Vincenzo Frosolone
July 31st, 2023
Solitary Refinement: Why Patience Games Endure
Abstract: Patience: the only game that is true to its name, because people play it to patiently pass time by. Laypeople know it as Solitaire, and the most familiar Patience is Klondike Solitaire, the one that people play when they have nothing else better to do during a power outage. Within the mathematical shuffle of outcomes for this lonely game lies dormant a key for unlocking social doors. March past the rogue hierophant into an enriched theater of gamers as you meditate on what Solitaire can consecrate for you. Behind the rigorous complexity that has stumped intellectuals for centuries, we find that myriad species of Solitaire, some more preeminent than others, have enticed deviant advertisers to convince the population of its omnipotence. Solitaire is normally viewed as a reclusive activity, but it is really a social educational force contending with the video game industry to forever leave its mark on society. Basically, I will talk about how Solitaire is more than just a card game and how it has affected marketing teams, educators, and fellow gamers like you. Feel free to play as your text-to-speech robot narrates the post to you.
The Best and Worst Case Scenarios
Wes Cherry’s baby, Windows Solitaire, has withstood the test of time. Its historical origin is foggy, but we do know that it and its predecessors have shuffled around the land for centuries anxious for its next prey. Its legacy shall not be overlooked. Reflections upon the success of Windows Solitaire made me envious of the dopamine rush that initial players must have felt when they first encountered the megalithic game. Finally there was an entertaining distraction other than making copies of random objects on the scanner. The closest facsimile to this experience for me was determining the best possible outcome, the score which would inspire the most celebratory writeup in the office. Devising its partner, the worst possible outcome, was obligatory.
For this end, a brief outline of the scoring for the Windows digital version is demanded at this juncture; a game played by hand with physical hands is not usually scored. I should note presently that in the current edition of Windows Solitaire Collection, in Klondike, no points are deducted for cycling through the stock four or more times; moves are not tallied either. Without further ado, here is the scoring sheet for Windows Solitaire:
In the idealized game, every time a player flips a card in the tableau and moves it to the foundation right afterward, they earn 15 points. No autocomplete would occur because the last card that they extract would be the last card in the game. Games that are completed quickly receive a larger bonus, but if the game takes less than 30 seconds in summary, no bonus is given. This paradigmatic game takes a total of 86 moves to complete. If each move takes 0.5, 0.75, and 1 seconds, then the following would be the total scores.
Cola examined the approximate maximum speed of the human forearm in baseball, which is between 0.723 and 0.75 seconds (Cola 42); I have extrapolated that for movements of the forearm used for clicking or tapping various areas of the screen to retrieve a score of 12,011 points. Young would agree, as he found that 750 milliseconds is a fast human movement (Young 50). According to Gaveau, however, 600 milliseconds is a “natural movement” for clicking a mouse or touchpad or tapping a screen (Gaveau et al 2).
Here is an amusing factoid. If a player took 700,000 seconds (194 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds) to play this perfect game, each move would last for 2 hours, 15 minutes, 39 seconds, and 535 milliseconds, and they would get a bonus of 1 point, meaning that the lowest score that they can possibly achieve is 754 points. For the nerds, this is an approximate equation to summarize the chart: y = 7.72551x^2 - 1089.3x + 49019.
The universal amount of winning Solitaire games is difficult to calculate without first optimizing the stock available and the suits to be played because of the massive value of 52! (hereby 52 factorial) total possibilities for games, both winning and losing. Since I cannot reverse-engineer Reijtenbach’s painstaking optimizations which kept his supercomputer from overheating, perhaps we can infer the percentage of all winnable Solitaire games piece by piece based on each calculation and work our way up. For example, out of the 165 games possible using three cards per suit and two tableau columns, 2 of them were total losses, leaving a winning probability of 99.9879% after the optimizations; this was out of 12 cards. The next example features a total of 665,280 games with three cards per suit and three tableau columns, leaving a winning percentage of 99.9998% accounting for 153 losses, and 12 cards. Finally, with three cards per suit and four tableau columns, creating 29,937,600 possible games and 668,790 losses out of 12 cards, the winning percentage was 99.9777%. We want to figure out the winning percentage using four suits per card, seven tableau columns, and 52 total cards.
Or… if I start with working up to five, six, and seven tableau columns, then maybe it can tell us something useful. Following is the relationship of tableau columns to possible games given three suits. If there is a graphical pattern to be unearthed, then perhaps I can proportionalize it to a situation wherein we are given four suits (for an uber basic illustration of this ramble: 2/3 = x/4, x = 2.6666667/4.)
I have no idea what I am doing. Moving along…
A deeply researched 2019 report by Charlie Blake and Ian P. Gent calculated a universal winning percentage of between 81.861% and 82.029% (Blake 10). Meanwhile, Bjarnason and associates crunched their own numbers using various methods. Through the hindsight optimization test, they found an average winning rate of 23.094% out of 1,043,046 simulated games of Thoughtful Solitaire, in which the player gets to preview the cards before playing (Bjarnason et al 28-29). Via three forms of a Monte-Carlo planning algorithm called Upper Confidence Bounds applied to Trees (yes, that is the actual title,) dubbed the regular, sparse, and ensemble, a grand total of 2,997 games, 12,171 games, and 10,192 games, respectively, churned out winning percentages of 30.03%, 32.068%, and 34.557% (Bjarnason et al 32).
In my comparison chart, the possibility stands that I may have played the same exact deck twice, once on each app, in fact a 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000015371038685533904304366275737191483132641394545325798676213199084154776476065398792524078205262370949995311057267664965143029358432746558969815042054844980515982166656138491614807164475696748925304752% chance, or 1/52!2%. In other words, I'm not worried about any duplications. I unfortunately had to delete the Me2Zen Solitaire app several months ago because it kept flickering and freezing. I instead downloaded the Tripledot Studios app, which lacks the jazzy soundtrack of its predecessor but is equally straightforward. Under this circumstance, I elected to adopt a different strategy. In lieu of transferring bundles of cards from one tableau column to another the very second I see an opening, I now seek to remove as many cards from the stock as possible. For instance, instead of moving the Queen of Hearts onto the King of Clubs resting one tableau column away, I wait until I have removed as many cards as possible from the stock, and iff by that point I have not yet seen the desired Queen of Diamonds, the other red Queen, only then do I transfer the Queen of Hearts over. One may say that this places me at a disadvantage because I am squandering clear opportunities; in fact, Bernard Suits would call me a “trifler” for inventing my own preference of how to win (Yorke 29). Adding rules to this already deterministic game may sacrifice some modicum of playability (Bishop 25), but to critics I would reply that I am teleporting from one game to another and the rules therefore remain unaltered. The movement of one card affects the outcome of the entire game; by favoring one strategy over the other, I emigrate from the universe of one game into that of another. Yes, one can excuse a comparison to point out where I have gone wrong, but my chief concern is draining the stock; once I have left as little stock as possible, my focus shifts to transferring cards to the foundation. There are far too many possibilities for this difference to matter in the grand scheme of things. At the same time, I am proving that Klondike, without any fancy bells and whistles, can be an “insoluble” game after which I cannot feasibly decipher whether it was skill or chance paired with my agency that had navigated me toward my outcome (Yorke 196). Nevertheless, I interpret this chart in two ways since Me2Zen is an outlier.
In interpretation one, the final winning percentage yielded 21.032% out of 2810 games played over the last three or so years. This is fairly accurate because there are abundant data from which to pull. In interpretation two, the final winning percentage yielded 7.722% out of 777 games played within the last year. This is more accurate in that I used my new strategy within the last year whereas in the Me2Zen app, I used the more forgiving strategy of transferring any and all cards as necessary rather than only those from the stock unless the target card was already overturned. Versus the 81.945% chance of winning as predicted by Blake and Gent (Blake 10), my percentage is woeful for Tripledot and Windows. I apologize, scholars, but I am not worthy of attaining your numerary thresholds for Solitaire prowess. As for the Me2Zen data, however, I am relatively close to the mark. Bjarnason would be disappointed with all of my data, and for that I owe my deepest regrets, but it is not my fault that mathematics is a strong force.
Finding the overall winning percentage of all Solitaire games is complex; as a matter of fact, it is an NP-complete problem in complexity theory (Black). In simple terms, the problem must involve a binary decision where any affirmative decision can be verified via brute-force algorithms that do not follow any specific sets of overarching rules (Longpré 5253). An NP-complete problem can be verified using a brute-force algorithm to thumb through all solutions in an amount of time that is quick from the perspective of the algorithm, and not necessarily to humans, but the caveat is that the impenetrability of the problem increases as the amount of solving time allotted to the problem extends (Black); thus, with current supercomputer technology, it is nearly impossible to calculate the winning percentage of Klondike.
In practice, it is the opposite, as you lose more often than you win. Or do you? For instance, out of 2,810 games, I have only won 591. Why is this the case in a world where it is theorized that there are 65,834,009,156,276,103,128,975,128,408,565,318,642,901,047,235,903,340,192,727,040,000,000 winning games? Assuming that a sheet of printer paper is 0.1 millimeters thick and we added a sheet to a pile for every win, that pile would be 6.5 novemdecillion kilometers tall, which is 7.5 undecillion times the diameter of the observable universe on the astute authority of Wolfram Alpha. Astronomically unimaginable values in the unvigintillions present the illusion of losing more often than winning when it is really the opposite; you would figure that out if one were to play all 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 games. Over the last couple of years, I have played a small percentage of that amount. I am a little fish in a big pond; I can only see the tip of the Solitaire iceberg.
