Solitaire and other single-player games allow for focus and interruption, for the fluidity of life, for a moment of quiet mind in the middle of another durational task.
I grew up playing Solitaire, with my cards laid out next to my mother’s. In the evenings, we’d make popcorn and play cards. Throughout the day she had a game of Solitaire laid out on the kitchen table.
We lived in the countryside with one car, so my mother was essentially homebound. I developed a fascination with Solitaire well before it appeared on our gadgets my mother was a homemaker who for many years didn’t have a driver’s license. It’s a habit I developed as a student of culture and as a game designer. The key to Solitaire for me is a satisfactory sense of aloneness. Each time I walk up the aisle on a flight, or move down a subway car, the instinct to look for individual experience kicks in I check people’s screens and scan for how many people are playing some form of game. The links between aloneness, duration and stillness have been there since the beginning. Note that names for the game vary around the world, and in many parts of Europe the name of the game is Patience. Hundreds of variants of Solitaire exist, each with a curious name tied to a range of references from Athena to Napoleon. Game historian David Parlett has written that the classic Solitaire likely developed in the Baltic in the 18th century, possibly as a form of fortune telling, during a wave of renewed interest in tarot and cartomancy. And nowhere is the connection between games to a sense of slowness and mindfulness more apparent than in the game of Solitaire. This unusual and unusually popular game represents a marked shift in our definition of a game, and a return to individual experience - an introspective one at that.Īre games the new “mindfulness machines”? Actually, games always have had a relationship to mindfulness. It’s called “Walden,” and it’s a single-player game that depicts going into the woods to live alone à la Thoreau at its heart is the idea of solitude and deliberate living. Video games may have gotten really good, but a truly unusual game just won Game of the Year at the 13th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York.
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