“When a man is reduced to such a pass as playing cards by himself, he had better give up — or take to reading.” –Rawdon Crawley, The Card Player’s Manual, 1876

Big news out of the Googleplex today: the internet giant is offering a free solitaire game through its search engine and its mobile app. “When you search for ‘solitaire’ on Google,” goes the announcement on the company’s always breathless blog, “the familiar patience game may test yours!”

Pokémon Go, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Farmville, Minesweeper, Space Invaders, Pong: computer games come and go, offering fleeting amusements before they turn stale.

But not solitaire. Solitaire endures.

Invented sometime in the eighteenth century, the single-player card game made a seamless leap to virtuality with the arrival of personal computers in the early 1980s. The gameplay was easy to program, and a deck of cards could be represented on even the most rudimentary of computer displays. Spectrum Holobyte’s Solitaire Royal became a huge hit when it was released in 1987. After Microsoft incorporated its own version of the game into the Windows operating system in 1990, solitaire quickly became the most used PC app of all time.

“Though on its face it might seem trivial, pointless, a terrible way to waste a beautiful afternoon, etc., solitaire has unquestionably transformed the way we live and work,” wrote Slate’s Josh Levin in 2008. “Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture.”

Google is late to the party, but it’s a party that will never end.

Microsoft had ulterior motives when it bundled solitaire into Windows — the game helped people learn how to use a mouse, and it kept them sitting in front of their Microsoft-powered computers like, to quote Iggy Pop, hypnotized chickens — and Google, too, is looking to accomplish something more than just injecting a little fun into our weary lives. “A minor move like putting games in search means that users – especially mobile users – will turn to the Google search app at a time when a lot of the information we need is available elsewhere on our devices,” reports TechCrunch.

It’s a devious game these companies play. We are but deuces in their decks.

Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that solitaire is a perfect microcosm of personal computing, particularly now, in our social media age? In “The Psychology of Games,” a 2000 article in Psychology Review, Mark Griffiths pointed out that games are a “world-building activity.” They offer a respite from the demands of the real. “Freud was one of the first people to concentrate on the functions of playing games,” Griffiths wrote. “He speculated that game playing provided a temporary leave of absence from reality which reduced individual conflict and brought about a change from the passive to the active.” We love games because they “offer the illusion of control over destiny and circumstance.”

Solitaire, a game mixing skill and chance, also provides what psychologists call “intermittent reinforcement.” Every time a card is revealed, there is, for the player, the possibility of a reward. The suspense, and the yearning, is what makes the game so compelling, even addictive. “Basically,” wrote Griffiths, “people keep playing in the absence of a reward hoping that another reward is just around the corner.” Turning over an ace in solitaire is really no different from getting a like on Facebook or a retweet on Twitter. We crave such symbolic tokens of accomplishment, such sweet nothings.

Shuffle that deck again, Google. This time I’m going to be a winner.