Here’s a question for you – how seriously should we write about casual games? This is maybe less a question of tone and more about narrative weight – that is, it makes sense to take your subject matter seriously, regardless of what it is, but there’s also a sense of proportion as to how important or unimportant it is within the grander scheme. We Are The Champions, for instance, is a 2020 documentary series on the indomitable human spirit told through the context of a series of weird competitions – frog jumping, dog dancing, hot pepper competitions, and of course, the ancient English tradition of rolling down a hill after a wheel of cheese. It’s funny, but never openly mocking. It’s not a bunch of silly sound effects or staged gotcha moments. It’s a relatively strait-laced documentary where the subject matter is just inherently a little goofy. Each episode comes with stakes – there are competitions with prizes and fame – but it’s all pretty inauspicious. You don’t get a lot of social prestige by announcing at work that you’re a competitive chili eater. These are weird competitions that people only really pursue out of sheer passion. There’s a real sense of kindness and humanity to the show, but also this sense of – hey, sometimes people get excited about things that don’t really matter, and that’s important too.

If we were to write about a casual game, then, we might shoot for something of the same sort of tone. We Are The Champions suggests that casual games can be inconsequential without being unimportant. You can write about a fluffy time-waster without resorting to puff journalism – and also without going in the other direction and wildly overstating the importance of your subject matter. Kyle Orland’s Minesweeper is a 2023 book from Boss Fight Books, a publisher of video game monographs that we discussed last week in the context of Shadow of the Colossus. As I mentioned then, each of the BFB titles takes a different critical approach to its subject matter: where titles like Knights of the Old Republic focus on a game’s development, Minesweeper is a history of the casual game mostly after its release. The game Minesweeper, for those who are unfamiliar, is a logic puzzle game released for Windows in the 90s. It came preinstalled on most machines as part of a games package alongside existing card games like Solitaire and Hearts, and it continues to be available in an updated form in Windows 11 today. It was ubiquitous but also sort of just a time-waster – to me it’s a precursor to things like the Sudoku craze in the 2000s. Inconsequential, but not unimportant. Kyle Orland’s book about Minesweeper I think struggles to tell its history in a balanced, proportionate way, which makes it a really useful case study for our broader question around tone and weight.

Let’s maybe start with a piece from the introduction as a case in point. The book opens with some facts and figures:

“The sheer reach of Minesweeper during its peak popularity is staggering, even by modern standards. Between April 1992 (when Microsoft first shipped the Windows 3.1 operating system) and August 2012 when it first shipped Windows 8, approximately 4.5 billion personal computers were sold worldwide, according to Gartner Research. Of those machines, conservative estimates suggest 90 percent (or just over 4 billion) came with a copy of Windows and, therefore, a copy of Minesweeper pre-installed. These statistics alone easily make Minesweeper one of the most widely distributed video games in history in terms of the sheer number of total playable copies.”

This early passage exemplifies what we might call the book’s ‘wow but not really’ rhetoric, where a seemingly amazing fantastical figure is quickly undermined by thinking about the facts. Minesweeper shipped billions of copies, but only because it came pre-installed for free on Microsoft computers, which were sold in the billions. It’s not really a reflection on the game – if anything it’s almost stolen valour. Orland immediately adds further qualifications of his own: “Yes, many of those physical machines were just replacements for defunct PCs … and sure, many of those billions of free copies sat ignored and unloved”. But “still,” he contends, “Minesweeper found plenty of dedicated players among the fast-growing cadre of 90s PC users.” Wow, but not really. Minesweeper doesn’t have a staggering reach, except by accident. Windows has a staggering reach, and Minesweeper benefits from it mostly by way of historical accident. It’s not any particular reflection on the game or its merits, or its cultural significance. We’re not talking about Word or Excel, which were genuinely transformative products in their own right. Minesweeper is an oddity. This hype language, this crown-taking claim of one of the most widely distributed games in history – it just doesn’t ring true. It might be true on a technicality, but I don’t think the game should be set alongside other games as if it’s functioning in any comparable sort of way. Orland makes a similar comment soon after when he notes that Minesweeper was “the 18th most popular PC program of any type in June 1998.” He argues “Any game that is still being played by nearly one in ten home PC users eight years after its initial release can rightly be considered a smashing success verging on a cultural touchstone.” That’s – really again just not a fair assessment. First, June 1998 is a very specific time point to reference for that claim. Orland has earlier given us a twenty year window, from 1992 to 2012. What’s so special about June 1998? Why are we pulling that month out of the woodwork? The specificity with no further context is a little suspicious. Second, being the eighteenth most popular program is – again, just not that impressive. I wasn’t aware there were eighteen PC programs in 1998. Third, and this is the big one, the comparison to other games just doesn’t feel legitimate for the genre and the time. Orland argues that “any” game still being played eight years after its release is a smashing success. That might be true in the context of modern single-player story-driven releases today, but is it a fair comparison for casual games from the Clinton administration? Back in August 2023 Kotaku published an article about Hogwarts Legacy, which had lost most of its player base within about six months of launch. Kotaku suggested it was due to poor game design over and above the natural drop-off for that type of game (which I can’t really comment on, not having played it), but at base, they recognise that it’s normal for modern games to lose their player base relatively quickly. “In an industry where multiple big releases can take place within in a month … there’s a natural ebb and flow for interest.” That wasn’t the case in 1992. There’s less coming out, less saturation, less of a turnover for video games – and again, we’re also talking about a free casual game that you play for five minutes. In that context, it feels misleading to reach for longevity as a significant factor. The cultural context just doesn’t line up. Wow, but not really.

