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posted by LaminatorX on Sunday August 16 2015, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the wax-on-wax-off dept.

conspiracy-theories dept.

If you haven't ever played Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts or FreeCell, it's safe to say you're in the minority. These simple Windows games have probably caused more lost worker hours than anything short of a worldwide coffee shortage. Whichever one was your favorite, the temptation to take just one more go at beating them—to get a faster time or a better score—was hard to ignore.

But as fun as these games were, they weren't actually designed for entertainment. At least not in their Windows incarnations.

The oldest of the four, Microsoft Solitaire, was first added to Windows 3.0 in 1990. Although the game (sometimes called "Patience") has existed since the late 1700s, this digital version seemed to be demonstrating that in the future we would no longer require a physical deck to play simple card games. But that's not what it was doing at all. Its real aim was far more modest: it was teaching mouse-fluency by stealth.

The intention was that Solitaire would get a generation of computer users still most familiar with a command-line input to teach themselves how to drag and drop, without realizing that's what they were doing. The fact that we're still dragging and dropping today suggests that it worked rather well.

http://mentalfloss.com/uk/technology/32106/the-true-purpose-of-solitaire-minesweeper-hearts-and-freecell

It is highly probable that SN members were aware of the true purpose of these games but the article seemed interesting nevertheless.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:08PM (#223603)

    Games have always been where it's at to teach keyboard and mouse skills.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @08:53PM (#223620)

    > Games have always been where it's at to teach keyboard and mouse skills.

    I learned vi cursor navigation playing rogue on an early unix system. Unlike the games in this article though, it was explicitly advertised as a way to learn those keys.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 17 2015, @06:59AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 17 2015, @06:59AM (#223807) Journal

    I guess it worked. I didn't have a mouse for years. It seemed something of a waste, really. I finally purchased a computer at an estate sale, which included a mouse, and some software for which a mouse actually made some sense. Learning to use the mouse wasn't difficult - but when I installed Windows 3.11, and started playing the silly games, THAT was when the mouse became an extension of my hand.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday August 17 2015, @11:12PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Monday August 17 2015, @11:12PM (#224141) Homepage

    I'm sure I'm not the only one who learned touch-typing by playing MMORPGs.

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