decide their purchase on whether the machine can play solitaire or not. Walk through CostCoClubMart on any weekend and stroll through the computer aisle, and you'll see all these people contemplating which computer to buy, and all they do is play solitaire on each one to help them make their decision.
did you just get Tetris-rolled? Cause I think you did.
Just when I thought I played it too much, this guy apparently found some sort of wraparound bug. I don't know whether to congratulate him or just run from him.
"Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing."
Puhleez.
There were "games" directories in timesharing system distributions long before acquiring QDOS was a gleam in Bill Gates' avaricious eye.
Pioneers were wasting time playing Spacewar! on the PDP-1 in the sixties.
David Ahl's "101 BASIC Games" or whatever it was called was typed in by hand to everything in the known world that ran BASIC (Hunt the Wumpus, anyone?).
And when a FORTRAN version of Adventure hit the DECUS library, it caused work outages in DEC shops all across the nation.
And those are just the ones I personally have wasted time with.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It is an addicting game, I had a boss who used to kick me off my computer, the only Windows 3.x system in the office, at lunch everyday. She was almost as crazy as George Dobbs, the ALDOT worker who spent massive amounts of time on Solitaire: http://www.waff.com/Global/story.asp?S=2081845
no comment
My guess is that the real reason is that it is written in C# and hosted on the Windows 98/ME/XP/Vista OS. If that won't rob a person of time and CPU cycles, what will?
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
If you think that Solitaire is the worst time killer that Windows includes, just think that you *can* access Slashdot with IE !
Still smells the same. One side of the pond calls it Solitaire, the other calls it Patience. I cannot find a firm reference, but I would bet that the change originates from some of the anti-french sentiments around the Napoleonic wars.
Strictly speaking, the game should be called "Klondike" since it is really a subtype of solitaire/patience.
-
Skifree taught me a lot about life.
Whenever you think things are going well, a giant monster will run out of the woods and attack you.
Maxed out.
Beyond maxed out.
Comparing Solitaire (TM) and AisleRiot, a game bundled with GNOME, may be interesting.
Solitaire: When you play solitaire, you play solitaire. You have no choice but playing solitaire. And we at Redmond knows you better than yourself and we know you want solitaire. We lock you in (OUR version of) solitaire and you feel it's good so you waste a lot of CPU quanta with it. And more important, it's part of the OS as IE is. It's fairly quick to get familiar with.
AisleRiot: You have choice and control. You have more than 90 solitaire-like card games to play. You are free to choose, but most of them are completely unknown to you. So, you are likely to RTFM first. And you find out AisleRiot is rather a platform than a specific game (or in ESR's words, "mechanism, not policy", referring to the X windows system). You learn the game-independent ideas and terms first and only then can you understand the manual for a particular game. You end up playing only a few out of the 90+ games.
Actually, I found AisleRiot more fun. BTW, obligatory advert for AisleRiot: It's free as in freedom. If you can't beat a game, you can rewrite the code and recompile so that you always win!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
And isn't it the most popular video game? I'm tired of the "PC gaming is dead" rhetoric. Mini-games, like Solitaire, are hugely popular. Yeah AAA titles are more popular on the console, but gaming on a computer is not dead.
-516
TFA misses an important point: Freecell and solitaire are something to do while you are waiting for downloads, program starts, file transfers, slow web pages, etc., etc. In the old days when 300 BAUD modems were the way we transferred files, we old-timers used to read books. (That's how some of us got educated.) Modern speeds, particularly on Windows, are too fast to make it worth while studying, but a whale of an annoyance if you have to wait. So, pop open the game of solitaire or freecell, and your mind is occupied for the 60 seconds or so that it takes for Windows to get ready to work.
On LINUX or UNIX systems I usually have multiple desktops open, and while a task is loading on one desktop I'm working on another, but this is not easily done with Windows.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
My own preference for mind-numbing games is something called JT's Blocks found over at Yahoo Games. [Remotely similar to Same GNOME]
I'll miss it if/when M$ takes over Yahoo.
Solitaire is not just a PC-era phenomenon. JRR Tolkien in his later years was known to have idled away many a wasted hour on this game.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.