{"id":7207,"date":"2016-08-25T11:59:34","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T17:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7207"},"modified":"2016-08-26T16:27:46","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T22:27:46","slug":"solitaire-as-synecdoche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7207","title":{"rendered":"Solitaire as symbol and synecdoche"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"solitaire\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“When a man is reduced to such a pass as playing cards by himself, he had better give up\u00a0\u2014 or take to reading.” \u2013Rawdon Crawley,\u00a0The Card Player’s Manual<\/em>, 1876<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Big\u00a0news out of\u00a0the Googleplex today: the internet\u00a0giant is offering a free solitaire game through its search engine and its mobile app. “When you search for ‘solitaire’ on Google,” goes\u00a0the announcement<\/a> on the company’s always breathless blog, “the familiar patience game may test yours!”<\/p>\n

Pok\u00e9mon Go, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, Farmville, Minesweeper, Space Invaders, Pong: computer games come and go, offering fleeting amusements before they turn\u00a0stale.<\/p>\n

But not solitaire. Solitaire endures.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0was\u00a0easy\u00a0to program, and a deck of\u00a0cards could be represented on even the most rudimentary of computer displays. Spectrum Holobyte’s Solitaire Royal became a huge\u00a0hit when it was released in 1987. After Microsoft incorporated\u00a0its own version of the game into the Windows operating system in 1990, solitaire\u00a0quickly became the most used PC app of all time.<\/p>\n

“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<\/a> Slate’s Josh Levin in 2008. “Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture.”<\/p>\n

Google is late to the party, but it’s a party that will never end.<\/p>\n

Microsoft had ulterior motives when it bundled\u00a0solitaire into\u00a0Windows \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2013 especially mobile users \u2013 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<\/a> TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

It’s a devious game these companies\u00a0play. We are but\u00a0deuces in their decks.<\/p>\n

Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest\u00a0that solitaire is a perfect microcosm of personal computing, particularly now, in our\u00a0social media age? In “The Psychology of Games,” a 2000 article<\/a> in Psychology Review<\/em>, Mark Griffiths pointed out that games are a “world-building activity.” They offer\u00a0a respite from the demands\u00a0of the real. “Freud was one of the first people to concentrate on the functions of playing games,” Griffiths\u00a0wrote. “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.”\u00a0We love games because they\u00a0“offer the illusion of control over destiny and circumstance.”<\/p>\n

Solitaire, a game mixing\u00a0skill and chance, also\u00a0provides\u00a0what psychologists call “intermittent reinforcement.” Every time a card is revealed, there is, for the player, the\u00a0possibility of a reward. The suspense, and the yearning,\u00a0is what makes the game\u00a0so compelling, even\u00a0addictive. “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.<\/p>\n

Shuffle that deck again, Google. This time I’m going to be a winner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When a man is reduced to such a pass as playing cards by himself, he had better give up\u00a0\u2014 or take to reading.” \u2013Rawdon Crawley,\u00a0The Card Player’s Manual, 1876 Big\u00a0news out of\u00a0the Googleplex today: the internet\u00a0giant is offering a free solitaire game through its search engine and its mobile app. “When you search for ‘solitaire’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7207"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7242,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7207\/revisions\/7242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}