Posted by bob on March 8, 2000, at 19:00:08
In reply to Re: Hypnosis or the art of Solitaire, posted by Noa on March 7, 2000, at 18:52:10
Well, I might agree with you on the addiction vs. compulsion question for something like solitaire where (1) you do have those lovely, quickly changing patterns on the screen and (2) as someone (sorry, can't remember who) just mentioned, it tends to have the most strongly reinforcing pattern for rewarding your efforts.
But I don't play solitaire.
I tend to play strategy games that take days to finish at low levels of difficulty, so from the very start there is no doubt of the outcome ... world domination for me (bwa-ha-haaaaa). If something goes "wrong", I'll reload a saved game and play the situation over and over until it goes "right". I'll even play to the point of pain, and long past pain, from my RSIs, from slouching, from lack of sleep ... pain until my whole body is buzzing -- one of my personal forms of "cutting".
Even when I do play solitaire, random games like Klondike really don't interest me. My best example is the game Eight Off ... there is no layout of cards in that game that is unsolvable. I left my post in academe with more than 5000 consecutive wins, no losses, on my computer. Even if it took me 15 to 20 minutes to figure out the solution (my average time was close to 90 seconds), I could not begin a new game until I had solved the current one.
I do have a "cycle" of three games that give me that hypnotic buzz, and that usually takes 20 minutes of my time then I can walk away. In the other situations, there just was no walking away from it.
cheers,
bob
poster:bob
thread:25799
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000302/msgs/26391.html