In a sense what we’re talking about here is framing, which is maybe a slightly fiddly idea in the context of history writing. As we discussed with Shadow of the Colossus, history is a subjective venture. There’s no such thing as ‘just the facts’ – the facts still have to be framed. The point might not be immediately apparent with Orland’s work, which often seems a bit dry – it often seems like there’s not a lot of room for interpretation in some of the straightforward details of who said what and when they did it. But selection and placement are still deeply subjective operations. In a chapter on a very minor moral panic surrounding Minesweeper, Orland discusses various accounts of Minesweeper addiction, including from the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. Here’s how Orland introduces him:

“In 1997, for instance, conservative political pundit Charles Krauthammer took a break from writing about the ‘nanny state’ and the folly of devoting state resources to curing AIDS to spend a weekly column ‘coming forward in a spirit of public service and self-loathing to admit my own sad story. I was a Minesweeper addict.'”

Strictly speaking, that extract contains facts, but those facts are pulled out of a person’s life and set as shorthand for their broader character. It might be a matter of historical record that Krauthammer wrote about the nanny state and against AIDS research, but that’s not all he wrote about. He wrote for Time Magazine, where his article was published, for thirty-five years. There’s clearly a lot of material to choose from. Orland has pulled out two facts to sort of characterise Krauthammer, to give an impression of what the guy was like. But there are plenty of other facts out there. This is a Pulitzer-winning writer who lived for nearly seventy years and spent most of it writing. He was an accredited psychiatrist who helped create the DSM-III. There’s a whole heap of material to choose from. The process of selecting and presenting relevant facts – making the judgement about what’s relevant or not – is subjective, which is obviously not to say that it’s bad. It’s normal. Writing history is a subjective exercise, even when it seems like relatively straightforward he-said she-said. So I don’t accept the idea that Orland, in reporting the history of Minesweeper, is just telling us the facts. There are problems of framing and context that I think make the edges of his work curl.

Probably one of the more glaring examples is in the chapters on the speedrunning community that grew up around Minesweeper. Speedrunning, for those unfamiliar, is the process of playing a game very quickly, either by just being really good at the game or by exploiting glitches to skip entire sections. It’s a common and well-known part of the gaming community, with events like Games Done Quick (or GDQ) happening each year. There are also leaderboards and global records held by websites like speedrun.com, often with different criteria for different types of speedy play. It’s common to see 100% categories, where players are required to complete a game 100% (which might mean collecting all the collectibles in Mario, or that type of thing). Others might include glitchless, where players aren’t allowed to exploit glitches in the game, or the ubiquitous any%, where you just have to complete the game as fast as possible – with any percentage allowed. In essence, then, the Minesweeper speedrunning community back in 2000 had an internal conflict over an exploit discovered in the game. Some types of boards are easier to solve than others, for reasons that aren’t worth getting into, and an especially easy type of board was discovered to repeat around every 15,000 games. Some players were clicking ‘new game’ 15,000 times and then solving the easy board, which they’d practised. They got super fast times, and people who weren’t using this easy board (the ‘Dreamboard’) couldn’t keep up. To be competitive, you had to practise the Dreamboard. As you might expect, some people wanted to ban Dreamboard speedruns, while others thought it was a fine and legitimate way to speedrun the game. It’s not cheating, and it’s not even really a glitch: it’s just memorising one particular board pattern that comes up every 15,000 games. But it goes against the spirit of the game, people complained – anyway, look, it’s speedrunner drama. They ended up with a Minesweeper council or something – a congress, sorry, Winmine Congress – which achieved nothing and then most of them quit. Orland spends four chapters of his twelve chapter book recording this process. Four chapters of social media arguments and online debates about the spirit of Minesweeper – it’s good to have the history collected and archived, preserved, but I think we can also see that there’s not necessarily a super critical eye at play. Orland’s preference is to refrain from direct comment (something he acknowledges in his endnotes), so he lets these frankly histrionic statements from Minesweeper speed-runners pass by without remark: “‘In the end, the true reason for the demise of Congress was depression,’ Moore wrote on The Authoritative Minesweeper’s Wiki. ‘The innocence of Minesweeper had been lost and the beauty of Intermediate destroyed.'” Guys, it’s Minesweeper. Bring it down a notch.

Orland doesn’t really give us a lot of direct commentary on all this, but as noted, he spends a lot of time talking about speedrunning, and his decision not to comment is itself a type of comment. He obviously thinks the history is worth preserving, worth remembering and talking about, and he doesn’t seem to think these sorts of histrionics about the innocence of Minesweeper need much overt commentary. He doesn’t like to step in and says – you know, we can see they got a bit wound up about it all. It’s presented as po-faced journalistic reporting, just the facts, so-called, but offered without acknowledging that the observable facts are sort of silly. That silence comes to suggest a lack of perspective or balance. It would probably read better if it was a little more casual.