Game expert Chris Crawford remarked that the games with the greatest replay value always appear to be winnable but are never altogether surmountable without encountering a conflict, which is hidden by the apparent “cleanliness” of the game. I imagine that the conflict equates to an Eldritch beast leaping onto the silver screen during a horror film: viewers know that something will happen, yet not when. The player must be able to diagnose the source of their own errors and endure in order to learn from the experience and validate the challenges brought forth by the developer (Crawford).
In any event, as for the least productive Solitaire deck shuffle, I created a torturous scenario in which the Kings are all fully accessible in the tableaus, but the Queens are ensnared deep in the talon (a synonym for stock.) Three of the four Jacks are accessible in the tableaus, and the final one is at the bottom of the stock as are the Aces; the Aces are separated into four bundles of three cards each for draw-three Solitaire. I only wrote and researched about draw-three Solitaire because draw-one Solitaire defies my personal preference and it is not akin to the most familiar Windows version; draw-one is subjectively for children. The deck arrangement is found in this chart (read down each column left to right,) which is sorted under the assumption that the bottom row of the tableau columns is laid out left to right with the next going on top, et cetera, and the remainder being used as the stock; the asterisk demarcates the start of the stock. The King of Diamonds is the top card of the deck and the Jack of Hearts is the bottom card.
Marketing - Many Will Vie for Attention, Few Will Resort to Cringe
The first pre-installed computer game, for the dinosaur PDP-1, was Spacewar in 1962; strangely enough, both Microsoft Solitaire and Spacewar were used as diagnostic tools (Vedrashko 27).
Windows Solitaire, like its simplistic companions PacMan and Tetris, is defined as a pattern recognition game; it was designed as a distraction from the stressful corporate office environment (Cox 43). It guided the technologically illiterate of the 1990s toward independently maneuvering a computer mouse or depressing the directional arrows on the keyboard (Garreau). Prior to Windows Solitaire, created by an unpaid Wes Cherry (Garreau), developer Spectrum Holobyte had offered Macintosh users a game called Solitaire Royale, which bundled eleven Solitaire iterations, including Canfield, Reno, Corners, Golf, and, our standby, Klondike. It was $34.95 in 1987 (today, this would equal approximately $93.87); Windows Solitaire came with the operating system three years later (Harwood). It even accommodated a multiplayer tournament option during which players would compete to speedrun all eight standard Solitaire games (Harwood). It is fitting, then, that Tetris was the first mobile game, baked into the software of the Hagenuk MT-2000 mobile phone, aptly released in 1994 (Windows Blogs).
In 1998, Hewlett-Packard released their 620LX palmtop personal computer which ran Windows CE and therefore carried Windows Solitaire (Braue). Not to be outdone, Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson AB debuted their T28 mobile phone in 1999, allowing consumers to talk for up to five hours and also play Solitaire (Democrat and Chronicle). By 2000, mobile phones featured games such as Snake, Logic, Memory (notably a card game,) Tetris (Guernsey), and naturally Klondike (Snider). I remember playing Snake on one of my mother’s old flip phones when I was young; be not mistaken, for it was not a Nokia. These digitized strategy and logic games were marketed to working adults to distract from the drudgery (Garreau). Mobile gaming was quickly becoming the next standard in gaming technology. To take advantage of this trend, Nintendo worked with Konami to develop ad campaigns for “software that [would] let Game Boys use cell phones to download new games from the Web” (Guernsey). Those primitive prototypes of mobile game ads were certainly not as unhinged as those from modern mobile game app developers such as Fabiosa and Betta Games, the latter of which I will regard later, but they did precede the imminent onslaught of smartphone games.
There seemed to be no significant concern for instigating addiction in children because mobile gaming was not quite yet the stimulus for mobile phone sales; the contemporary grievance was distracted driving (Guernsey). No better guinea pig for this campaign existed than Japan (Guernsey), the mobile phone capital of the new millennium. Fifty million technology enthusiasts would have used the Internet on their devices if only they could afford to have done so (Parker). After all, Japan introduced 3G mobile phones to the world, and “crammed multiple functions and crystal-clear LCD screens into some of the world’s tiniest digital handsets” (Parker), so I can postulate that the Japanese would have been some of the first passengers on the mobile game bandwagon. By 2002, Microsoft was blueprinting a mobile phone nicknamed Stinger; manufactured by Sendo, it would officially be called the Z100 Smartphone and feature pocket-sized Internet access on a colorful screen, complete with a calendar, address book, an email inbox, and MP3 capabilities (Krakow). There was no word about its gaming content, but by that time, the operating system Windows CE was already able to run entire game consoles such as the Playstation 2 (Walker). This would be Microsoft’s third breakthrough gaming moment after the XBox in 2001 and— you guessed it— Windows Solitaire back in 1990.
Digitized games such as Windows Solitaire are more absorbing because they help the player determine a fundamental skill level and strengthen their “twitch skills,” or their ability to deftly drag or otherwise transfer the cursor (Bishop 60). Logic and glamor must coalesce as a mechanism of aggrandizing a halfway decent game (Crawford). The cards in Windows Solitaire mimic the jets in Space Invaders or abdominal morsels in Centipede which exemplify that in balanced single-player games, “the human player’s advantage in intelligence is offset by the computer’s material advantages” (Crawford), thereby presenting an onus for the player to defeat the armies of pips, pilots, or predatory partitions. As I have explained, 52 factorial is a stratospheric number of shuffles; this reality embedded within the mundane game (Bishop 9) amplifies its significance to our mental faculties and triggers the challenge for our player agency (Crawford). It is fruitful to add that Solitaire jells with Centipede and Space Invaders as all three revolve around “removing objects from the screen” (Bishop 101). The winning animation during which the cards choreograph fireworks displays, haphazardly bounce around the screen, or burst from their foundations into fluttering butterflies. This aligns with the factor of sensory gratification which Crawford stated differentiates good and bad games (Crawford).
Successful advertising of mobile gaming apps must present the challenge in a poignant fashion to hook the consumer. Keep in mind that the developers had no choice but to incorporate an endeavor that appeals only to human beings aiming to handicap the apathetic computer chip inside the smartphone (Crawford). This may involve a doctrine that satisfies human desires such as sex, status, and luxury (Danesi 205), hence the shock value of the ads that I will analyze for Solitaire Home Design by Betta Games. Klondike, played on a computer, also satisfies these qualities, but on a smartphone, people may need more of an incentive to play. Through my research, I divided Solitaire clones into two categories: attention grabbers, and cringy.
Attention grabbers have three subcategories. The “Boomer” variety consists of casual games where players get to play the classic card game in relaxing environments such as the beach as in Solitaire Resort published by Popside, a hotel in Emily’s Hotel Solitaire from Rainbow Games LLC, on a world trek like in Solitaire TriPeaks Journey by Me2Zen Limited, and of course on a farm like in Solitaire Grand Harvest published by Supertreat. Solitaire Grand Harvest is definitely a Boomer game because there are television commercials for it on cable. Only Boomers watch cable, as we all know. Also, Tiki Solitaire TriPeaks from Scopely paid Jeopardy to be a sponsor (Jeopardy). Honorable mentions include Solitaire World: Journey Card from BFK Games, Klondike by Me2Zen, and Fairway Solitaire Blast from Big Fish Games. Notice that only one of these games has specified that it offers Klondike; this is because the others embrace TriPeaks Solitaire, a simpler strain of the game into which I will delve in the next section. Next are the entertaining games which add a bit of pizzazz to the original game. Castle Solitaire from MobilityWare lets the player build castles along the way, Klondike Game from Smart Project GMBH has characters who travel the world, and Tiny Fish Solitaire from Bennergames has players build aquariums. Then we have interactive fiction games in which characters narrate the exposition and pull the player through a crime investigation as in Solitaire Crime Stories from Rainbow Games LLC, a mystery in Ava’s Manor by Uken Games (which oddly features slim Solitaire gameplay,) and starting a small business in Piper’s Pet Cafe from Tripledot Studios Limited, which features “regular Klondike updates” but is generally a TriPeaks or Pyramid game (Tripledot Studios Limited).
Back in 1999, Soda Pop Productions released Coke Is It, a game named after Coca Cola’s 1980 slogan which was essentially an advertisement for Coca Cola disguised as a comical scenario-based game with multiple characters and endings (Vedrashko 30). This game foreshadowed the dawn of mobile game ads broadcasting bizarre interactive situations, but they were so innocent compared to what we have to deal with in 2023. Cringy games have three subcategories as well. The least raunchy subcategory is that of gambling and general ickiness, with games such as Solitaire Clash from Real Casino for Slots Gaming (henceforth RCSG), Bitcoin Solitaire Get BTC! by PlayDay Studios, and Solitaire Smash from Baca Mihelich. These are repugnant because they teeter on the line of scam apps. The next subcategory is dedicated to animal abuse. The members are Solitaire Zoo and Solitaire Ocean both from Linkdesks, Solitaire Golden Prairies from Kosmos Games, Solitaire: My Farm Friends by Solitaire Aquarium (that confused me too, and I have not even touched the scandal of all of the Solitaire clones with an underwater theme,) and Solitaire Dragons from Polar Bear Studio. The ads for these apps show animals in distressing neglectful situations from which it is the job of the player, not their caretakers, to save them. They are a bit more than cringy, and enter the reproachful realm. Finally there is Solitaire: Home Design, snug in its own subcategory of unadulterated adult obscenity.
