Cheating for fun

It's been a long time since I sat down with a deck of cards and played solitaire. So used to the well-ordered clarity and immediacy of computer solitaire games have I become that I had almost completely forgotten about the many charms and "affordances" of a physical deck of actual playing cards. Aside from the sensuous tactility of the cards, their perfected flexibility and functional stiffness, the elegance and visual clarity of their design, the autonomic joys of shuffling and laying out a new game, there's the compelling opportunity to engage in what one might call "the inner-dialogue surrounding the pros and cons of," well, "cheating."

You can't really cheat at computerized solitaire. And it's a shame.

The almost lost art of cheating at solitaire, I rediscovered, can lead one to a self-exploration of the highest order and deepest discovery. So you're playing, say, Canfield, and you've dutifully gone through the "stock," three cards at a time, and have reached that soul-encountering point that accompanies the realization that you have lost the game. So you go through the stock one, nay, two more times, and everso clearly reached the point at which the only thing left to acknowledge is defeat.

You now have two choices: 1) admit defeat, shuffle, and start the game over, or 2) explore, just for the sheer educational value, what would happen if you, say, put the top card of the stock on the bottom. In fact, now that you think about it, there could be a veritable voyage of discovery awaiting you. You could investigate the impact of turning over every two cards instead of every three, or perhaps arbitrarily selecting a card from the middle of the deck and placing it on the bottom, or even contemplate adding a fifth column to the proverbial tableau. A panoply, a conceptual cornucopia of what one might call "alternative rules" if one had lost cognizance of the fact that: a) the game was already lost, and 2) one was in fact cheating.

Odd, though, now that we think of it, how much more there is to play with when cheating becomes an option.

Which brings me to the text of today's sermon - the text of which can be found in Chapter 4 of The Well-Played Game, pages 30-32, which is just now conveniently and freely available to you, my personal public, in this PDF file.

We found that there was a kind of cheating which — even though it can be considered unfair, even though it helps somebody win or keeps somebody from losing — was good, was right, which led us all to a game we could play well together.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith