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?

Comments

I'm ridin' spinners, they don't stop

[tepples]

One virtue of solitaire over most other computer games is that it's not time-based. Neither is Tetris. You can just sit and spin a piece forever. In fact, this infinite spin behavior has been mandatory in Tetris(tm) products since the early 2000s.

Re:Screw Card Games!

[DavidD_CA]

Windows Vista (some versions) now comes with a quite decent Chess game.

-David

Re:Origins of Solitaire?

[allanw]

That aside, if anyone has an old copy, or knows of an image online, I would very much appreciate the correlation of ecidence. If you had read the FA, you would have seen this exact same point made there ;)

Obligatory

[imamac]

Mac OS X has had Chess for YEARS!!

Re:Can It?

[Kankraka]

Actually you CAN get better game hands by exiting and restarting freecell. You don't -have- to open and close it, you can just hit F2 or select new game. If you look in the title bar it will say FreeCell Game #(1-100000). It only has 1000000 possible games, so if they restart FreeCell it changes to one of those hands, some being easier than others. Alternatively they could just write down one of their favorite hands and press F3 to enter said hand number. Oh, I've played FreeCell maybe.. three times in my life, and that was on win95.

Re:More truth than humor here.

[cp.tar]

I don't know why Windows still includes games, but I do know what Solitaire is awfully good for: education.
All the computer-illiterate people I've taught found Solitaire an invaluable aid in learning how to use the mouse.

While to us geeks, the mouse is a natural extenstion of the hand, computer newbies have a really hard time with it; instead of looking at the screen, they look at the mouse, and left and right click are higher math. With Solitaire, they get something unimportant, yet interesting to look and click at; the game absorbs them and they forget about the mouse in the hand. Minesweeper is also great, but for advanced newbies -- after they've learned the basics of mouse usage, they can achieve precision playing Minesweeper.

For that reason, I use similar games under Linux as well when introducing newbies to the computer. First learn how to use the keyboard and the mouse, then we can get on with some real work. I found there was no use in teaching people advanced concepts when they still lose their way on the input devices.
Kind of like teaching aphasiacs the finer points in grammar.