I find it fascinating that all of the cringy games except for Solitaire Golden Prairies are legitimately founded on Klondike and not TriPeaks. Does it take that much more energy to emphasize the glory of Klondike for a smartphone audience? The intrusive ballyhoo used to market these games is not unique. This technique is not even unique for smartphone apps. In fact, people have been blocking advertisements for decades, starting with the LazyBones remote control advertised as an advertisement silencer in 1950, and the Blab-Off remote control marketed in 1953 as a tool with which consumers could effectively mute their television sets during commercial breaks (Vedrashko 6; Dawson 58). On a slight tangent, if you have ever complained that television commercials are louder than their supporting programs, then you are not alone; this has been a conspiracy since 1956 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) denied this claim (Dawson 58). I have personally noticed that mobile ads may not always start out muted, blasting my eardrums with drivel about Temu or miracle diet pills. Since TiVo entered the marketplace in 1999, followed by obligatory imitators, consumers have been able to fast forward through these intrusive commercials (Vedrashko 6). With ads that squeeze themselves between smartphone apps, you have the option to tap the little X in the corner, which always seems to get smaller and smaller, I have noticed.
In 1996, PrivNet had become the Internet’s first ad blocker (McElvogue). By 2005, a program called Greasemonkey allowed these early Internet surfers to block pop-up advertisements by changing the script of the webpage (Willison). Mobile game ads make you wait to click that X though; you have to engage with or watch the ad for a certain period of time before being able to exit. Be careful to not accidentally click into the product website. These ads do not necessarily prompt you to act quickly, but their flashy animations and queue time do hold you captive like the “bizarre economic model” of the old— or dwindling, I should say— popular means of brain melting entertainment: television (Dawson 218). Even though commercials were and still may be viewed as “an invasion of the privacy of consumers’ minds” as devices that zombify consumers into slavery under the mastery of the advertiser (Dawson 55), Jamie Kellner, the contemporary executive of Turner Broadcasting, commented in 2004 that by skipping commercials, consumers breached their contract with a network who was providing them with the show that they so desperately wanted to watch (Dawson 251). Despite this alarming message, consumers were invited to “shoot” their television screens, symbolically, with the Zenith Flash-Matic remote control (Dawson 69).
Leading into 2006, while smartphone games did not yet exist, console video games became a battleground for advertisers. The decision by an advertiser of implementing product placement in video games was hindered by the slim profitability margins of physical releases, the extensive vetting process, and the difficulty of selecting games that would match their demographic and branding strategies (Vedrashko 18). Nowadays, entire marketing departments at corporations mobilize mobile game app ads based on personal information in a breeze. Advertisers had a better shot in 2005 at reaching a wider audience by making “a psychographic and behavioral match than a purely demographic one,” such as interests, attitudes, and other metaphysical criteria; yes, even in 2005, gamers had to deal with intrusive pop-up ads (Vedrashko 20). Regardless of their inferior technique, modern mobile game advertisers achieve the trick of enhancing “the alternate reality” in an immersive manner (Vedrashko 19), albeit deceptively. Digitization was not outside of possibility in 2006 though; the game Second Life beat Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse to advertising in virtual reality, with American Apparel’s “avatar outfits that [were] modeled after their real-world merchandise” (Vedrashko 24). This is as close as they got to current mobile ads although sixteen years after the launch of their groundbreaking Solitaire game, Microsoft innovated once again in 2006 with Major League Gaming, which catapulted gaming to the mainstream as a live event, probably with abundant sponsorships (Vedrashko 30). This move would precede the era of mobile games proliferating American gaming culture. It would take six years for writers to heed the presence of a new force in gaming: the smartphone, namely the iPhone, in 2012, when it accidentally redefined casual gaming as a lucrative business (Leaver et al 31-32).
We shall at long attend to the elephant dung in the room: Betta Games. Betta Games is a subsidiary of Beijing Beta Technology, a mobile game development company founded in 2011 as a mobile game developer based in Zhongguancun; the company claims that they have engaged more than five hundred million users from multiple continents (Fotoable). Betta’s vision is to lead in industry innovation and “achieve mutual success with employees” as well as “create happiness for players all over the world” and their core values are seeking truth, being inclusive, and achieving lifelong growth (Fotoable). While these are honorable philosophies, they seem awfully hackneyed to me.
Betta Games, not to be confused with the blog published by Zack Applewhite, describes Solitaire Home Design as the odyssey of Lori and Eddie as they “embark on a journey of transforming and renovating an entire island into a beautiful paradise”during which the consumer plays varieties of Solitaire to level up their achievements and “become smarter.” Sometimes, however, these ads may star minor unnamed characters instead. They may also focus on makeovers rather than home design. This company has propagated Mergical, Tank Hero, Townest, Word Villas, Crossy, Dragon Farm Adventure, Meeerge, and Royal Meeerge (these are not typos,) but by far their most renowned game is Solitaire Home Design due to the notoriously crude and obscene presentation of its mobile ads. The ads, which may be found on their official YouTube channel, Lori’s Dream Island, are not universally offensive, but the ones which attract the most attention, and therefore clicks to the download screen, are also shared in private Facebook groups. Some themes include but may not be limited to divorce, adultery, gambling, sex, body shaming, infertility, domestic violence, animal abuse, vomiting, urination, and even murder. Feel free to view them from the link included in the appendix.
The first video ad displayed on their YouTube channel (as of July 10th, 2023) was for Solitaire Home Design and featured Eddie in a drunken rage beating a puppy, Hachiko, off-screen for jumping in front of Lori, his initial target, and kicking Lori out of the house. Lori walked outside into a rainstorm with Hachiko in her arms to an abandoned, disheveled property, wherein she cried. The player moved some cards around to improve their clothing and shelter, and Lori cheered when the player earned her a sweater and a roof, at least until the plywood covering blew away in the wind, leaving her and Hachiko in the rain again. A message appeared asking the player if they can do better next time. This ad alone contains domestic violence and animal abuse. Another video in their playlist reverses the gender roles. Lori believes that Eddie is eyeing her breasts and throws his ice cream in his face, only to find out that he is suddenly blind. Eddie navigates to the same abandoned house as earlier and endures similar tragedies, yet the player earns him a feast and a T-shirt before the roof is whipped away again; the game asks the demo player to do better. As of July 31st, the lead ad shows a dragon getting impaled by an arrow to the throat and Lori cradling the baby, taking it with her to a hospitable house with a worn couch.
Most of the questionable ads follow a pattern in which Lori does something, either by accident or unintentionally, which inevitably sets off her colleague Eddie, who kicks her out of the house or location. She hunts for the abandoned house and waits for the demo player to earn her comfort which is inexplicably pulled away at the last second. The player is tasked with choosing items that will help the character’s situation or cards that satisfy the rules of a rummage of solitaires, such as Tripeaks and an aberration of Klondike. Bizarrely, the developer or their intern replies to comments with positive statements about how the characters deserve better treatment or with emojis. They make no mention of why their content is so obscene in the first place. It does not appear that Betta employees are neglected because they supposedly receive gift packages, risk protection, five different “social insurances,” a “housing fund,” an “annual physical examination,” housing and education and food for welfare beneficiaries, and access to clubs and parties, exclusive medical care, and “equity incentives” (Fotoable), so the culprit is not ironic catharsis. Betta’s slogan is “seek truth without end; there is no end to seeking truth” (Fotoable). Nothing remarkable stuck out to me in their biography, except for how it failed to acquiesce in its lewd marketing tactics. I emailed Betta Games to no avail asking about this.
Are these ads effective? Do people fall for them? Advertising has over the last few decades become “rhetorical art” in that materialism opened consumers to the virtues of life, as reported by Big Marketing Department at least (Danesi 208). Back in 2006, about half of the most involved gamers expressed that they were indifferent about product placement because it was “an inevitable part of the future of their play” and bought the products (Vedrashko 21-22). Humans rely on semiosis in order to interpret words and signs and make relevant decisions, but the visual brainwashing of slick pixelated advertisements has begun to overtake textual analysis and critical thought, although humans still permit the imagery “only if they suit already established preferences” (Danesi 208). The traffic of the Solitaire clone marketplace has allowed developers to tack salacious ads to otherwise homogeneous apps as a provision for persuading consumers to download their ostensibly spirited product (Picht). As early as 2006, which was 17 years ago, mobile devices were seen as “more valuable real estate than the back page of the Wall Street Journal” (Vedrashko 44).
Believe it or not, advertising does not change minds as much as one may think it does; they do better at constructing a “social reality and altering the worldview of the consumer than coaxing people into buying their products (McMillan 223). It is no longer 2006; people are more cognizant of the shady marketing of game ads. Advertisers who see consumers as numbers on a spreadsheet possess patently Machiavellian traits of goal-orientation and emotional detachment (Jablonska 478). The marketing team members are entities superior to the consumer who believe that they can rake in downloaders, using vapid content that matches with their perceived average level of consumer intelligence and propensity toward distraction, without thinking about how their ads actually affect consumers. Successful advertisements make consumers feel the need to overcome an obstacle that was never there in the first place, as with games, except in this case, advertisements should correlate with everyday life rather than an existential model of life (Danesi 208). The marketing department is fully aware that ads do not work, but they expend a lot of time and effort into making a deep impression. The aforementioned ad for Solitaire Clash with the two women not only passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, but also stimulates the desire for money, which is important but should not outweigh wisdom or social interaction (Danesi 205-206). The obstacle is that suddenly one does not have enough money to survive and must resort to a Solitaire app for sustenance.
