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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.
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"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'
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..."
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.
-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?
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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
I am also Mr. Anonymous Coward.
- CmdrTaco.
Try to delete pinball.exe from your XP computer.
Seriously.
You'll find that it comes back when you restart the computer.
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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.