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Why Windows Solitaire Eats So Much Time

Posted by timothy on from the chomp-chomp dept.

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?

14 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Can It? by Vectronic · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Can It? by mrbluze · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But, I think more people play Solitaire than play(ed) Tetris, so collectively its more hours. That's ONLY because Windows doesn't come default with Tetris.
      --
      Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
    2. Re:Can It? by kitgerrits · · Score: 4, Insightful

      seriously How is Microsoft getting their numbers?!? The few millions of gamers across the globe con't compare to the hundreds of millions of professionals that have some spare time to kill at the office.
      THAT is how Solitaire gets played.

      Also, I recall the games were added to promote hand-eye co-ordination because, back when they were written, a mouse was a novel thing to have on a computer.
      --
      "I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
  2. Perfect steps... by BoldAC · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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..."

    1. Re:Perfect steps... by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      And to sorta nitpick, most Linux distros include some version of solitaire too. Its even on Emacs! http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/contrib/games/elisp/solitaire.el
      --
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    2. Re:Perfect steps... by kesuki · · Score: 3, Insightful

      AisleRiot is a single program '/usr/games/sol' and even though it has so many games '/usr/games/sol' is just 151,904 bytes.

      In comparison, on Windows 'sol.exe' is 56,832 bytes, freecell 55,296 bytes, and Spider (AsileRiot has 3 versions of spider, btw) is a whopping 538,624 bytes, but you know the fireworks at the end are clearly worth it, right?

      AisleRiot For what it's worth, in it's 151,904 bytes of glory has exactly 82 version of solitare. many with multiple rule settings...is only 25% of the file size of 'windows top three games' (as per TFA) even though it supports a whopping 79 'extra' games that windows users don't have.... just imagine, if the card engine were expanded to the same file size of those three executables by adding perhaps, a generic computer multiplay game engine the likes of 'hearts' and ' internet spades' that XP has... then you might have over 200 games in one 600 k executable...

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      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  3. Re:Screw Card Games! by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess the key difference is that Solitaire and Pinball are usually found preinstalled on most systems. I find that when I'm preparing workstations I tend to leave them on there. When I walk by and see somebody playing solitaire it doesn't bother me, if I saw somebody playing the Sims or some fps there would be a problem.

    --
    "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
  4. Re:Screw Card Games! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    For all the vista bitching, it does have a fairly nice chess game :)

  5. Pack-in Tetris by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Given that Tetris isn't installed on every Windows desktop...do you even have to ask? But Tetris was packed in with every Game Boy for the first couple years, as well as in the "Gamesampler" packed in with blank floppies. And I seem to remember an online version of either The Next Tetris or Tetris Worlds being packed in with some game console's online gaming kit (Dreamcast BBA? PlayStation 2 network adapter? Xbox Live starter kit? I forget).
  6. Re:Origins of Solitaire? by Larry+Lightbulb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wasn't Solitaire supposed to be showing people how to drag 'n' drop, and Minefield was to show them how to left and right click?

  7. There is one simple reason for this.... by zappepcs · · Score: 3, Insightful

    MS Solitaire eats up so much time because they did not ship a decent version of Maijong.... meh

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  8. More truth than humor here. by Erris · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:More truth than humor here. by antek9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the only ones that make themselves look bad here are the anti-twitter trolls. If you mod down bog standard, moderately insightful posts because you _think_ you know something about the identity of the poster, and completely unrelated to its contents, then my guess is that you are the one who has been played.

      As for me, I've noticed a lot of this lunacy over the last months, where posts went flamebait just for the fact that someone pointed them out as stemming from twitter, something that wasn't obvious from what the post in question was about. There are hundreds of thousands of active accounts here on slashdot, why don't you do what the rest of us do: ignore the ten or whatever twitter account's postings unless one of them posts something interesting, instead of creating tenfold more inappropriate and offtopic posts because of your little paranoia? You and your kin don't even log in any longer because you are afraid twitter will mod you down? Let me tell you something: if I had had mod points now, I would have modded you down just as well.

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  9. MS forces name change by ChameleonDave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".