Returning to Solitaire Home Design, however, the ads are obscene and shocking in nature. They are abrasive, sensual, and at times offensive. Does this reflect current times? Does this upsell desires? Sex has been known to sell in the form of a “courtship text” for cigarettes, for example, whereby cigarettes equate to sensuality and desire (Danesi 6). If an ad is sexy, then the consumer will be sexier when they purchase it. However, these particular mobile ads contain scenes of shock value and abuse which do not align with this philosophy. Assuming that these ads portray legitimate game content, which, to clarify once again, they do not do, Crawford would hypothesize that the seduction stems from the underground, mature nature of the game that lets the player unlock their devilish instincts and personas (Crawford). Nose-thumbing is what Crawford named this release of the inner vigilante from consumers as they urgently save Lori from Eddie’s abusive behavior and simultaneously encourage her (Crawford). For a mental cleanse, I have linked playthroughs of the actual game content in the appendix.
The new spectral vexation is the fact that the consumer has been too selfish and needs to simulate helping others in order to reacclimate to the harsh realities of the world not hidden behind a screen. Users who are defined as chronically online possess overlapping traits of narcissism and psychopathy (Jablonska 489); they tend to be self-centered from all of their time spent alone and lack empathy from the normalization of video game violence or a preoccupation with negative subjects such as global conflict and politics, yet simultaneously they know that they are outcasts and as a result can be hostile, unsocial, and insecure (Jablonska 478). My inner psychologist tells me that the most adept Internet users are disposed to respond to these aggressive ads with sympathy for the man beating the woman, or the sense that to achieve social redemption they need to learn how to be a hero. They try to elude the perforation between hardcore gamers like them who have been stereotyped into playing patently violent games and casual gamers whose sources of entertainment are deemed by hardcore gamers as “distractions” rather than games (Leaver et al 34), and become somebody.
Thus, they may be finessed into downloading a Solitaire app under false premises, leading these misunderstood consumers into imitating the dominant psychopathic man in the ads and satisfy an impulsive desire which has fooled them into downloading the game in the first place. In a metaanalysis conducted in 2014, violent video games had been proven to reinforce “hostile attribution bias,” which means that any action by an opponent is hostile by association; the studies also showed that stereotypical enemy figures such as those in a culture associated with terrorism or an aggressive regime make the player more reactive (Selvarajan 20). Players of violent video games had desensitized themselves to violence enough to identify the whimsy of video game playing with real violent acts and vent anger in unhealthy ways (Selvarajan 20).
Flaming in gaming culture embodies a vehement expression of strongly worded language intended to either mentally harm opponents as a harsh taunt within the realm of cyberbullying or crudely assist teammates as a joke or meme within the realm of acquaintance or friendship (Chen 22). Poor communication skills can be easily misconstrued as threats if the context is not clarified. We see a form of flaming in the ad for Solitaire: Home Design, at least in my humble opinion; it satisfies the technicalities of an online interaction since the characters are pixelated and the male character consistently chastises, beats, and evicts his female housemate in “specifically hostile and aggressive interactions” (Chen 22) until she secludes herself in an abandoned property. Luckily, none of the apps in this blog post are barbarous, although players fond of violence may trap themselves in the fantasized world of the Lori and Eddie alteregos and conclude that the actual game synopsis will embody a cathartic experience for their unsociable sensibilities. They may relate to either character and let the ad morph their worldview into a negative stereotype that violence is the key to getting your way (McMillan 224). Ironically, the ads never show consumers the aftermath of the enraged confrontation; what does the abusive man do when the woman leaves? This is left to the imagination I suppose.
Klondike in itself does not allow for such catharsis, but within a fantasized world such as that of Lori and Eddie, the motivation to endure the negativity would fuel this fire. The marketers claim that they are simply attempting to encapsulate as much information into the span of the modern attention span as possible (Picht), yet this charming personality in conjunction with the psychopathic “manipulation and deception” encompassed by their campaigns emphasize an evil fortitude and therefore sculpt them into the enemy, not the defenseless corporate employee whose mission it is to direct eyes to a generic Solitaire clone (Jablonska 479). Unsurprisingly, the actual game pales in comparison to the vitriolic ad content. The playthrough that I found on YouTube, included in the appendix, is nothing short of lackluster. It may shock you, reader, to learn that Lori and Eddie are not the characters from the commercial. I have been fooling you this whole time. Lori and Eddie are unassuming characters focused on renovating a home, period. While it is nothing special, this game does take into consideration the factor of prowess, at least for the speedrunning community (Crawford). Crawford would call speedrunners “sharks,” as they do risk the mental and physical safety of their community members by lunging for social dominance in games of skill. Sharks are generally dismissive of games of chance, such as vanilla Klondike (Crawford). Sharks would be defined as narcissistic; since they are concerned about their social and bodily appearance (Jablonska 478), they need to assert their status over their peers. Continual engagement with abusive, violent content does not always lead to imitation of violent behavior, but rather it is more likely that consumers will be inspired to protect themselves with guns or guard dogs (McMillan 226).
Leaderboards do not only promote antagonism; they provide a sense of accomplishment and pair with both Solitaire (e.g. whomever can earn the fastest time to win in the least amount of moves) and gambling, even though both are games of pure chance (Albarrán-Torres 226). I would imagine that in Solitaire Clash the player gets better prizes from slots as they improve at the card game. Despite the positive reward system (Yorke 196) inherent within these casino facsimiles, these games do not allow for much player agency and are therefore “boring” according to Suits’ theory (Yorke 220; 156). Too much hidden information reduces games to an aleatory affair, but the right amount of logical gaps can stimulate the processing facilities of the human brain (Crawford). Klondike apps featuring leaderboards and reward systems do push the player to crush record times and rise the ranks on leaderboards, collect the most shiny accessories, and convert chance encounters to skilled maneuvers. While Solitaire: Home Design is not exactly the talk of the town as far as “social lubrication” goes, its ads definitely stir conversation, and conversion, across Facebook and YouTube, and possibly other social media platforms as well (Crawford). Klondike in its corporeal form is more like a social repellent, so it loses points there. The interactivity of the abridged demo in these deceitful ads, though, continue a trend from 2006 of an inkling of the notion of “responsive content with a built-in rewards system” (Vedrashko 26). Even if the player would never in their right mind download that trash, they still tinker with the free gameplay.
As a disclaimer, I do not personally condone any risky business such as gambling, stocks, or Bitcoin transactions. However, solitaire gambling apps are all the rage. The earliest blip that I can find for Solitaire Clash is from April 27th, 2023 in the Google Play Store, merely three months ago; however, another Solitaire Clash, by AviaGames, has been draining pockets since at least 2015. One of the most familiar social gambling platforms, Big Fish Casino, has been around since 2002 (JT); that’s 21 years! What a number. Vegas Solitaire is its own breed because it is contingent on gambling. Regardless, this caliber of casino apps has been around for a while. I should note that the AviaGames app is only found in the Apple App Store while the one developed by RCSG is exclusively from the Google Play Store. The AviaGames app was developed during the aftermath of the burgeoning social gambling industry; in 2012, the global social gambling market was valued at $1.7 billion (Albarrán-Torres 22). Currently, the market is valued at $6.2 billion (Clement). Considering that slot machines themed around pop culture icons are trendy (Albarrán-Torres 35), I find it interesting that Klondike can act as such a pull for consumers. It is possible that this is because Klondike’s widespread charisma is compatible with the flexibility of digital gambling applications across platforms (Albarrán-Torres 44). It is also possible that the developer wants to manipulate the player into believing that the ease of playing Klondike translates to digital gambling apps (Albarrán-Torres 44). One origin story of Solitaire claims that the game was born from fortune telling (Yorke 47). This concept of pairing gambling with such supernatural rituals of chance boosted the surge of social gambling in the United States in the second half of the 1800s because “gambling is a ritual in which humankind continuously enters and exits the realm of chance, which is separate from the everyday” (Albarrán-Torres 50).
There has been a move for the past couple of decades to normalize gambling as a leisure activity which has been vastly aided by human dependence on smartphones and other screen technologies (Albarrán-Torres 115). Back in 1996, American consumers could gamble with their Mitsubishi Cellular One mobile phone for only $29 (Southern Illinoisan) (today, this would cost around $56), so it is apparent that the industry jumped on any viable opportunity to wrangle gamblers. We already know that we are addicted to our smartphones because driven by a “self-delusion necessitated by existential angst” we humans desire utopian “surrogate[s] for social interaction” in the form of a space in which we can single-handedly salvage reality (Yorke 85; 81), but casino apps such as Big Fish Casino, Solitaire Clash, and Solitaire Clash may take a more sinister approach to keeping users hooked. Consumer lifetime management (CLM) services maximize consumer addiction through turning gambling into a daily routine and establishing friendly brand presence (Albarrán-Torres 120-121). While it is true that when Windows Solitaire first entered cubicles in the early 1990s, employees found themselves addicted to not only Solitaire, but also Minesweeper; the author of a relevant Washington Post article boldly claimed that Minesweeper was even more narcotic for players (Garreau). This is not to mention Vegas Solitaire, in which players wager $52 from the start. Regardless, gambling aggravates addiction, and addiction has been proven to stimulate our dopamine receptors (McMillan 244), therefore developing a craving for gambling or the next flashy video game release.
