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The Great Operating System Games
harrymcc writes "For decades, the simple little games that come with operating systems have been some of the most-used software on the planet. Legendary geeks such as Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Andy Herzfeld have tried their hands at writing them. And yet they get no respect — or, actually, attention of any kind. Technologizer's Benj Edwards aimed to rectify that with a look at forty years' worth of bundled OS games, from 1971 Unix text-based ones to Woz's Little Brick Out to such Windows mainstays as Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Reversi." Article is an annoyingly long slide show (would it kill people to put a reasonable amount of content on pages?) but there's some fun stuff in there.
That may or may not have been its original purpose, but that was the way we trained people to use the mouse at a previous job, back when Windows 3.1 was being introduced.
I ran several training sessions, helping people play solitaire on a computer for 2 hours. Seemed really, REALLY silly at the time, but we tried training a couple of people using different methods and paying someone near-minimum-wage to play a game that was included with the OS for two hours turned out to be an exceptionally efficient way to get the concepts of cursor movement, click, double-click, click and drag, menu operations, etc across.
Self-study was not, however, encouraged. We did have one guy try to defend playing with "Vegas rules" enabled as "advanced self-learning" - didn't go terribly well for him. ;)
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http://xkcd.com/667/
Were you setting someone up for free +5?