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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.
It is highly probable that SN members were aware of the true purpose of these games but the article seemed interesting nevertheless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @08:45AM
Only if you want to limit computers to the groups of society that already uses computers. Last we tried to get my mother to do something with a mouse, she had big problems. Every time she tried clicking, the mouse would move an about an inch.
Maybe if we could get her to play solitaire. But she'd probably give up before we manage to explain the rules.