Classic Solitaire: Deceptive Edutainment
When I realized that hundreds of hours playing Solitaire on my parent's personal computer taught me how to use a computer mouse I trembled from the sheer epiphany.
Being born in 1989 and being a child of the 90s gave me a unique opportunity to be one of the first generations partly raised on and with computers. My parents weren’t wealthy people, and in fact despite the comfortable middle-class existence they live in now, conversations with them both have led me to realize that it’s nothing short of incredible that I was able to go to a private school that had computers and even computer classes. As I’ve grown and had a career in public service I’ve learned quickly how many people haven’t in fact had training and regular exposure to computers. Even more so, there was a culture shock the first time I watched an elderly patron at the Library where I work struggle to just click a mouse the proper way.
It was an unfair, and judgemental thought that crept into my brain the first time this happened: “How do you not know how to use a computer mouse?”
The question is answered before it’s even asked: “They haven’t used one. Or they haven’t used it enough to know how to properly use it.”
Like a fully grown adult watching a baby struggle to walk, I recognised how far I had come, and that it was my exposure to computer games and productivity software that made using a mouse border on second nature. It was my time spent with Solitaire that gave me my 10,000 hours.
I have to be honest though, my reflection of Solitaire’s educational role in my psychological and professional development is largely due to the book Minesweeper by Kyle Orland. As my regular reader might know, I've been steadily reading and reviewing the Boss Fight Books series. This is a collection of books by the publication company Boss Fight Books founded by Gabe Durham that publishes short documentary style books about videogames. Whether it’s Parappa the Rapper, Super Mario Bros 3, Postal, or Shadow of the Colossus each of these books has given me new insight to games I’ve played numerous times or never even played before. As of this writing I’ve been working on my review of Kyle Oralnd’s book[LINK***] about Minesweeper, and while that game is also an incredible tool for understanding user-interface and the click-and-point interface in videogame design, his book offers a great insight into Solitaire’s success as a videogame unto itself.
On that note, he explains that Solitaire drew a larger crowd than Minesweeper did. In one passage he provides some numbers for his reader that reveal this:
Media Metrix’s historical data from a decade later corroborates this: While Minesweeper had an estimated 7.3 million players in March 2000, 22.3 million of the 87 million estimated home PC users that same month were playing Solitaire (46)
This number makes absolute sense to me because I have a father who is a Solitaire addict. When he isn’t working, making objects with his wood turner, doing chores, reading books faster than I suspect is humanly possible, or playing whatever Call of Duty game he’s bought he’s usually in his office listening to Louis Prima and playing Solitaire on his laptop. If I’m being completely honest, that is usually the way I think and remember my Dad, though sometimes he listens to Jackie Gleason instead. Jackie Gleason rules. Even as a kid I remember my father playing Solitaire regularly, sometimes for what seemed hours at a time. My mom would even sit in his lap and talk to him while he played the game. Sometimes I did too. And eventually I picked up the game for myself.
Solitaire is easy to pick up because the game doesn’t have a narrative. It’s purely a random puzzle game.
If my reader’s never played Solitaire before the game is simple. The software takes a traditional deck of 52 cards(sometimes referred to as a French suited playing cards) that has four suits: hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. The cards are shuffled and then arranged horizontally from left to right in seven columns, and as the rows continue the number of cards stacked on top of each other increases. Once the cards are down the goal is to create four stacks for each of the suits chronologically starting with the Ace cards and ending with the King. There is a stack of leftover cards and the player uses these to arrange cards on the horizontal line in order to help reduce the stacks of hidden cards. The player attempts to clear the rows to create lines of cards of alternating colors to ultimately complete the main stacks along the top. For example a red 7 card cannot be placed on top of a red 8 card, it can only be placed on top of a black 8 card. The challenge of the game becomes recognising opportunities to stack cards in the upper row while also making sure the cards in the horizontal line are cleared. And this becomes a problem because sometimes Aces get stuck under the largest stack and the game results in a loss.
I have lost more games in Solitaire than I have won them.
And, I have data to prove it.
Approaching this essay, I decided to generate some raw data. I downloaded the Classic Solitaire app to my personal computer. I then decided to play Solitaire for five days, setting a timer on my phone for 30 minutes. Within that 30 minute time I would do nothing but play Solitaire. I created an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the dates, the number of rounds played during my 30 minute sessions, how many games I won, and how many games I lost. If the timer rang while I was in the middle of a round I did not include it in the data. Once the data was collected I was able to generate a chart which I’ve included below:
Apart from just the sheer unironic joy I derived from the exercise of creating a new spreadsheet, the chart and the data visualization goes a long way in demonstrating one important fact: I suck at Solitaire.
In each of the five sessions played there was not a single instance of me winning more games than losing. I lost a lot, but what is absent from this data is how, as the half hour progressed, I began to observe why I was losing. The first reason was because I wasn’t paying attention to obvious spots where cards should have gone, and the other was because I was resisting the “flow state” of using the mouse. As the game went on, my speed increased and I was able to play more games.
I don’t have any way to prove this next observation, so instead I’ll offer conjecture and say: I suspect this was the case for a number of people who played Solitaire.
Looking back to Orland’s book he arrives at a similar conclusion. He writes:
A large part of Solitaire's massive appeal also likely had to do with the way it served as a perfectly non-threatening way to introduce Windows users to the concept of new graphical user interface. That includes familiarizing players with a computer mouse, a new and sometimes bewildering input device for MS-DOS users who were accustomed to completely keyboard based interface.
