Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Zhaoyue

Bill Gates and Microsoft employees' obsession with "minesweeping" is only a microcosm of later Americans' addiction to minesweeping.

Before Windows 8 was launched in 2012, Microsoft always built a batch of Mini Game into its operating system, and the games of Solitaire and Minesweeper were enduring. Worldwide, sales of Windows systems have already exceeded 100 million, and the number of potential players of these two games will naturally be calculated on the basis of 100 million.

Primary and secondary school students in computer classes, as well as working social animals, are difficult to resist the temptation of these games. Even today, when the Windows system no longer has its own minesweeper, there are still a group of players who insist on refreshing the time record, breaking the limit and challenging themselves.

Before the ranking website "minesweeping net" established by Chinese people in 2006 is popular all over the world, it must be popular in the United States. In the 1990s, Minesweeper became a popular style as soon as it was launched, indulging millions of American adults.

In fact, Minesweeper is one of the first games to be posted by Americans as "wasting time", "game addiction" and even causing panic. Tetris has failed to achieve such a feat before. At that time, the mainstream public opinion in the United States would talk about the fanaticism of "minesweeping" in a pessimistic tone that Chinese players are very familiar with, and wantonly criticize the "addiction" of the game.

The media also cited a number of living examples, one of the most famous is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, since the person who personally released the "devil" can not resist its temptation, then who can resist it.

1on May 22, 1990, Windows 3.0 made its debut. With many industry-leading innovations, Windows 3.0 became Microsoft's first widely acclaimed operating system.

It has a graphical user interface, uses thumbnails to represent files and applications, and comes with notepad, WordPad, drawing, calculator and other applications to support richer screen colors.

The Windows 3.0 interface can be used more than 30 years ago, and the above concepts and terms are like books of heaven. Many people only see the computer as a productivity tool used by large enterprises, and have no way to understand the beauty of the new system.

Microsoft wanted to make computers and operating systems attractive to ordinary people, so it came up with the practice of introducing games. However, the mainstream game publishers at that time did not regard Windows as a serious game platform, so Microsoft had to rely on itself and called on employees to submit game programs written in their spare time.

When it first went on sale, Windows 3.0 came with classic "card" games and black and white chess. On October 8 of the same year, Microsoft released its extended Windows entertainment package (WEP) with the slogan: "now you can use the incredible power of Windows 3.0to goof off."

The packaging cover of WEP

Microsoft gave WEP a small budget for WEP ads. Bruce Ryan (Bruce Ryan), a product manager at WEP, had to write a user manual for WEP himself, printed two and a half pages of Word documents, then took it to the local copy store and made 20,000 copies.

WEP doesn't even have enough budget for quality testing. There is no need to approve the budget, after all, these seven games, including Tetris, tic-tac-toe chess, and the protagonist of this article, "minesweeping", all have the characteristics of easy to use and suitable for fishing at work. Internal digestion by some of Microsoft's employees alone is enough to solve the testing problem.

"We stifle a lot of our own productivity with our own products," says Ryan.

Minesweeping stands out in this process. There is a joke circulating in Microsoft's office: minesweeper is the most tested product in Microsoft's history. Libby Duzan, Ryan's boss and chief product manager for games, also said Minesweeper is "everyone's favorite game for the creation of WEP."

"this is one of the things you will see when you walk out of the hall. On people's computers. At Microsoft at that time, people would stay up late into the night, and at 9 o'clock in the evening, you would see them take a break and open a game of minesweeper."

Windows version 3.0 "Minesweeper" screenshots these "testers" are not rigid requirements. Some colleagues often report that there are loopholes in the game, and programmers who write mine clearance often ask them to send a screenshot and point to the screenshot to find out the logic errors they have made.

On one occasion, a colleague in the marketing department insisted that "the expert difficulty of the game is impossible and should be cancelled," and said he had tried at least 20 times. Ryan felt that it was not impossible. In order to convince this colleague, Ryan tried a game of expert difficulty with his computer and cleared it in only 10 minutes.

Ryan didn't say how to deal with this lucky situation. Ryan is indeed a good minesweeper, setting a speed record of six seconds in the simplest primary mode of the game. He also sent mass emails to the whole company, challenging all employees.

The only person in the company who responded to this was Bill Gates, whose record was five seconds.

Bill Gates in 1990 was not the richest man in the world, but he was also a billionaire. He could have invested his money in more elaborate entertainment, but at that time he was addicted to Mini Game written by his subordinates.

In 1990, Bill Gates took a picture with boxed Windows 3.0. it all began with an email from Gates to Ryan: "I just solved mine clearance in 10 seconds. Is that great?" Ryan replied, "Yes, 10 seconds is really great." I think our current record is eight seconds. "

Obviously, such a response inspired a certain competitive mentality of Gates, which led him to regard it as his mission to refresh mine clearance records. Gates devoted a lot of time to "minesweeping", and realizing this, he uninstalled "minesweeping" from his own computer-but could not help but go to other people's computers to continue to play.

