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!"

Gaming Improves Us!

[Sierpinski]

There has been a lot of research done that shows that playing games not only improves critical thinking skills (like with games like Myst, etc), but also can improve hand-eye coordination with the fast paced shooter type games. (Quake3, etc).

What about TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever stop to think how much *MORE* time Americans spend watching TV than playing solitaire (etc).?

I thought about it

[Nf1nk]

I thought about, and it it hurts, but it points to an interesting thought, is solitare a good game on the PC.
It just isn't but for some stupid reason I keep playing it.
The interesting thing about the article is that it shows more than ever that graphics and speed are unimportant to the quality of the game. Right after the bundled games were and I quote
October 2001were (Electronic Arts) Maxis' The Sims, with 1.6 million users; Microsoft's Age of Empires, with 805,000 users; (Vivendi Universal) Blizzard's Diablo II with 624,000 users; and (Electronic Arts) Westwood's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun with 563,000 users.
none of these are visualy very impressive, but they all share one common theme anyone can play them with ease.
conclusion gameplay over style every time

Solitare is a trainer...

[(H)elix1]

I've found Solitare a great way to introduce the idea of double click, single click, and drag for those who really don't know beans about this computer thing. That app was the moment of zen for my Mom, and I hear others with similar stories.

What were they doing?

[3seas]

Perhaps there is a question to ask: What was it people were doing that they had that kind of time to play solitary?

Cumulative hours waited for internet to download this year [osearth.com]

I was just using mapquest and it seems that IE wants to download everything, even what you have already downloaded once.

Geee, I suppose I do have time to play solitary.

and before Solitare and Mindsweeper...

[Infonaut]

people wasted the same amount of time by:

* watching TV
* masturbating
* sitting around thinking of ways to avoid doing something
* bowling
* watching bowling on TV
* reading Danielle Steel novels
ad nauseum...

People will "waste time" because humans can't work 24/7. We're primates, for Chrissakes.. have you ever seen primates in a zoo? "Wasting time" is all they do!

Video games are just a way of wasting the same amount of time in a different way.

Too bad we can't combine work and play...

[bourne]

Now what we need is some game that provides a playable veneer over an actual problem that benefits from human judgement. Kind of like Seti@Home benefits from all the idle computer power out there. Humans are capable of inuition and pattern discrimination that computers are not, and a game would be an excellent way to apply massive amounts of distributed human analysis to an appropriate problem.

Has anyone got an appropriate problem? I'm thinking that somewhere in the vast field of genetics there's got to be some problem that humans can work on better than computers, next step is to turn it into a game and getting it bundled with your favorite (or least favorite ;>) operating system...