One ad for Solitaire Clash by AviaGames achieves this by flourishing to consumers the possibility of making bank through daily play (davisjaxx6673) anywhere they may go (Albarrán-Torres 213). In the ad, one woman drops all of the cash that she has won from playing the game, and another woman alerts her about it; the first woman gives the second woman a bundle worth $500 and says that she has been winning “a ton of cash” from Solitaire Clash, adding that “you just play short, fun games, and sometimes you can win even hundreds of dollars in just a few minutes” (davisjaxx6673). The variability drives players into a supernatural sphere of unknowns situated within the app (Albarrán-Torres 222) in which they do have defensible potential to win money, since AviaGames is supposedly an official PayPal partner. In the description for Solitaire Clash by AviaGames, the company warns that cash games are not available in all states; the Google Play app specifies the same thing. Under these circumstances, players are in it for the “enhanced experiences” promised by the app (Albarrán-Torres 207). Only Bitcoin Solitaire acknowledges that “it takes a long time to earn enough Bling Points to cash out for a meaningful amount of Bitcoin” and that “most users earn an amount that is only worth a fraction of one cent” (Google Play Store). This is puffery at its thorniest; the Solitaire Clash clones do not disclose anything in their descriptions about any actual cash amounts that can be won. The ad does show push notifications of the woman’s winnings (davisjaxx6673), which are another means of CLM (Albarrán-Torres 121). Users actively bolster the company’s social media reach by investing their time into the app (Albarrán-Torres 210).
Gambling apps reimagine the slot machine by interpolating “quests and levels” (Albarrán-Torres 224). However, while shady developer RCSG only has one other app to offer called Party Casino Slots Games, there is still diversity to be found from Big Fish, such as Fairway Solitaire Blast, and from Baca Mihelich, such as 21 Smash and Bingo Smash, none of which offer cash prizes. Solitaire seems to be a moneymaker for these developers because of its close relationship with gambling and casino culture. It is suspicious that Baca Mihelich does not publicly post ratings or comments for their apps; perhaps there is a scandal afoot? The apps based on gambling, which are Solitaire Smash, Solitaire Clash, and Bitcoin Solitaire Get BTC, elude the philosophical outcome that gameplay produces nothing “tangible” for the player (Yorke 181). I argue that players of Klondike on its own accord have indeed produced a tangible meaning for the game by developing these apps.
I am not certain about the demographic of this game or the other ones listed in this post, but younger individuals are more affected by these psychological conditions since they are the generation voted most likely to fall asleep playing video games (Jablonska 480). Perhaps these players would be harboring an itch to play, but in a pedagogic or professional environment play is— downplayed, if you will. They grew up playing in school because gameplay teaches the quickly developing brains of young children social and critical thinking skills anthropologically natural to mammals (Van Eck 35). via “macro-level involvement” with their peers (Iacovides 240). As adults, however, they were left with games such as Windows Solitaire on the office desktop computer. As in the 1990s, with the adults opting for games that “put them inside a whodunit, or a romance set on a desert island,” some of the apps in this post have achieved Millennial and Gen X acclaim, but smartphone games are flashy and may also appeal to a younger generation, although I can imagine that the Nintendo Switch would dwarf it just as the Sega did to Solitaire in the 1990s (Cox 43). This is confirmed in an article from 2006 which states that adults were hopping onto a new trend of casual games involving tiles, puzzles, cards, and words, including one titled Aloha Solitaire which predates apps like Solitaire: My Farm Friends, or one of the many tropical excursions (Saltzman 16). Children did too, though, with the inauguration of the Nintendo Wii in 2006 (Leaver et al 33).
It is serendipitous that casual gaming arose for both parents and their children in the same year. This blurs the generational gap of casual games, and opens the opportunity for children to be enticed by psychopathic advertisers with games that perfectly leverage the “smartphone’s intuitive gestural interface, low barrier of entry via digital distribution channels and persistent connection to online social networks to create a home on the smartphone for approachable and accessible casual games” (Leaver et al 32). Hardcore gamers could mobilize their hardcore experience outside of their dens and socialize (Leaver 80). Despite that, though, gamers, social or otherwise, tend to gravitate toward desktop computers or laptops for the most riveting gameplay (Jenkins 40).
Remember when I mentioned previously that the ads do not portray legitimate game content? During the writing process for this entry, a new Steam game called “YEAH! YOU WANT ‘THOSE GAMES,’ RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!” (yes, that is the actual title,) came to my attention which lets users play some games as advertised (Monkeycraft). Agonizingly, one cannot play as Eddie or Lori, but they can delve into the games that marketing teams do not want consumers to know about. Specifically, many mobile app ads have shown a character running down a conveyor belt through portals containing different choices, say for dressing up for a first date. The demo player usually selects more than a couple of wrong tunnels and sets the character up for embarrassment as they stand in front of their special someone barefoot, reeking from having not showered in days, and vying for an onion and mustard soup for supper. These ridiculous scenarios seem to attract downloads anyway due to the primal urges of the demographic (Picht). As otherworldly as the ads seem to be, the marketing department is onto something.
However, this underhanded tactic has also gotten them in legal trouble in the past because the content was not even a minigame; developer firms began to integrate ad content into their games as a result (Picht). One advertiser, Magic Tavern, Incorporated, recently had to shutter their operation because of complaints that were sent to the Better Business Bureau concerning shocking ads containing blatant fat shaming and sexism (Better Business Bureau). Beware, Betta Games; you may be next on the chopping block. I can contemplate, however, how developers and their attorneys will inject more minigame ad content into their games after this strikedown. Magic Tavern “discontinued the advertising and represented that it will not use similar advertisements in the future” although at the time of the proceeding they needed to request the removal of the ads from third parties as well (Better Business Bureau). “Mudgirl,” as the Project Makeover character has been honored on Facebook, will no longer endure poor hygiene and fetishize flatulence because she portrays women as “helpless and social outcasts if they fail to maintain a feminine appearance” (Better Business Bureau). I wonder how this case will affect the Steam game from the start of this paragraph as they do depict unrealistic bodily proportions and questionable scenarios (Monkeycraft).
The Enduring Cultural Relevance of Solitaire
Crawford argues that the game of Solitaire is actually a puzzle (Crawford); I respectfully disagree with him. To advocate for the devil, it does not meet many of the criteria for intriguing games: it is lulling rather than invigorating to the mind; it lacks sociability; it is mindful but not purifying. However, nobody can deny its iconic cultural status. Even if it is technically a puzzle and not a game, this puzzle has aided boredom and empowered app developers to be creative for decades. Its enigmatic allure has stood the test of time. Perhaps as a puzzle it has garnered a following for its symbiosis with the natural pattern seeking human brain. That being said, I do still believe that it is a game. In its digitized rendition, the program substitutes human adversaries to acknowledge the player’s moves and strategies (Crawford). The physical version played— well, solitaire, as the term goes— pits the player against the NP-complete problem, the abstract mathematical specter that has haunted prefrontal cortices for centuries. Even Crawford stated himself that in card games, the player faces calculations and trials rather than projectiles (Crawford). Mobile app developers have doubly gamified as a means for spiking its pensive elements with rewards, yet this additionally proves that the elements of gameplay were inherently present. It takes a delicate equilibrium of complexity and rules to produce a palatable game, so developers must proceed with caution (Bishop 8).
As much as I love discussing the versatility of Klondike, realistically more mobile apps opt for a simpler archetype such as TriPeaks or Pyramid. TriPeaks Solitaire, which has gained considerable recognition since it was included in the Microsoft Solitaire Collection and has been featured in dozens of mobile game apps, was invented by Robert Hogue in 1989 (Flynn). Rather than tableau columns, there are tableau cliffs, three pyramids of six cards each with ten cards left face up underneath. The goal is to eliminate the pyramids by stacking sequential chains of cards, such as a King, then an Ace, then a King, Queen, Jack, Queen, et cetera. As Klondike was used to train humans on how to use a desktop computer, TriPeaks Solitaire, owing to its utter simplicity, has been taught to five different machine learning models in order to test their proximity to human abilities in the game; in the nature of advanced technology, they greatly exceeded human capacity (Yi 37). For its contributions to science I grant TriPeaks Solitaire a soft pass, but it is still more depthless than Klondike. If I could have found how many shuffles the game has in store, then maybe I would be more accepting of it, but as it is, it is in the cards.
Pyramid Solitaire bears a similar premise of removing cards from a structure, but players must pair cards that sum to thirteen. One study from 2020 gathered that Pyramid Solitaire has the same playability as Candy Crush Saga and other casual mobile games (Reguera 4), which is vaguely incredible but simultaneously proves that fun can be unearthed from yet another variety of Solitaire. Both TriPeaks and Pyramid purportedly improve decision-making skills and promote self-reflection which soothes the mind (Flynn). I find this to be plausible as I have already shown that Klondike is meditative, so why should TriPeaks and Pyramid contradict their fates? This would apply to Golf Solitaire, which is a relative of TriPeaks.