"A file with a high score is a text document (which is easy to modify manually), so we have a rule that someone must witness the generation of new records in real time. So. One Sunday afternoon, we received an email from Bill saying, 'Hey, I think I just got a new high score. It was recorded on the computer of Mike Hallman, the then president of Microsoft.' We were thinking: what? (What? ) "

Later Windows XP systems put "minesweeper" high scores in the program registry, as another product manager, Charles Fitzgerald, recalled that day. It was on Holmann's computer that Gates set a new company record for the primary difficulty of minesweeping: 5 seconds. At 7 p.m., Ryan followed a group of curious employees to Holmann's office just to see the boss's new record.

Gates' addiction to minesweeping has affected his work and daily life. The first person who wanted to change that was not his subordinates, but his wife, Melinda French (Melinda French,2021 announced her divorce from Gates in May).

One day in 1993, when Gates and French were watching a basketball game, French called Ryan to her office and asked him to "do the company a favor": don't share the progress of mine clearance records with Gates. "Bill's attention to the game is not a good thing. Bill has a lot of important decisions to make, and minesweeping shouldn't take up his time!"

Ryan followed French's advice but did not follow her approach. Just keeping records from Gates is of little use, because he will challenge himself as a goal over and over again.

In the end, Ryan decided to use some methods comparable to cheating to create a "mine-clearing" record that Gates could never challenge successfully, while proving to Gates that he was the leader in the "mine-clearing" field.

In theory, in the primary difficulty of "mine clearance", if the mine is refreshed in a certain area, it is possible for the player to clear the entire screen of the mine in 1 second.

The initial version of Minesweeper starts at 1 second instead of 0, which may take tens of thousands of attempts, but the technical level of 1990 has been able to support such an attempt. Windows 3.0 has a built-in software, the Macro Recorder (Macro Recorder), inherited from earlier systems, which can record keystrokes and mouse movements, and then map the corresponding actions to keyboard shortcuts to quickly perform complex functions.

Windows 3.1MacroRecorder uses the demo Ryan to write a simple script that iterates through two processes: automatically clicking on the grid in the corner of the game interface to start a new game, and pressing a new game button to refresh the location of the mine.

If in the ideal game, the first step successfully identified all the grids and swept out all 10 mines, the game would pop up a window to record the time, cover the original new game button, and automatically interrupt the second step and script cycle. "so I put it there and started the day's meeting. four hours later, the program won."

Ryan sent Gates a screenshot of the fake record and said proudly in an email: "Sorry, your five-second record has disappeared forever, because I don't think you can get through in one second."

The next morning, Ryan received a reply from Gates. The title of the email is "the CEO has been replaced" (Chairman Displaced), and the body looks like Gates wrote an epitaph to himself: "my key skills are being replaced by computers... this technology is too much. How can we maintain human dignity when machines do things faster than humans?"

It's just that the more he read, the more convinced he was that Gates was joking. Although Gates admitted that the script broke his minesweeping record once and for all, he did not admit defeat. "I think I have to try the intermediate level. Let's see if there are any machines that can't beat my project."

The "Minesweeper" user manual printed by Ryan showed that the intermediate record when the WEP went on sale was 47.3 seconds. Bill Gates and Microsoft employees were crazy about minesweeping, which was a microcosm of the subsequent American minesweeping addiction. WEP originally expected to sell to "unregulated businessmen", but the actual sales results far exceeded expectations.

In 1991, Computing, an American home computer magazine. "(COMPUTE! ) reporting on Microsoft's achievements: "speaking of WEP, in addition to boring Tetris, it includes the most addictive game I've seen recently: minesweeper. If you have a Windows system and enough cast iron self-control to finish your real work before playing Minesweeper, then the game is worth the full price of WEP ($39.95, or $92 today)."

Article title: "A good Game of good quality and low Price" Picture Source Internet Archives in 1992, the upgraded version of Windows 3.1 was launched, which incorporated "minesweeping" directly into the default pre-installed file. More and more Windows users are playing "minesweeping", and minesweeping fever has become out of control.

After realizing the potential negative impact of "mine clearance" on productivity, some enterprises and government departments made boycott measures. Companies such as Boeing and Ford require that "solitaire" and "minesweeper" be removed when installing Windows systems, or that Microsoft ship system products that do not include games. The governments of Pennsylvania, Illinois and Virginia have issued bans banning workers from playing games on government computers.

It's time for the mainstream media to criticize. In March 1994, the Washington Post published a report entitled "Office minefields", which began with a conclusion:

As companies and governments abandon bulky, old machines when choosing Internet-connected personal computers, the United States is discovering the true demonic nature of Bill Gates' Microsoft empire. Microsoft Windows, which controls 80 per cent of the world's new computers, comes pre-loaded with two insidious games-Solitaire and Minesweeper. Does this mean that productivity software spread in offices across the country is sowing the seeds of laziness, distraction and the collapse of American capitalism? "

The report, including Bill Gates, cites several cases of "card" and "minesweeping" addiction. According to the president of a company who helped install the system in the water treatment plant, the first thing the customer said when he saw him for the second time was, "I got 2000 points in Solitaire." Another woman claimed that she had difficulty going to the toilet because of "minesweeping". Every time she saw the wall tiles, her eyes would automatically divide them into mine-clearing squares.

