Swept Off My Feet

It’s great when a brilliant person admits to doing something mundane because it makes you think you might be brilliant too. This was my thought process when J.K Rowling revealed she was an avid Minesweeper player. Aside from proving that she uses Windows (because only dark witches or wizards use The Operating System That Shall Not Be Named), Rowling’s confession confirmed that playing Minesweeper may not be a total waste of time but rather one of those absorbing activities (like gardening or showering) that allow the creative juices to flow unselfconsciously.

Unfortunately it turns out that as well as being a better writer than me, Rowling is also a superior Minesweeper player. Her best time for clearing the Expert level is 99 seconds. My personal best is solving the Beginner level in one second, thanks to that game-breaking glitch which pops up every once in a while and lets you win on the first click.

For what appears to be a simple game, Minesweeper has a convoluted history. Minesweeping games existed before the Windows version, and the first program that resembled Minesweeper as we know it was a 1983 game called ‘Mined-Out’. The game was written by Ian Andrew and designed for the ZX Spectrum, an early personal computer popular in the United Kingdom. The ZX Spectrum was a revolution in home computing at the time, featuring a colour screen and up to 48kb of RAM (for those keeping score, the computer I’m writing this post on has 4GB of RAM, or 9.5367 ⁷ times the amount of RAM of the Spectrum).

Screenshot from Mined-Out, an early minesweeping game written for the Spectrum ZX computer.
Image courtesy of www.minesweeper.info/wiki

Mined-Out featured aspects of gameplay that would be familiar to Windows Minesweeper players, such as a gridded playing field, numerical clues indicating the number of mines adjacent to your current location, and increasing difficulty levels. The game also included features which never made it to Microsoft’s iteration of the game, such as the bizarre ability to win bonus points for successfully rescuing ‘female worms’ from the dangerous minefield. I suppose I’ll leave it up to you to decide if this makes Mined-Out superior or inferior to the well-loved (but worm-free) Windows version.

Following Mined-Out were a number of similar games which expanded on the minesweeper concept, such as the fun sounding ‘Relentless Logic’ (1985), named from this melodramatic passage from the game’s introduction:

You have two tools at your disposal. One is a mine detector. It will tell you how many mines are hidden in squares surrounding you. You also have one of the most important attributes known to man ... RELENTLESS LOGIC.

The game’s premise is simple: you are a private in the US Marines who has inexplicably been given the critical task of delivering a message that will save the United States from oblivion. In order to deliver your message you must successfully negotiate a minefield. It’s a shame that Windows Minesweeper doesn’t provide a context for your dangerous (and seemingly never-ending) task, but I suppose there are only so many times a low ranking private can save the lives of 313 million citizens before the concept becomes tiresome.

Screenshot from Relentless Logic
Image courtesy of www.minesweeper.info/wiki

The Windows iteration of Minesweeper (a.k.a Winmine) was written in 1989 by Microsoft employees Robert Donner and Curt Johnson. Johnson had already written a rudimentary minefield game, and gave the source code of this program to Donner who had expressed interest in testing out Windows’ programming capabilities. In the early versions of the game, the mouse cursor was represented by a foot which became a bloody stump if the player clicked on a mine. The game was released as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack games suite in October 1990 (which, according to the packaging, is ‘the most fun you can have with Microsoft Windows!’). When Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in April 1992 Minesweeper (and Solitaire) were included with the operating system, and a global addiction was born.

No caption necessary.
Image courtesy of http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki

Fast forward to 2013 where I am now playing the newest version of Minesweeper included with Windows 7. I’m sad to say the latest iteration has lost some of the minimalistic charm of the earlier versions. The dull grey grid has been ditched and replaced with shaded coloured squares, and the default (and frankly terrifying, especially if you inadvertently left your volume up too loud) 8-bit bomb sound has been replaced by an OTT animation of the mines exploding. But the most grievous loss is the familiar smiley face overlord who would turn wide-eyed and open-mouthed every time a move was in the process of being made. Sadly, the proficient sweeper is now robbed of the thrill of watching old mate smiley face throw on a pair of chic sunglasses when the minefield is successfully swept. And we call this progress?

Windows 7 Minesweeper, sans the smiley face.

At this point you may or may not have questioned the inherent political incorrectness of a game involving land mines. The International Campaign to Ban Winmine was created by Sergio Chiodo in 1999, and the organisation cited that the game was offensive to landmine victims and those who risk their lives to clear real life minefields. In the latest versions of the game Microsoft enabled an option for sweepers to play on a field of daisies instead of land mines. The UN has also used Minesweeper inspired posters to alert people to the unknown number of active landmines around the world which claim 65 casualties every day. 

Tiptoeing through the tulips in Windows 7.

About the only thing that hasn’t changed in the latest version of Minesweeper is that I’m still rubbish at it, and it took me several (i.e. twenty five) attempts to win a game on Beginner level. It’s a game that requires patience, attention to detail, the ability to recognise patterns, and a grasp of basic number logic. I am terrible at all of these things. My current win percentage is 8%. My main strategy—a term which I use liberally—is to click around the board at random until I either step on a mine or uncover enough squares to make the game appear winnable. At this point I apply some rudimentary logic and flag about half the mines before becoming stuck/bored and clicking at random again.

