My name is Tom and I am an addict, a Vegas Solitaire addict. The mindless game resides on my MacBook Pro, my 'writing' computer, two clicks away from anything I'm working on at the time. I find my curser drifting toward the Launch Pad at the bottom of my screen when I'm puzzling over a phrase or paragraph. I tell myself that one game will help clear my mind so that I can proceed. I click the icon, then the one with the image of a spade ace, and soon I'm playing.
It is truly a mindless game - one card is turned at a time; a single pass through the deck and it's over. The entire game takes less than a minute to play and yields four to five percent wins. I have won 120 games. Feel free to do the math.
I will engage, saying to myself "Only three games, then back to work." When the third game is over it's "Just one more" until I've wasted an hour, or more. I tell myself I will not play another game until I've written 500 words, but when the words don't come easily, my mind drifts, like my cursor, to the game. Even as I write this, I'm telling myself that when I'm finished I'll play a couple of games as a reward. If I do, it will likely be more than a couple - unless I win, in which case I stop playing and close that session.
It's incredibly easy to get hooked on a computer game, on a social network site, on anything that involves a video/computer screen. I remember, many years ago, when I taught in IBM Education, we were trying to decide whether to use video lectures to reach more people. A video producer worked with us to set up a pilot program and one of the things he said stuck with me. He said, "Put something on a video screen and people will watch it." Look around you and you'll see what he meant: TV's in bars, homes where there's always a TV on in the background, smartphone screens, IPads, laptops, etc. Even on the street, if a store window has an active TV in it, people will stop for a bit to watch. Make the screen interactive and we're hooked.
The whole thing reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 in a way. Scary.
I will not play solitaire today.
i so get this. once, when Solitaire was new (but i was already old), i stayed up all damn night, on a weekday workday night, playing. [sigh]
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