All Work And No Play ...

Clifton Forlines writes: "Jupiter Media Metrix released a report on Monday about PC gaming - here's one of the more interesting tidbits: 'Similar to past years, Microsoft Windows-bundled games dominated the top rankings in October 2001: Solitaire was number one, with 21.3 million users.' A little math tells us that americans spent about 24 million man-hours in October on Solitarie (estimating that each user spent a little more than an hour over the whole month) That corresponds to about 1 million man-days, or around 2740 man-years! For comparison, I looked up these numbers... Empire State Building: 7 million man-hours (a mere 9 days of Solitaire), Panama Canal: 20 million man-hours (a mere 26 days of Solitaire), Apollo project: 15.5 billion man-hours (or a mere 52 years of Solitaire) Think about it!"

Re:no freecell?

[Tasty Beef Jerky]

According to the article... "Freecell was number two, with 14.8 million users". I guess you must have read something different than I did.

There is a big market for card games

[Pinball Wizard]

and the like. Most of us just don't interact with these people, unless they are our grandparents.

Consider the man hours needed to produce Hoyle's Poker vs. Quake3. Its glamorous to do the latter, but I bet the former makes a lot more profit.

I've always avoided game programming simply because I know it would require me to give up virtually everything else I enjoy doing with computers(databases, web programming, sysadminning). You have to be pretty dedicated to be any good at it. However, if I was to start a game company, it would definitely start out producing simpler games for older customers, then perhaps move to making bigger 3D action games once I made enough to hire more people.

Re:Funny numbers

[gorilla]

It just means that if 23 million people each spend one hour digging, the Panama canal could have been finished in less then a month.

No, it couldn't. This is the mythical man month, which was truely debunked in the book of the same name. Each project has it's optimal size. If you don't have enough people, then the project will fail or take longer than neccessary. However, if you have too many people, then the project will also fail or take longer than necessary.

This is especially true when you think of overall design, or other tasks which cannot be sub-divided. If you split the design work into 10 units, then you could well have either a canal where the two ends don't meet in the middle, or your designers spend longer in meetings deciding on the route instead of just doing it.

Solitare on Mac

[mattkime]

While its not pre-installed, for years it was the first shareware Mac users would come in contact with - Klondike! The mac equivilant of solitare for windows. I believe MS may have even copied Klondike, as it was originally created on a Mac Lisa in 1984.

Anyways, this past week I discovered that not only has Klondike been ported to Mac OS X, but that it still runs on a Mac Plus with System 6! Thats right, the same binary can be run on a Motorola 68000 processor running an operating system without multitasking (unless you count MultiFinder) AND run on a machine with a total of 1.6 gigaherts with a fuly modern operating system, including protected memory.

Perhaps some day my mom will be ready to switch to Mac OS X.