Never underestimate the power of the internet to bring people with similar interests—no matter how seemingly niche—together. For most people, Minesweeper is a brief respite from the drudgery of day-to-day existence, and the packaging of the original Microsoft Entertainment Pack reflects a game built for casual play: ‘No more boring coffee breaks! Frustrated when your calls are put on hold? Minesweeper will keep you entertained.’ But for some, Minesweeper is serious business. A small but passionate community of Minesweeper players gather together on the Authoritative Minesweeper website, and the site’s collection of high scores, rules and in-depth discussion of what on the surface appears to be such a basic game is indeed authoritative to the point of obsession. The site also includes a wiki which is surprisingly detailed and includes invaluable tips, most of which proved my suspicions that there are indeed proper ways to be a good Minesweeper player and ‘clicking randomly’ is not one of them.

Due to my penchant for being fascinated by highly passionate/obsessive people—a penchant positively correlated to the apparent unimportance of the passion/obsession in question—I spent a lot of time reading through the Authoritative Minesweeper forum. The community has coined a variety of Minesweeper related words and concepts such as ‘chording’, a playing technique using both mouse buttons which increases speed; ‘3BV’, an abbreviation which relates to the number of left clicks required to clear a given Minesweeper board; and ‘Elmar Syndrome’, when a player equals their personal best time many times without breaking it—so called after German player Elmar Zimmermann who was stuck on his own personal best time for 13 months before finally breaking it.

On the forums you’ll find people discussing many things to do with the game, but like any group of competitors, the primary discussions revolve around skill improvement. The best players sweep at an alarmingly rapid rate, so much so that at first I was suspicious that the high score videos posted were fake. After reading pages of tips and strategy on the forum, as well as estimations of time spent playing the game daily (upwards of four hours in some cases) I could only conclude that these players are indeed that good (as shown in the video below).

On the forums, advice is given (whether asked for or not) on how to improve sweeping times, including these tips from user EWQ Minesweeper, who suggests ‘lubricating your mouse to reduce friction [seems sensible], increasing screen resolution to see more squares at once [ditto], using a flatter mouse to reduce air drag [um…], sitting closer to the screen to see squares sooner [hang on…], and using a shorter mouse cable for faster clicking’ [I’m pretty sure physics doesn’t work like that].

The community takes competitive play extremely seriously. As with any competitive pursuit where personal prestige and records are involved, cheating occurs. Those accused of cheating will be asked to provide further evidence of their sweeping skills, and anybody caught bending the rules will usually be shamed out of the community. Common cheating tactics include using Photoshop to doctor screenshots of record scores or using ‘solver’ computer programs. Suspected cheaters’ videos are scrutinised heavily by other players; one cheater was only caught years after the fact when another player was watching the record video ‘for fun’ and noticed an inconsistency in the playing board numbers. Other cheaters will go to great lengths to make their cheated scores seem legitimate, meaning that they may spend months posting fake times before claiming a new record.

To combat cheating and to regulate the playing field so that record times could be comparable, in 2002 a group of players established The Winmine Congress. Consisting of an elected group of hard-core sweepers who corresponded via email, the Congress attempted to provide a governing body for competitive Minesweeper players. The Congress followed a surprisingly familiar political trajectory and was accused of lacking transparency by other community members. It was eventually superseded by the establishment of the International Minesweeper Committee in 2005. The IMC has banned the use of Microsoft Minesweeper from being used for official rankings because the game has several bugs and known issues which drastically increase the potential for players to gain an unfair advantage. The total actions of Congress and the IMC remain vastly outside the level of detail I wish to cover in this piece (and probably a level of detail that few people will ever require), but if you’re curious, webmaster Damien Moore has gone to great lengths to preserve its history and detailed accounts of the groups’ actions can be found over at the Minesweeper wiki page.

Minesweeper adheres to Bushnell’s Theorem (coined by Nolan Bushnell, whose diverse resume includes being the founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese) which states that good games should be easy to learn but difficult to master. Anybody with basic numeracy skills can understand the rules of Minesweeper very quickly, but the difficulty increases when the size of the playing grid increases. This allows players to scale their own difficulty levels and to keep challenging themselves as they become more proficient.

Furthermore, Minesweeper is an ego-destroying, soul-challenging, mind-numbing one player game. There’s undoubtedly something uniquely satisfying about competing against your own inescapable flesh, especially when you’re so bad that the only person you would remotely have a chance of beating is your own losing self. Even if you’re not quite at the level of investing in the most streamlined computer mouse, Minesweeper is compulsively addictive. A big reason for this has to do with the game’s simplicity and minimalism. The real challenge of Minesweeper lies not in finding mines, but rather in finding a way to force yourself to stop.

Many thanks go to Damien Moore et al. over at http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/ who are responsible for the wonderfully detailed record keeping which formed the basis for my research for this post.