Minesweeper by Kyle Orland: Book Review
I spent a good portion of the mid to late 90s on my parent’s personal computer. To be honest, like my father I had a slight addiction to Solitaire[LINK***], but I was also playing videogames (at that point it was usually Putt-Putt, Dr. Brain, or Lil’ Howie’s Funhouse). But in between these graphic adventures I would tinker with the productivity software my Mom and Dad used to keep track of their finances, and occasionally I would play the “games” that came with the operating system. I remember playing Solitaire and the pinball game the most, but there was one game that left a distinct impression on me, mostly because I could never beat it.
It was a strange game involving a grid of gray-silver tiles, flags, a smiley face, and bombs that were hidden randomly under the tiles. Eventually I’d discover Pharaoh, Stronghold Crusader, and Zoo Tycoon, and this game drifted into the background of my computer experiences until it disappeared entirely. It remained there, until sometime in early 2024 when I saw its name pasted to the cover of a book.
The title, was Minecraft.
Wait, no, that’s not right.
The title, was MineCart Carnage.
Wait, no that's a Donkey Kong Country level. Pretty good one too. Damn why haven’t I written anything about that level?
I’m getting off title, topic!
Minesweeper. That was it.
I didn’t even have to have to think about it; I knew instinctively that it made sense. Of course, someone would write a book about Minesweeper because that’s one of the most popular videogames ever made. I didn’t even stop to ask if Minesweeper was quote “really a videogame.” It is a videogame and always has been. The only distinction between it and a game like Super Mario Bros. is that it was packaged alongside productivity software, and ultimately that gave it a step-up from just about any other videogame on the market.
I know this because I read it in a wonderful book.
Minesweeper by Kyle Orland is book #31 in the Boss Fight Books Series, making it one of the more recent titles. Even though there’s a stack of the books on a table next to my livingroom sofa that I’ve steadily been collecting over the last year, I kept looking at Minesweeper on the organization’s website recognising the familiar siren’s call that hits me whenever I instinctively know I’m going to purchase an item. This has happened several times in my life, enough to recognise that it’s part of a general intellectual pattern. I suspect part of it was because of the cover graphic of the mines that resembled the Covid-19 virus. Those little orbs became icons in my gray matter, but as I considered more and more I knew that nostalgia, and the chance for meta-cognition was taking hold over me. I bought the book, read it, and began this review as soon as I possibly could.
For context of the author himself, Orland (as of this writing) is the Senior Gaming Editor at the website Ars Technica and has written numerous articles for that website, along with other periodicals and has published two books about videogames. I provide that background to point out that Orland is an experienced writer with a background in videogame journalism and analysis and he brings all of that experience to the prose and research of Minesweeper.
Orland’s book is, simply put, wonderful.
At some point I may actually encounter a Boss Fight Books entry that isn’t great, but honestly I highly doubt it. Orland’s book is yet another successful effort in the series, and it tries to understand how Minesweeper came to exist, how it operates structurally as a game, how it impacted the culture that received it, how it established a sub-culture of dedicated (arguably obsessed) fans, and how it’s existence continues to ripple through the videogame world.
By the end of this book I was impressed, not just with the writing itself, but with the sheer amount of information Orland was able to pack into this short book without ever making the read feel like a tedious list of data. To clarify, I originally suspected any book about Minesweeper would be boring because the game has no obvious plot, no protagonist to speak of, and its visual design has all the appeal of a programming calculator.
So, how do you write an entertaining and informative book about Minesweeper?
Well, as Julie Andrews so beautifully put it, you start at the beginning(it’s a very good place to start).
Orland begins by explaining what Minesweeper actually is as a game, and in the opening chapter Orland gives a brief overview of what the rules and goals of Minesweeper are. He writes:
The Minesweeper playfield is a 2D rectangular grid of opaque boxes, each of which can be uncovered with a click of the mouse.Some of these boxes cover up mines, and clicking one of those ends the game immediately (though the first box you click will always be safe thanks to a hidden algorithm that shifts any unlucky first click mines out of the way before they appear).
Clicking a box without a mine reveals a color-coded number that tells you how many mines are adjacent to that box either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.If there are no adjacent mines, the game automatically reveals all eight adjacent boxes, then repeats that cascade until it bumps up against the borders of a mine.