Likewise, Spider Solitaire is a denomination of the game in which the player must remove thirteen sequential cards of the same suit from the arrangement of 44 cards in ten columns at the top of the table. If you thought that there were a lot of shuffles for Klondike, then you will be dumbfounded by the fact that since Spider uses two decks of cards rather than a measly one, there are 104 factorial shuffles for Spider (Weisser 6). For illustration purposes, 104 factorial is 10,299,016,745,145,627,623,848,583,864,765,044,283,053,772,454,999,072,182,325,491,776,887,871,732,475,287,174,542,709,871,683,888,003,235,965,704,141,638,377,695,179,741,979,175,588,724,736,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and 52 factorial represents a mere 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000078316384143138293031819730987234954264487668176890023812769684968405476288252853250706701810708066810344175899858351031823778251104496649660220675194851753559913713254155493682631166395769433352569081% or one untrigintillionth of that amount. However, the unique game count may be the saving grace for the reputation of Klondike, as Spider is only endowed with 5,514,180,903,482,211,467,538,291,522,642,741,965,015,878,244,315,448,415,496,993,306,907,520,164,211,208,678,433,367,297,130,944,810,652,756,716,514,104,265,932,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 unique games, which is only 0.000000000000000000053540848023975527605306311154071195625964506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506172839506173% of the possible shuffles (Weisser 9). Therefore, it is immensely more difficult to find the universal winning percentage for Spider than it is for Klondike. An educated guess is that more than 99.9% of Spider shuffles are winnable (Weisser 85) although this seems very much like a stretch to me. The web ensnares the player yet again on the quest to find this elusive ratio. Considering the gigantic scope of the mathematics inherent for Spider, I will decree that most benefits of Klondike can be registered to Spider as well, save for perhaps its ease of gameplay. Spider is crawling all over the Google Play Store and presumably the Apple App Store too.
FreeCell thrives on probability. In this game, invented by Paul Alfille in 1978 as a purely educational Solitaire game (Baker 407), players stack descending cards of alternating colors from eight columns. This sounds similar to Spider, but in FreeCell, the player must move one card at a time and not an entire chronological stack. Also, players of FreeCell can reserve up to four cards for later. It takes strategy and logic and makes students ponder how the difficulty is measured as they progress through the levels (Baker 406). FreeCell teaches students about probability and the scientific method; in Baker’s class, students figured out how to select fair random samples from a set and hypothesize how the average winning percentages along the pathway of the game correlate to difficulty level (Baker 406). The trick with FreeCell is that there are predetermined shuffles at each of the thousands of levels (Baker 407), so there is no need to calculate a universal winning percentage. FreeCell drops the player into their own personal mathematical problem; what is their personal winning percentage? Can they win one hundred percent of the levels with enough due diligence, and if not, is their average superior to that of their friends? Does it really get more challenging as the game number increases? FreeCell gamifies Solitaire to the highest degree and makes transparent the marvel of statistics. A player can turn to Klondike and retain that mindset in order to maximize the windfall, to see the sparks that have been snuffed all along in the quintessentially conventional Solitaire. Baker’s students, and FreeCell players in general, are mathematician interns realizing that they have the power to synthesize their questions and counterexamples into a theorem and prove it for themselves eventually (Baker 408).
While I cannot figure out a surefire way to conclude which variety is most popular, I can confidently say that Spider is less prevalent than TriPeaks and Klondike, both of which are fairly equally represented in the mobile gaming market. TriPeaks secures an edge because Klondike has fallen victim to abuse by psychopathic advertisers shilling scammy Solitaire clones. TriPeaks is highly advertised and is more intuitive than its complementary Klondike. In the end, as much as it hurts to say, TriPeaks is the winner. But this begs the question of why Solitaire, a card game, is still relevant to the youth of today who are inundated with new technological advancements every day and care more about Fortnite than FreeCell, although they are more related than the children realize.
In the mid-2000s, video games became more cinematic with releases like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Halo, anticipating narrative mobile games interspersed with Solitaire (Vedrashko 29). Even casual personal computer games of the period, such as Mirror Magic Deluxe, harmonized a narrative plot with a hidden differences puzzle (Saltzman 16). Solitaire is still relevant today because any kind of game, even one as ubiquitous as Klondike, introduces a sentiment of significance, whether one believes that either the game of Solitaire or the game of life itself lacks meaning, per philosopher Bernard Suits (Yorke 19). Either way, Suits believed that most people view life as an activity “demanding of sacrifice” and games are the way to fulfill this paradoxically monotonous summary because without games with which one can improve, life is essentially meaningless (Yorke 19-20). Suits defined gameplay as an activity during which we voluntarily “attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (Yorke 43); if one cannot piece together an inherent meaning in life, then games and play in general provide a means of control over life’s events. One may infer that life is a game of chance, like Solitaire, and by playing Solitaire, one is imitating life. Crawford would second this, citing that gameplay correlates with healthy subconscious brain development in mammals and birds (Crawford). Gameplay did not solely grow our brains; it sowed the seeds.
Solitaire is malleable due to its quaint simplicity, so it is no wonder why there have been a slew of interpretations. This demur provides more meaning to life with bonuses and prizes, as they do not evoke ennui; these apps encourage “the exercise of meaningful player agency” (Yorke 156). In Suits’ utopian world wherein gameplay is literally the life force of his citizens, games of pure chance or skill are both considered to be boring because any agency is lost when everybody has their entire lives to study strategies to prevent ennui, even for complex games such as chess (Yorke 156-157). Practically the only difference between the palpable and digitized Solitaire is the element of time constraint (Bishop 8). Is it possible, though, that in this utopia citizens would unearth the winning probability of Klondike, or would they die of literal boredom before they can do so? The electrodes in the smartphone computer chip are utopian citizens because they contribute to a world of infinite gameplay study, so the unknown overall winning percentage problem should be a field day for them. That determining a solution would exhaust even our most advanced supercomputer technology is a testament to the status of Klondike as a sublime cultural force. It will always present quandaries to humans; in our current state of puzzlement over this solution, the game is an enigma, yet in a future state in which we have known the solution for years or decades, developers will finally be able to design a level for each individual deck shuffle.
Klondike is less insipid when its player masters flow; in this zone of proximal development, the player creates quicker synaptic connections and concentrates on the hunt for their desired outcome (Van Eck 36). The flow indebted to concentration pairs with the ephemeral recognition and familiarity of Klondike that stews in a back burner of the brain (Herz). For now, as stated by Crawford, charting out each viable solution is the goal (Crawford). Indeed, the activity of cracking this code generates the positivity discussed by Albarrán-Torres moments ago; since Solitaire, the game and its NP-complete conundrum, is a “closed system in which the player knows there’s a solution,” it “promotes persistence, perseverance, and motivation, which in turn promote self-efficacy and autonomy” (Van Eck 39). Without the crux of bringing all of the cards to the foundation piles given any of the 52 factorial shuffles, the player would have more fun shuffling the deck and slipping it into its box (Van Eck 37). The “uncertainty through randomness rather than complexity” enhances its playability (Bishop 9-10).
However, the developers of mobile game apps based on or around Solitaire are substantially engrossed by the gross profit that they receive from downloads. In 2022, the mobile game market was worth $92.2 billion USD within only half of the entire global online game market; they exploit the eminence of bonus points and rewards by charging players for the most covetable ones via microtransactions (Picht). They know how intoxicating these goodies are, so they bait it to a hook in free waters and pull the player into more expensive depths (Picht). Desktop casual games from the mid-2000s foreshadowed microtransactions because the free downloadable software cost $20 after the first hour, so this is not a recent advancement (Saltzman 16).
Social games such as those provided by these Solitaire apps and games like Candy Crush Saga and the infinite varieties of match-three apps remain popular because of the feedback “loop of desire” that they produce in users with their “reward and punishment features” (Albarrán-Torres 217) including point systems, currencies, accessories, and powerups. Klondike apps which reward positive player behaviors can in turn cause players to carry that positivity outside of the context of the game (Yorke 196). However, mobile game app developers depend on those infamous riotous ads to summarize the emotional beats of the game posthaste and negativity is more palatable for consumers (Picht). Toxic aggression is a standard expectation for online gaming communities, especially for competitive games such as League of Legends (Chen 28-29), Call of Duty, Rocket League, and Mario Kart during which players may bottle their anger until they rage quit or take it out on fellow teammates, so it is a reasonable marketing strategy for a perverse reason.
Nevermind— I cannot in good faith let Klondike fall to TriPeaks. I have charted 18 apps strictly dedicated to Klondike at minimum. The first nine are minimal apps; the second nine have the extra bling of rewards, animals, carnival games, and more galore. The point is to determine whether these frills make Klondike any more digestible to the modern youth.
I am aware that I cannot dismiss the threat of bots assigned to spam positive ratings onto otherwise mediocre apps to raise their SEO on Google Play or the App Store. However, there is no way for me to know which ratings are fibbed; as a result, I assume for the sake of this experiment that all of these ratings are fair and accurate. The reviews of one star or less are conceivably from disgruntled reviewers complaining about the false advertising rather than spam bots. By far more people downloaded the standard games than the more festive ones because they were looking for a game to keep their minds occupied. It may also be due to the wide assortment of entertaining Solitaire options; the votes spread thin. I interpret that the most successful standard Klondike app in the Google Play store is the one from Brainium Studios. With ten million downloads, it has a fairly positive overall rating. As for the flashier games, that honor goes to the oceanic Me2Zen app.
