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.

God himself could not sink this phone

So my Nexus 4 arrived and it’s beautiful. The screen is amazingly clear, and Android 4.3 is superfast. In terms of performance, updating from my Blackberry to this is like going from a shopping trolley to a fighter jet.

Speaking of Blackberry, take a look at this graph from the Wall Street Journal:

Sourced from http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/20/blackberrys-slump-in-4-charts/?mod=e2tw

So while all the Cal Hockleys of the smartphone world were paying people lots of money to take them to safety on an iPhone, I clung to my Blackberry and listened to the band as we slowly went down. Thankfully I was resourceful enough to find a boiler door (i.e. my Nexus) and everything worked out okay (except for that person who I was clinging to it with, who may or may not have been my true love and is now decomposing at the bottom of the ocean ... ).

Is it weird that I find Blackberry’s demise sad? I guess I had a vested interest in the company because I had my Curve for so long. I still think it was a good phone too, but age (and my parent’s toilet) got the better of it. Now Blackberry are kind of like that best friend you used to hang around with in Grade Four but haven’t spoken to for a while, and for me it’s as if I’ve just found out they have a terminal disease. What do I do? Wish them luck I suppose, and hope they don’t me ask for money.

So now I’m doing that thing where I’m finding any excuse to use my phone. Someone casually asks what time it is in London? LMGTFY. I’ve also sent a fair few messages that have low or zero relevance except that they’ve been an excuse for me to play around with the (very fun) Android swipe typing feature. If you know me, you probably suspect that you’ve gotten one of these messages in the last couple of days, but then again it’s probably hard to distinguish them from all the other unneccessary shit I send.

I admit the novelty of the new phone is slowly wearing off. Which is a good thing, because I’m still not quite sure how I feel about being so attached to it. But since I can actually talk to my phone and have it understand me I’m leaning towards classifying it as a sentient being and therefore a friend rather than an object. I’d be tempted to go so far as to claim it as a co-dependant relationship but it’s quite clear I need my Nexus much more than it needs me.

Yes I’m scared of becoming a Google fanboy; no I don’t want to talk about it

Two days ago I took the plunge and ordered a Google Nexus 4. If you know about the history of me and my Blackberry, or my penchant for keeping things until they are absolutely, embarrassingly unusable, then you’ll understand this is kind of a big deal.

Basically, my Blackberry is still ‘usable’ in the most literal sense of the word, but ever since I dropped it in my parent’s toilet (unsoiled, thankfully) using it has been even more of a labour of love than usual. Added to my general Blackberry woes of low (i.e. non-existent) compatibility and infinite loading screens was a trackball which steadfastly refused to do what I wanted it to. This is fine if you don’t use the trackball often, but back here in tactile user interface land you must understand that the trackball is the essence of the Blackberry Curve.

My trackball kind of works okay for the most part, but it has become incredibly sensitive; especially in the scroll up/down department (I don’t want to think about what’s causing it to malfunction since its Cousteau-esque adventure). This stops me from scrolling up and down message histories, meaning that I have to commit entire conversations to memory and then hope that my replies cover everything. Too bad if someone refers to a message they sent a couple of days ago, that baby is gone. In a Zen kind of way it’s somewhat refreshing to be constrained to the present, but in an actual day-to-day want to live successfully kind of way it’s shit.

As attached as I have been to my Blackberry, I’m excited about my new phone. I've been checking the order status hourly and telling anybody who'll listen about my purchase. My childish glee may say something about the attractiveness of Google products, because generally I try not to let material objects determine my emotions. This is clearly a lie if you read my Blackberry post, but in any case as someone who tries not to buy into new product bullshit I’m somewhat embarrassed about the daydreams my imminent new phone has induced. 

I’ve been imagining the endless range of apps and games I’ll be able to download, and how I’ll suddenly become infinitely more valuable to my friends, because while they’re all struggling to load an Apple maps page on their iPhone I’ll be whizzing around with the greatest of ease on Google maps (or, you know, something else that people do with smartphones. I wouldn't know). Even stupid stuff that I know I don’t care about—such as the Nexus always being the first phone to receive Android updates when they come out—has me pinching myself as if I’m in some sort of wonderful dream.

And this is all before the phone has even arrived. At the time of writing, the order status is still ‘Pending’*, so I technically haven’t even paid for it yet. Which leads to the real reason I’m worried. I’m not even a Nexus owner and already I feel like I’ve become a massive Google tool. I’m going to be that person at parties who starts talking about all the reasons their semi-obscure phone is vastly superior to everybody else’s and have all sorts of little stupid apps to prove it. I’m going to be that person in the supermarket using Google Goggles to take photos of all the products and then read other Google tools’ reviews of them. I’m going to inadvertently check the wrong box while browsing my Gmail account and sign away my power of attorney to Sergey Brin.

This is troubling because I’ve often been asked why I don’t own/want an iPhone. I usually mumble something about not wanting to be a mindless drone to a giant corporation. And then I go and buy a Nexus. I suck.

*It's probably frozen because they've discovered I use Hotmail.

Zen and the Art of HTML Coding

Part of the course I’m currently doing involves editing content for digital media, and a component of this has been to examine/experiment with some HTML and CSS coding.

I remember learning a bit about this as a kid. Dad showed me how to make a really basic web page and to jazz it up with some colour. It was fun because it was a bit like playing with Lego – you’ve got certain finite elements to use but you can combine them in pretty much infinite ways.

Don’t believe me? Check out the CSS Zen Garden. It shows how different designers can create hugely unique webpages with the same building blocks. It’s awe-inspiring to see how many different ways the elements can be combined. 

The idea that so many different designs can come out of one set of building blocks is appealing, for it mirrors nature. Think of snowflakes, or even human beings: all made up of the same basic elements but no two are exactly alike.

It’s not a coincidence that only recently I have come to find the ‘art’ of HTML quite profound. I’m currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which (among many other things) talks a lot about the inherent beauty of the structure of things, even seemingly ‘scientific’ things, and how art and science really aren’t as far removed from each other as some people like to pretend.* Good web design is an art form – a highly technical, specialised one, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less artistic.

I like the idea that creativity is an expression of each individual person, and this can be found through a Renaissance painting or a website. In every web page a small part of the web designer’s worldview is expressed.

With a basic understanding of HTML you can view the source code of sites and begin not to see just web pages constructed by strings of code but choices. Every page element has been deliberately placed and coded by somebody. There is a reason that a search box is placed where it is, and why it has a grey border instead of a pink one.

I’ve made an effort to be more mindful about encounters with art that I’m having every day. The Google homepage, from a design point of view, is a thing of beauty. Twitter’s ability to present so much information in such a clean format is elegant. The fact these sites just ‘work’ without us ever really thinking about it, is a credit to the designers and their ability to harness the craft of quality HTML coding.

*Apologies to Robert M Pirsig for distilling one idea from a quite complex book for my own purposes. And for stealing his title.