The goal is to use those numbers, along with some logic and maybe a little lucky guessing, to avoid the mines and reveal every unmined square as quickly as possible. (7-8)
Reading Orland’s description I wouldn’t blame anyone who assumes that Minesweeper is basic. Minesweeper is at first a deceptively simple videogame. Its simplicity of design makes it easy to assume that this is a quick, empty game requiring little to no effort necessary to play and beat. I make that statement with the honesty that that’s what I thought about the game the first few times I ever played it. This is personally amusing to me because I never won a round on Minesweeper, and still never have. And in the interest of full disclosure, I never “got” Minesweeper as a game.
Though my brain has developed a fondness (and arguably an obsession) with finding and recognising patterns, it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve developed an appreciation and fondness for numbers and the logic systems they are built upon. Minesweeper kept me stumped because I struggled with mathematics growing up. I failed to observe the patterns between clicking the boxes in Minesweeper’s grid, observing the arrangements of numbers in relation to boxes and mines, and the inevitable defeat when I clicked a mine.
Though to be fair, if my memory serves correct, I often would purposefully click boxes at random just to laugh at the smiley face who would make goofy faces whenever I lost.
I was a kid having fun on his parent's computer and I didn’t bother to work towards the “flow” of the game that Orland describes in a later passage in the book. He writes:
The first time you encounter Minesweeper, you're unlikely to reach that kind of flow state. That's especially true if you're using brute logical force to determine the rules and strategies for how to find safe spaces. Faced with a simple mine marking task, a first time player likely has to think through each step slowly and meticulously, painfully conscious of the logic underlying their next click.
After a few hours of practice, though, it becomes easier to identify the simplest patterns: A 1-2-1 in a line along the edge of a cleared space, for example, means there are mines next to the 1s; 1-2-2-1 means mines are next to the 2s. Practice those kinds of mental heuristics enough and you start to react to those kinds of patterns without much in the way of conscious thought.Your mouse starts moving before you can even articulate why.
That's the point at which you've entered the flow state–when logical deduction gives way to automatic reaction and explicit counting gives way to nearly subconscious responses as your eyes scan across a field of colorful numbers. And once you get caught up in the flow of Minesweeper, it can be incredibly hard to pull yourself out. (108-109).
This passage made me pause and consider the term “flow-state” in videogame discourse.
In the mountains of voluminous text that fill the chat-rooms and ad-submerged videogame articles of the internet, there exists the reality that within the discourse the word “flow” is both a dreaded and celebrated noun. It exists in a bizarre liminal space between acceptance and derision that, upon reflection is a facet of the self-loathing videogames as a genre still suffer from as they fight for street-cred alongside mediums such as writing, painting, sculpture,music, etc. What I’ve never understood about the revulsion of the word “flow” in regard to videogames it’s just referring to a state of mind when a person is metaphorically lost in a work of media. Literally every other variety of media encourages that reaction. Becoming emotionally stirred by Stairway to Heaven, crying at the Merry-go-round passage in The Catcher in the Rye, or being transfixed by the colors and imagery of Picasso’s Guernica are all in their own way emotional and intellectual reactions to art. The “flow” of a videogame is an indication that a player is fully engaged with the media.
Of course, this is a work of media that existed on computers, and the appeal of computers was originally their software and how it was supposed to help productivity rather than play.
In one beautiful and arguably hilarious chapter, Orland writes about the moral panic that Minesweeper caused when the software entered professional workspaces. Whether it was politicians, pundits, CEOs, government clerks, or low level corporate employees, Minesweeper and Solitaire became an existential threat to productivity. And because human beings like hyperbole as much as they enjoy puzzles, Orland is able to show through interviews, essays, and public documents how Minesweeper’s ability to distract workers became a public issue.
Seriously, this chapter made me laugh out loud (wish there was a shorter way to write that) from how absurd the reaction to the game was. Minesweeper made professionals want to play on their computers, and that mindset reverberated to their children.
Reading through Orland’s book, what I couldn’t shake was a growing awareness of how much Minesweeper and Solitaire helped me just approach computers. I was fortunate enough to go to a school that had access to computers, and even offered computer education classes as early as third and fourth grade, but it was my parent's personal computer with the now historic “Entertainment Pack” that helped me recognise the machine as something that could be used for purposes other than business. I wanted to play games on the computer, more than I ever wanted to play games like football or baseball. And the best part was I had parents who didn’t see this as a problem. In fact, like many parents in the 90s, mine realized this machine, and the little games on it, could give their children a step up.