Comparing those two, the winner is… both of them! In accordance with Crawford, it is because they are balanced. Artificial intelligence was nowhere near ChatGPT levels when Chris Crawford published his groundbreaking book about computer design in 1982, but computer scientists had been forging forward with the mechanical equivalent of artificial intelligence since the 1950s (Jones 3). Crawford mentions that individually curated “artificial smarts” algorithms for each game can mince the computer’s intelligence level to match that of an average adult human being. Usually these ads show the character in a dangerous situation requiring the user’s help, coercing them into a demo of the game and hoping that they will accidentally tap in the wrong spot to open the website. They fish for impressions and controversy to gain discussion if not clicks or downloads. The obstacles are typically puzzles solved by pulling pins, advancing through a course, rebuilding a house, or resolving a relationship struggle. Even though these are predominantly situations which do not actually appear in the downloaded game, they are commandeered by artificial intelligence algorithms.
As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, the program presents the player with narrative scenarios founded on choice selections with multiple endings that can potentially obscure the desired outcome for the character in question. Effort is inversely proportional to pacing and keen developers conciliate these factors to produce an attractive game (Crawford). Crawford added that the computer should be reasonably unpredictable in its movements, actions, and decisions. These ads may contain any number of storylines ranging from trite puzzles to bizarre hostage situations, so they are effectively games of expectation. The game’s unpredictability may come with the arrangement of cards in the Solitaire rounds or the range of narrative choices bestowed upon the player. This taps into Crawford’s idea that the resources utilized by the computer, as one may never know what shuffle will come next or if there will be a plot twist coupled with different narrative choices. Crawford’s final balancing measure for one-player games is pacing. The games that I have researched are leisurely despite the frenetic advertising. Keen developers must scrutinize the inversely proportional factors of pacing and cognitive effort in order to keep the game enthralling. The mental exercise for players unfamiliar with the machinations of Klondike and its umpteen iterations is vigorous at first, but then the sprint calms to a walk after a while. For these apps, interest is prolonged for the duration of the gameplay because the mystery needs resolution, or the house needs to be completed.
Recreational interest may be repurposed for an instructive setting as narrative games share the textual symmetry of books and the intellect of interpreting them (Shelton 111). In agreement with Van Eck, narrative mobile apps for Solitaire, akin to their minimalist counterpart, promote “problem solving, spatial reasoning, and increased confidence” (Shelton 112). These apps, despite their arguably monotonous affairs, do count as educational media in the end. I wish that I could say that the marketing department had intended that implication with their eccentric ads, but they are only in it for the money. Advertisement campaigns should ideally upgrade to stick with the times (Danesi 209), and when they were students, employees of the marketing department reviewed their ROI spreadsheets alongside their three Rs (Picht). They cannot afford celebrity endorsements, so mobile game developers resort to serving dubious swill to the primal hippocampi of their demographic (Picht). I got a new Samsung smartphone and what else but Solitaire: Grand Harvest was predownloaded? Needless to say, I deleted it immediately.
Consumers can stop contributing to the marketing madness by simply not downloading invasive apps and paying the masterminds to scatter more controversial ads, but the modern endemic of distraction has already corrupted human dignity and critical thinking skills according to Bill Gates after his Minesweeper disaster in the 1990s (Garreau). The connection of video games to education cannot be taken for granted though, because this can lead into another treacherous situation for adult casual gamers whereby they can get swindled into downloading brain training apps because they make bold claims about their efficacy (McMillan 255). Children are not the only victims of the marketing department. Once they download one Solitaire clone or cognitive app, more spurious ads appear and rope them into a subscription to the marketing scheme (McMillan 398).
Once the cringy apps are downloaded, most turn out to be glorified novels. Interactive fiction is befitting for keeping the player interested in the game because it lets them choose dialogue options. The plot may retain their attention or it may make them doze off, but whatever happens, they will be learning something along the way. Interactive fiction has proven itself as a practical medium for teaching students a language when the stories are followed by discussion and narrative analysis; the narratives teach students the second-person perspective, a rare point of view in standard paperback literature that immerses the reader into the story (Bazinet 116). While Bazinet defines interactive fiction as “a genre of literature that is text-based and lacks images” (Bazinet 147), apps such as Piper’s Pet Cafe and Solitaire Crime Stories are equivalent to narrated picture books which still prioritize text over imagery. If I take away one benefit of downloading Solitaire apps from a fishy ad, it is that I may potentially read a story and play Solitaire between chapters of exposition. However, Bazinet clarifies that the humorous elements in his selection “Lost Pig” act as a silly gateway into reading lengthier novels (Bazinet 147). The narratives allowed for an active education rather than a passive one typically gleaned from reading print literature with no narrations or interactive elements, as students were required to input answers that were spelt correctly and that were grammatically correct to amass progress in the narrative (Bazinet 215). Students learned about setting, pace, imagery, foreshadowing, and other literary elements (Bazinet 163); the same may perhaps be said for the Solitaire clones.
The apps boast a visual element which was not found in the interactive narratives in Bazinet’s classroom; the visual cues aid agency, and this means that when the player sees everything that they are controlling and the consequences of their actions, they feel more engrossed in the story (Bazinet 165). In Klondike, the factors of conflict resolution and visual aides are present, thereby mirroring a narrative. Since the similarities between Solitaire and narratives have been illuminated, I may add that Candy Crush Saga is on the same level of engagement as is standalone Klondike since within Bazinet’s interactive fiction lesson, students defeated any urges to cheat because they were set on making it through the story (Bazinet 170). This conforms to the conviction of players wanting to play clean through the entirety of the game when they associate themselves within the larger gaming community with “shared values” (Harrington 97). They compared the narratives to texting and not smartphone games, but I believe that that connection will surface soon enough, because they also familiarized themselves with The McDonalds Videogame and recognized that commercials can be games too, just like the ads from the marketing department (Bazinet 242). Pesky branding.
Social Implications
The language learning students in Bazinet’s class independently attempted to decipher the “puzzle” of each narrative without using the supplied guides rather than corroborating on the project (Bazinet 148); this coincides with the apps being meant for only a single player rather than a group. Despite the probability of multiplayer games to entice unsocial behaviors, games for a single player, such as Candy Crush Saga, can embed social networking so that friends can “give each other extra lives or share bonuses with each other that make gameplay easier” and accrue social capital (Leaver 80-81). In a 2020 study conducted by Sebastian Selvarajan and colleagues, Klondike was the control in an experiment to determine the social effects of certain games. This study contradicted previous ones, including that 2014 metaanalysis, which had concluded that video games wherein a player competes against others had a negative social consequence on players, meaning that they did not help one another and exhibited other unaffable behaviors (Selvarajan 64). The 2020 study demonstrated that players still have the potential to be courteous to one another in competitive or collaborative settings (Selvarajan 64). This synergy needs to be handled with care so as to avoid toxic friction (Depping 78).
Interactive fiction introduces players to the “modalities of doing” which characterize the modern multidimensional multiplayer gaming experience hosted from a single account (Bazinet 154). Massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs) wherein players engage with “a thoroughly literate space of icons, symbols, gestures, action, pictorial representations, and text” are also educating them subconsciously (Steinkhueler 186-187). They empathize with interactive fiction games to form a principle of literacy in action in congruence with the definition proposed by the New London Group in 1996 which emphasizes meaningful “sense-making within a rich, multimodal semiotic system” (Steinkuehler 185). However, based on a utilitarian definition of literacy penned by the National Institute for Literacy (Steinkuehler 182), MMORPGs have players participate in multiple chat rooms and update teammates on different topics in short form language (Steinkuehler 188). While this latter definition is also satisfactory for the literacy threaded into MMORPGs, the interactive fiction of the selected mobile apps are not advanced enough for anything but the London definition. Regardless, they still make the grade— and maybe raise grades too.
Multiplayer games were always as prevalent as they are nowadays due to the strength spectrum of opponents (Bishop 84-85), but as recently as 2015, single-player games began to add in multiplayer networking capabilities in a world of burgeoning interactivity over the Internet (Jenkins 29). Some of Bazinet’s students were shy and preferred interactive fiction games as a substitute for overwhelming oral communication (Bazinet 157-158). Those same students can play a game like Call of Duty, in which the single-player mode was perceived by contemporary players as merely “an introduction to the main attraction of the game,” the multiplayer levels (Jenkins 43), and ease their way into social circles. They will find that there are still generous individuals willing to help others in an instance of “situated learning” which extends the lessons beyond the games (Iacovides 36). Narratives are found in most modern games, not just within the covers of interactive fiction, and players revere games with an escapist narrative that subsumes character development (Iacovides 98).
