It's hard for me to estimate the percentage, but I think one can safely
say that most Freecell players out there don't know there's an entire
culture to it besides [Start] -> Programs -> Accesssories -> Games ->
Freecell. I believe not many people even try to search for "freecell" on
Google or on other search engines, which can easily lead them to
Freecell.org, the Freecell FAQ and other sites that summarize the online
Freecell culture.
I for instance, have been playing Freecell since I was required to install
Win32s on top of my Windows 3.11 installation in order to run Netscape. At
that time, I already became very good at Minesweeper[1] and Freecell
turned out to be much more challenging.
When I started using Linux on my home workstation, I discovered KDE and
GNOME, the two prominent desktops there, came with several solitaire
implementations that implemented Freecell. At this point I came up with
the idea of writing a program that will demonstrate if a scheme I came up
with for solving Freecell can work or not. I was so thrilled that the
program worked well for some games, that I prepared a small distribution
of it, made a basic homepage, named it Freecell Solver version 0.2 and
announced it on Freshmeat.
I think I stumbled across the Freecell FAQ, when I searched for "freecell
solver" or "freecell" on Google. As I released subsequent versions of
FCS, I was contacted by many Freecell enthusiasts, who became interested
in my program. Still, I became involved in the Freecell online community
and aware of the Freecell FAQ only about 2 or 3 years ago, and played it
for 7 or so years now.
Recently I was approached by the manager of the EE department Center for
Communications Technolgoies (whose office is right next to my workstation
in the computer networks laboratory) saying something like "So Shlomi, you
are a big Freecell expert...". I still don't know if he searched for
Freecell on Google and found Freecell Solver, or surfed to my homepage and
found Freecell Solver there.
There's a similar situation with other solitaires. Many people (at least
in Israel) think that Klondike is called Solitaire, and don't know there
are many other Solitaire variants besides it (and Freecell). That's
because Microsoft has very wisely named their Klondike implementation
(which dates back to Window 3.0) Solitaire.
Even in our time where more and more people (at least in the western
world) are connecting to the Internet, I don't know how to cajule a large
part of them to do the simple thing and search for Freecell on Google.
Internet Banners? Google Ad-words? I even once[2] contemplated that
mass-E-mail would be a perfectly legitimate way to promote it. Not that
I'm going to pursue this direction myself, because most people frown upon
mass-E-mail regardless of its content.
Of course all these solutions cost money and my financial resources are
very limited at the moment. Choosing between having 10 more users and
$1000 less dollars, and between gaining nothing and losing nothing, I'll
have to pick the other option.
Then, of course, there's word of mouth. But this can be a slow or fast
process.
What do you think?
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
[1] - Despite the fact that human players can easily master it,
Minesweeper solving is NP-Complete:
http://www.mat.bham.ac.uk/R.W.Kaye/minesw/minesw.htm
A minesweeper played on an infinite board is Turing Universal. ;-)
[2] -
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=12572&ixReplies=4
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish shlomif_at_vipe.technion.ac.il
Home Page:
http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.
Received on Thu Jan 02 2003 - 04:44:06 IST