In December of the same year, Richard Richard Cohen, a political columnist for the Washington Post, wrote another column in which he publicly admitted that he was addicted to "cards" and even affected his marriage and relationships:

"I warn you, don't start the game, and don't move one black Q to another K, so as not to endanger your marriage and ignore your family before you know it.

I can only speculate on the impact of these games, especially Solitaire, on American productivity-not to mention overall IQ, and if this continues, the birth rate.

"my work and family life have been affected, and sometimes my arm hurts from reaching for a computer mouse.... I should have written articles that would have made me a Pulitzer Prize, but the red king and black queen waved to me mercilessly."

Cohen was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times before retiring in 2019, but never won the prize in 1999. Cohen added a column. He sees Solitaire as a joke played by Bill Gates on all ordinary people in the world in order to play with those who are more self-disciplined than he is. "Bill Gates is taking over the world while everyone else is playing games."

Cohen said that many people around them openly admit that they are addicted. "I think they are role models of diligence. They started making their beds and doing their homework when they were children, and they also admit that they can't stop playing games of one kind or another."

Another Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Charles Krausamer (Charles Krauthammer), is also unfortunately addicted to Minesweeper. In a column published in time magazine in 1995, he shared "flood therapy", which aims to cure patients' fears quickly by fully exposing them to their fears.

As a result, Krausamer played minesweeping day and night, forgetting to eat and sleep, clicking the button to restart the new game over and over again, forcing himself to go back to the computer even if he didn't want to play it, until he was "numb and his eyes crossed."

Kraussamer died in 2018. He and Cohen are both controversial conservative writers whose columns are not serious news reports and their comments are relatively exaggerated. It is hard to say how serious the two authors are in their relentless criticism.

Krausamer says he will continue to try "flooding therapy" next week after writing his column, perhaps just as an excuse for his addiction to minesweeping. In his second column, Cohen mentioned that he had changed his computer and found the "accessories" and "cards" in the start menu within a few days. The last sentence of the article is: "I will finish this column later."

Since the 21st century, with the further popularity of the Internet and broadband networks, and the increasing abundance of games and entertainment, Americans will not be able to cure their addiction to Windows pre-installed games, and they will also be able to look at their former fanaticism from a more objective perspective. Kyle Orland, editor of the US media Ars Technica, made the following comments on the mine clearance panic in society:

"in some parts of American business and leadership, there is a traditional view that Minesweeper, Solitaire and other pre-installed computer games are responsible for billions of dollars in lost wages and wasteful taxes. these need to be protected by legislation. more importantly, the game itself has become a symbol: some people are anxious about how quickly the computer revolution has changed the way Americans work and live."

(4) the addiction to "minesweeping" may be cured by "minesweeping" itself. It is precisely because of the great success of pre-installed games such as Minesweeper that Microsoft and major game manufacturers have full confidence in the potential PC platform and released more and more fun games, diluting and diverting public anxiety about Minesweeper.

In Ryan's words, "We realized that games can really be a tool to show people how graphical user interfaces really work and get people excited about it."

Before the launch of Windows 3.0, computers and computer games generally needed to use the keyboard to enter text, while the mouse was still a very rare and rarely used thing. Both Minesweeper and Solitaire are seen by Microsoft as electronic tutorials that teach users how to use a graphical interface and a mouse. Subjects like Solitaire are drag-and-drop specialties, while Minesweeper is dedicated to making users fall in love with the right mouse button.

Early Microsoft Mouse Packaging Box

For comparison, the mouse produced by Apple at that time often had only one button and many people did not know what the right mouse button could do, and the emergence of "minesweeper" greatly increased the usage of the right button. In Minesweeper, the left mouse button is used to detect squares, and the right mouse button is to mark squares that may contain mines.

If the flag is inserted correctly, press the left button and right button on the mouse at the same time, you can instantly uncover a number of mine-free squares. The sense of achievement brought about by protruding out more than half of the area with only one operation is no less than the gorgeous animation played when "Solitaire" passes through customs.

Minesweeper and Solitaire changed the way people think about computers, operating systems and mice, and revolutionized the PC gaming industry over the next three decades. Based on the mouse control method, the beginning of seamless docking since the countless landing Windows platform games, from the leisure and educational fish Mini Game, to highly mouse-dependent shooter games, thanks to "Minesweeper" and "Solitaire" contribution.

Reference:

"Minesweeper"-Kyle Orland

Https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/02/how-bill-gates-minesweeper-addiction-helped-lead-to-the-xbox/

Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0

Https://minesweepergame.com/history/windows-entertainment-pack.php

Https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/03/09/office-minefield/3b74132a-5f0a-455f-a04e-6171d023149b/

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