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The most used piece of PC software in the world isn't Word, that blank slate on which countless novels, school projects, hot-takes and clipart collages have been tapped out across the years. It's not Excel, with its stretching and compressing cells, into which the world's companies daily deposit their vital statistics and forecasts. It's not even Steam, the portal that leads to millions of other virtual universes. It is, according to a Microsoft employee, Solitaire, the card-clearing game of luck and watchfulness, which has filled the gaps in many an office worker's schedule since its Windows 3.0 debut in 1990. According to a 1994 Washington Post article, Microsoft executives hoped Windows Solitaire would teach PC users mouse fluency and, moreover, "soothe people intimidated by the operating system." Intimidation, it turned out, had little do to with it.
Alongside Minesweeper, that other ignoble time-waster which was, until recently, included in every fresh install of Microsoft's operating system, Solitaire (or at least those variations offered by the company; strictly the term refers to any game that can be played by one player, the antonym, if you will, to 'multiplayer') is probably the most widely played PC game of the past twenty-five years. And yet, despite its persistence - this is, after all, a game Napoléon Bonaparte was reported to have enjoyed during his exile at St. Helena in 1816 - Solitaire is seen as a base distraction.
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