Digging into how Minesweeper helped bridge the digital gap for non-computer users, Orland observes in one passage how Minesweeper helped establish itself in the minds of players. He writes:
In turn, the early success of the Entertainment Pack helped fuel a virtuous cycle and convince office workers to bring a Windows machine home, Ryan said. “People in their offices had played solitaire and could see it's not a machine the kids [would] hate. [Employees thought], ‘I'm sure there's something we can put on it for the kids, and if we bring a computer home, it'll make the kids smarter and they'll go on to better jobs and their future, whatever they're dreaming of.’” With Entertainment Pack, “at least there's something on the shelf so that if I bring this machine home, there's something I can put in a box next to it.Will make the kids as happy as opposed to buying them a copy of a world atlas.” (74-75).
The idea that entertainment software could be an educational tool would come to fruition with the development of the “edutainment” genre of videogames. Orland’s book does to some extent explore this idea when he writes about how Minesweeper and its companion software Solitaire, but I’ve written an essay about the latter game that cites these passages [LINK***] so I won’t worry about it here.
While addressing the educational merit of Minesweeper, Orland manages to point out how valuable an addition to the operating system the game was. Simply put, Minesweeper helped videogame developers realize that there could be money to be made creating games for personal computers. A few sentences on from the previous quote Orland writes:
More than selling Windows as an operating system, though, the Entertainment Pack also served as a proof of concept to show the game industry as a whole that Windows was a viable platform for their games.
Today, the vast majority of PC games run on Windows, but back in 1990, Microsoft's own MS-DOS was the platform of choice for most PC game developers. That's in part because DOS had a much bigger user base of potential players, thanks to years long head start and backwards compatibility, while every Windows owner could run DOS games on their machine, the reverse wasn't true. (75)
Despite the resilience of Nintendo, and the price-tag on the Playstation 5, it can’t be denied that Xbox and Windows Personal computers are titans in the videogame industry. Microsoft as an organization is as much a fixture of power and influence in the market as concrete is the foundation of many homes. Orland’s book goes a long way in demonstrating how Minesweeper helped establish that power in people’s minds and pocket-books because they took a chance with Minesweeper. Going into extensive detail on its formation, development, and the fight by it’s designers to include it with the WIndows OS, Orland is able to show how a videogame that inspired a public panic about it’s addictive quality, and a rabid fanbase that developed a literal council to determine how best to record and measure game-scores set Windows as powerhouse figure in videogame production, design, licensing, marketing, and release.
When I was building my PC in early 2024 I went with Windows for my operating system because, even though Microsoft doesn’t need more money, I knew from experience that when it came to playing games they were a reliable system.
That’s also the reason why I was shocked and saddened when Orland pointed out how quickly Minesweeper fell into the dustbin of the company’s priorities. Near the end of the book Orland notes that Minesweeper is no longer accompanied on its core operating system (something that annoyed me to no end when I found out(you can play the game online for free though(and you should!))). It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out why, and Orland matter-of-factly explains it when he writes:
For most of its existence, Minesweeper had only existed as a free add-on for the Windows OS. Originally, the preinstalled freebie served as a marketing tool, helping to teach players how to use a mouse and differentiating Windows from competing operating systems. By 2011, though, no one was taking Minesweeper into account when deciding which computer OS would best fit their needs. Minesweeper had become a vestigial appendix in the Windows increasingly bloated body, contributing next to nothing in Microsoft's bottom line. (164)
At the time of this writing (7.30.2024), Microsoft has a market cap or net worth of $3.14 trillion dollars. The sheer ridiculousness of that number aside, given the number of products and services that Microsoft offers its customers and investors it makes absolute sense why the company would just drop computer games from its operating system. Besides, the proliferation of smart phones in the hands of consumers, and by extension the multitudinous options for mobile gaming, make including and re-developing edutainment software a moot point for a company that could probably legally buy me with little to no legal repercussions.
Though before I give some stock broker in a corporate office bad ideas, I’ll get to my final summation.
Orland’s book is incredible. Though nowhere near as personal as other entries in the Boss Fight Books series, Orland tells a fascinating history of the game Minesweeper and the way it impacted the culture. Every page has some new nuggets of interesting factual information that made me consider Minesweeper more than I ever had in my life. By the end I had a new appreciation for a game that I had written off years ago as just some old math puzzle on my parent’s computer. I appreciated Minesweepers visual design, I appreciated the logic systems and algorithms, I appreciated the number logic, I appreciated it’s point and click interface, and I appreciated the fact it was because of this videogame (and Solitaire) that I’m as adept at computers as I am. Minesweeper is a videogame that demands attention, not simply for its historic significance, but also for the fact that decades after its first appearance it remains a challenging and entertaining game about logic that leaves me stumped and unable to win.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
4.21.2025
You can purchase a copy of Minesweeper by Kyle Orland by following the Link below:
Minesweeper by Kyle Orland – Boss Fight Books
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