Klondike, based on my understanding of Crawford’s criteria, is a fairly balanced game. We have the computer generating random shuffles, the unpredictability of success aided by the illusion of winnability, the endless resources defined as buried cards and challenging decks, and pacing judged by a timer (Crawford). Errors are almost always produced by the player via missing an opportune move or redoing a turn (Crawford); just as with interactive narratives when a player can get trapped on their way to a goal, Solitaire clones with interactive narratives make the player dodge inopportune scenarios using a selection of commands (Bazinet 159). Klondike exemplifies the semiotic concept of binary opposition which defines how humanity defines their world: by defining things comparatively as that which they are not (Danesi 45-46). The idea that Klondike may have originated from fortune telling relates the game to other “philosophical, religious, and narrative systems across the world” such as self versus other, existence versus nothingness, and sacred versus profane (Danesi 45). In conjunction with Suits’ theory of player agency and the hunt for significance in a boring life of utopian gameplay, I will infer that Klondike unearths the meaning of the self against that of the other; this is a solitary game, a meditative exercise during which the player may reflect on their mental or physical status. One journalist compared the game to screensavers as a deeply relaxing “mental sedative” (Herz). The addition of positive reinforcement brought about by a reward system makes the game more enchanting, but the game itself introduces solitude to a rarely quiet existence.
The narratives of these apps do supplement players a chance to combat the perennial “struggle of righteousness and good against the forces of ugliness and evil,” the mythical game of humanity (Danesi 133). In Solitaire Home Design, at least as per the advertisement, you are tasked with either helping or harming Lori with her house. In Ava’s Manor, you supervise Ava as she investigates the disappearance of her great uncle Marvin, and in Piper’s Pet Cafe, you help Piper renovate the pet cafe using your Solitaire outcome as a means of deciding her fate. Even in Klondike with standard playing cards and no timer, you must choose every move carefully or risk the game. While the narratives are intriguing, the apps are mostly founded upon reading dialogue bubbles and selecting choices.
Solitaire is also a gateway game to other single-player experiences which are equally balanced and may boast more entertainment value. I am not simply referring to the apps which were previously examined; the merit of single-player games in general bolsters the representative status of Solitaire. When computer games first flashed onto screens, Klondike was viewed as an “anti-social” enterprise because of the computer’s “single-user orientation” (Crawford). Before the era of open world MMORPGs, clunky joysticks and paddles allowed two players to battle one another or team up against the enemy. Conversely, when MMORPGs stepped to the plate, they launched an open-ended world ironically guided by rules, albeit haphazard ones, that kept elementary schooler players in line; even on a map with hundreds of pinpoints and thousands of pathways, there was still a semblance of decorum to be had (Van Eck 35-36). The vastness of Klondike is not found in its prefabricated setup and rules, but rather at the bottom of its iceberg where all of the possibilities are submerged for the worldwide community to dive into and explore. It can be proclaimed that Klondike is philosophically not a single-player game at all because the player battles the designer (Harrington 44).
The difficulty settings of single-player games, including those with supplementary multiplayer modes, can be manipulated to circumvent misguided behavior (Bishop 85). Players of digitized Klondike programs can select from multiple difficulties, including random, which is its own category of difficulty because now there is no expectation of ease or provocation and the player has to think on their feet— or fingers. I suppose that the player can have a third party prearrange the deck into an easy, medium, or hard difficulty based on my earlier suggestions, but who has the dedication for that, especially through multiple replays? The player cannot spoil it for themselves, so there is no effective way to scale difficulty for the real world Klondike game. Any version of Solitaire which features leaderboards allows players to represent themselves in a meaningful way as long as they use unique strategies (Yorke 105). Speedrunners meet in forums to discuss the newest strategies; whomever follows these new rules is not virtuous with their gaming personality, yet they extol whomever first discovered the shortcut or time snipping clip for their innovation. There may not be a ton of room for this within the confines of standardized Klondike, but these aforementioned apps have attempted to bring modern value to the ancient activity. I may argue that if one player herds more animals than does another in Solitaire Zoo, or earns more stickers in Fairway Solitaire Blast, then that superior player has displayed a characteristic which sets them apart from other players.
Klondike certainly has restrictions, but the exponential mystery sewn into its indeterminable outcomes evokes this sense of play in a contained space. Withdrawn behavior is a common symptom of smartphone addiction, but without this compulse, addicts would be biding their time in other superficial activities such as doodling or rhinotillexomania (Garreau). Luckily, there are venues for players who worry about their mental health declining from being lonely. Clan Wars is an example of an intrinsically single-player game with collaborative elements meant to “leverage the psychological mechanics that underlie the benefits of cooperation and interdependence” without producing a fully multiplayer game; individual contributions to raids are totalled into a clan metric, such as recruiting reinforcements (Depping 69). In FreeCell, players try to disprove that certain levels are impossible (Baker 409) since out of 52 factorial shuffles, as with Klondike, there are up to 17 vigintillion unique deals in FreeCell and 99.999% of the first one hundred million of those are winnable (Klaver 6-7). Ideally, they help rather than reprimand one another in the process.
Whether they treat this exercise like a game in itself is their prerogative, yet the purpose is to ascertain the goal of winning all of the levels, like collecting all of the gems or coins. It should not be a dilemma though, because the opposition of abstract mathematical intimidation, as a replacement of another human, pitted against the human mind constitutes “one of the most entertaining sources of uncertainty in existence” (Bishop 10-11). In any event, single-player gamers are typically positive thinkers but can be egotistical, not to be conflated with narcissism (Jenkins 63). If they are met with that scenario where friends crowd around to help them, they are inclined to be courteous and loyal to the group (Jenkins 94). However, more players means more randomness and chaos ensues, potentially leading into toxicity (Bishop 52). Proper teamwork invites the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom from the greater community that informs single players when they are finally back in their bedrooms again (Iacovides 188).
Conclusion
Does it really matter whether a Solitaire game is entertaining rather than simply satisfactory? Does it need fireworks and animals and blood to appease the masses? Probably not. Determine on your best judgment the overall winner of the battle between Solitaire apps packaged for folly rather than for study, but I believe that the mere existence of the game has transformed our idea of what a game can do, how it can make us behave, and how it can be further embellished for future generations of gamers. See what visions lie within the cards for you as you remark upon your newly discovered Solitaire knowledge. Educate your family and friends on why this game is a force to be reckoned with among the giants of the industry. Most importantly, remember that Solitaire is not solitary, but rather anticipating its next move.
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Appendix
Solitaire Home Design playthrough: Solitaire Home Design Playlist
Solitaire Home Design ads: Lori lives in Dream Island !
Solitaire Golden Prairies: Solitaire Golden Prairies (android gameplay)
Solitaire My Farm Friends: Solitaire - My Farm Friends (by Solitaire Aquarium) - classic offline card game for Android and iOS.
Solitaire Resort: Solitaire Resort - TriPeaks Solitaire Card Game (Gameplay Android)
Solitaire Dream Decor: TriPeaks Solitaire Dream Decor Mobile Game | Gameplay Android & Apk
Piper’s Pet Cafe: Piper's Pet Cafe: Solitaire Gameplay
Solitaire Clash: “Solitaire Clash - Tips and Tricks to WIN!”
Bitcoin Solitaire: Bitcoin Solitaire Gameplay 1 - Android - Gana Bitcoin jugando al solitario!
Ava’s Manor: Ava's Manor Playlist
Deck arrangement for best possible game:
Ace of Clubs
Ace of Spades
2 of Hearts
3 of Hearts
4 of Spades
6 of Clubs
7 of Diamonds
Ace of Hearts
2 of Clubs
3 of Clubs
4 of Hearts
5 of Diamonds
7 of Spades
Ace of Diamonds
2 of Diamonds
4 of Clubs
5 of Spades
7 of Hearts
2 of Spades
3 of Diamonds
5 of Hearts
7 of Clubs
3 of Spades
5 of Clubs
6 of Diamonds
4 of Diamonds
6 of Spades
6 of Hearts
*8 of Clubs (1)
8 of Hearts (1)
8 of Spades (1)
8 of Diamonds (2)
9 of Clubs (2)
9 of Hearts (2)
9 of Spades (3)
9 of Diamonds (3)
10 of Clubs (3)
10 of Hearts (4)
10 of Spades (4)
10 of Diamonds (4)
Jack of Clubs (5)
Jack of Hearts (5)
Jack of Spades (5)
Jack of Diamonds (6)
Queen of Clubs (6)
Queen of Hearts (6)
Queen of Spades (7)
Queen of Diamonds (7)
King of Clubs (7)
King of Hearts (8)
King of Spades (8)
King of Diamonds (8)
Deck arrangement for worst possible game:
King of Diamonds
2 of Hearts
3 of Diamonds
3 of Hearts
3 of Spades
3 of Clubs
7 of Clubs
King of Spades
4 of Diamonds
5 of Diamonds
6 of Diamonds
7 of Diamonds
7 of Spades
King of Hearts
4 of Hearts
5 of Hearts
6 of Hearts
7 of Hearts
King of Clubs
4 of Spades
5 of Spades
6 of Clubs
Jack of Diamonds
4 of Clubs
6 of Spades
Jack of Spades
5 of Clubs
Jack of Hearts
*8 of Diamonds (1)
10 of Diamonds (1)
9 of Diamonds (1)
8 of Spades (2)
10 of Spades (2)
9 of Spades (2)
8 of Clubs (3)
10 of Clubs (3)
9 of Clubs (3)
8 of Hearts (4)
10 of Hearts (4)
9 of Hearts (4)
Ace of Diamonds (5)
Queen of Diamonds (5)
2 of Diamonds (5)
Ace of Spades (6)
Queen of Spades (6)
2 of Spades (6)
Ace of Clubs (7)
Queen of Clubs (7)
2 of Clubs (7)
Ace of Hearts (8)
Queen of Hearts (8)
Jack of Hearts (8)