While a mouse now seems intuitive to longtime computer users, at the dawn of Windows many people still needed to be taught. (48)
I noted earlier that I was a kid in the 1990s(my skin is mostly asbestos(that was a 90s reference(and a bad one at that))), and what this meant for me was that I never played computer games on earlier machines. This means that I missed the generation of computer owners who played games on machines such as the Apple II, the Amstrad-CPC, the ZX Spectrum, the T99/4A, a Commodore 64, or the IMB PC 5150. These early machines were the first efforts at creating personal home computers and didn’t include a mouse because they were so basic in design they didn’t have graphic interfaces. They had text options, and the early “games” on these systems were reliant entirely on a keyboard for play.
The last sentence is worth reflecting on because it’s important to remember personal computers were not initially created for playing games. They were machines designed to encourage productivity. In fact that concept of the computer as a tool for gaming was a foreign concept.
In terms of my own bias, I have to be honest, just thinking about Solitaire as a videogame was laughable.
It seemed ridiculous to me at first thinking of Solitaire as a “videogame” because I never considered it as such. But after reading Garland’s book, and reflecting on this it makes so much sense. In fact, trying to call Solitaire anything but a videogame is absurd. Solitaire relies on a video screen which includes a graphic image of cards, and it’s built on coded software to show these cards moving as I point and click. It’s literally a game using video-based imagery which is, wait for it…a videogame!
Solitaire’s interface is entirely visual and dependent on the mouse for its entertainment and educational value. It almost borders on edutainment.
And Orland more or less demonstrates this a few sentences later when he writes:
While a mouse now seems intuitive to longtime computer users, at the dawn of Windows many people still needed to be taught. “On the Mac side they'd been using them for a long time, but a lot of people didn't know how to use a mouse,” Nuttall said. “Initially a lot of times you'd see people with their mouse up on the wall trying to point and click.[Trainers would say,] ‘This is how you put it down, this is how you judge the left button from the right button,’ all that stuff.”
“So the idea, particularly with Solitaire, was to get people comfortable with the idea of mice, of seeing things graphically, of clicking on things and making it more approachable,” she continued. “Solitaire was used by almost all trainers to teach people how to do that.”
Nuttall’s description of Solitaire as a Windows mouse handling tutorial appeared in a lot of contemporary press discussion of the operating system throughout the 90s. But some who worked at Microsoft at the time think that's an after-the-fact justification for what was just a fun game. (48-49).
Just a few sentences later Orland manages to make the final summation when he writes:
In any case, for many 90s computer users, pre-installed games like Solitaire and Minesweeper formed their first significant experience with using a mouse. That exposure would go on to revolutionize the computer game industry in the ensuing decades, with mouse based controls getting integrated into everything from casual hidden object games to first person shooters. (50)
These passages are what reminded me of how much time I spent playing Solitaire on my parent’s personal computer when I was young. And they’re also what made me consider how many videogames I’ve played that relied on a point-and-click interface design system. It’s easy to forget how important the actual act of using a mouse can be when discussing any videogame because even console systems employed game-pads that ultimately were just computer mice with more buttons.
As of this writing I’ve been playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and it’s possible to play that game with a computer mouse. It’s laughable by comparison, but Solitaire was instrumental for players like me who would eventually play games as visually and technically complex as Cyberpunk 2077.
Solitaire was the foundation for that ability.
Considering the games I played on the PC as a child and young adult, whether it was Dr. Brain, Pharaoh, Lil Howie’s FunHouse, Stronghold Crusader, or Putt-Putt, I was prepared for the graphical interface of those games because of the training I had invested into playing Solitaire. The hardware of the computer itself was as vital to the videogame as the code that went into the software, and there was an expectation in these programs that the player would have, and should have, knowledge of how to use a computer mouse.
Today there are companies that make specialized computer mice for professional and hobbyist videogame players, as well as companies that manufacture basic level mice for the purposes of professional working environments. It’s expected of players and professionals to know how to use a mouse in order to progress either in play or their career. This is one of the reasons why, as I was talking to a coworker at the Library who was preparing for their general computer class for the public, I encouraged her to show her students Solitaire, specifically as mouse training. The look of confusion on her face quickly shifted to epiphany and she said, “That…that makes a lot of sense actually.” We then stopped and have a brief conversation about Solitaire as way of teaching new computer users the proper way to use and handle a mouse.
This interaction makes me feel comfortable observing that a computer game helped me and others in my public service career.
See Mom and Dad, I told you staying up past 7PM to play Putt-Putt would play off. Playing computer games helped me do my job!
Also, can I just play for 10 more minutes. I’m almost at the thing.
There’s a lot more than could and should be written about Solitaire as a videogame, but my purpose in this essay was simply to note how its design as a point-and-click interface has reverberated both in my personal and professional life, but also in videogames period.
Solitaire's simplicity and its entertainment structure allowed a new generation of people to see computers as more than just machines for keeping track of finances. Computers could be vessels for entertainment and education that would prepare people, as well as their children, for the future in the new industries that would develop in and around computers. The interface set the stage for millions of videogames that recognise what could be made on these machines, and how interface would play a role in it.
Solitaire is a videogame, it’s one of the first videogames I ever played.
Whenever I was lucky enough to win a game, and watch the stacks of cards begin to fly through the air and bounce on the bottom of the screen, I was knowledgeable enough about the game’s system to move my mouse up to the left hand corner, open up the game options, and click the word “Deal” to start another game. It was a game I was probably, almost certainly going to lose, but that’s just because I spent ten minutes worrying about where the King of Clubs was going to sit instead of realizing that the Ace of Spades had been sitting out in the open for the entirety of the game.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
12.23.2024
You can buy a copy of Minesweeper by Kyle Orland by following the link below:
Minesweeper by Kyle Orland – Boss Fight Books
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