aditya kumar's weblog

Recently, at work, there was a chat around the PC games of the old days and one of my colleagues mentioned how she never came across understanding Minesweeper (back in the day when it used to come bundled with Windows). For her, the game was always about mindless clicking until a mine blew up.

I asked her what she meant because there were certainly rules to the game. Most people I know did not spend enough time to read through the rules of the game. So I was invited to a session at work to teach my team how the game works.

I am not going to write a tutorial on that, but while explaining this game to my team, it made me realise how incredibly difficult it was to explain the game to a beginner. Perhaps the biggest entry barrier to the game was the entrance itself. I found myself sharing screen and saying things like “This is the vicinity of this square, while this is the vicinity of that square” (Where both the square that could possibly house a mine and its vicinity were shaped as squares).

After I was done with the 10 minute monologue, the person who had organised the session said “I have no idea what you talked about”.

So I started all over again, this time, using screenshot of the game and drawing on it. I have played this game from the 90s and honestly, I had never imagined that describing this game was going to be such a complex task.

But it also makes me think about how some tasks that are muscle memory to us, are actually so difficult to describe in words. The finer aspects of the task are so much ingrained into us that however good we are with the tools of communication, be it words or the pacing of them, it is incredibly difficult to break that fabric (if you can think of it that), into threads and then weave that narrative together again.

As programmers, we get job-trained for this sort of a thing. Breaking down complex workflows into small manageable chunk of processes/functions are often the first step in designing a program. Despite all that, I found it incredibly difficult.

You could do this thought experiment too. Pick something you have a muscle memory for and try describing it to yourself, as if to a beginner.

And I can tell you, I was indeed good at this game.

Anyway, so, for the purpose of writing this blog, thanks to my bff who pushed me for it, I dug up old posts and emails where I had mentioned the game. I found this screenshot:

This is from 2007. That score of 20 seconds clearing an intermediate minesweeper was **close** to being in the top 10 of the unofficial records at that time. A glance on the other aspects of my late-night desktop reveals, among other things :

1. A complaint with the ISP for bad internet.
2. A CV that I was working on (I was looking for a job)
3. A chat with a friend, for some reason his chat copied and pasted on a text file.
4. My lifelong faithfulness to the Firefox browser.
5. Yahoo messenger, fun times.
6. My obsession with Windows Theming (I came to Windows only for games, as I must be using Ubuntu too then)

Coming back to it, Would I have done a better job in explaining the game back in 2007? Looking at the clarity of mind that I had then and if the clean windows desktop is anything to go by, I think yes.