Remember teaching PCs back in 1998 or 1999 and realizing that Microsoft hearts or soltaire was an excellent way to teach retired people to use the mouse.<p>The games were familiar and fun helped them stop clutching the mouse like it was, -I don't know, something that was trying to escape.<p>Didn't know until now that it was purpose-built for teaching.
> the Microsoft version Minesweeper was introduced to Windows 3.1—not to demonstrate that Windows was an adept gaming operating system, but to make the idea of left and right clicking second nature for Windows users<p>It took me all the way to Windows XP to learn that you can right-click in minesweeper. I showed it to a friend, and he told me that doing that was cheating. No one in my family knew about it either.<p>So my take is that they could have made the concept clearer.
I know a handful of competative gamers, some of whom who would use Minsweeper to 'warm up' before LANs to get their eye in, and keep their mousing muscles loose between matches.
Moms everywhere love these. When I moved my mom to Linux, I threw gnome-games on there. A week later, she calls and says she had no idea there were that many varieties of solitare.