Solitaire

Have you noticed that kibitzers of a solitaire game seem as engrossed as the player? As my officemate noted, suggestions from the crowd are unwelcome, so the kibitzer isn't really interacting. Perhaps a second-order kind of interaction; interaction by proxy?

There's a way to check. Create a computer solitaire game that plays itself while you watch. If it is popular, then just watching is good enough for involvement. If not, then you have to identify somehow with the player. I'm pretty sure some percentage of people who hear about it will just watch: as said officemate noted there are people who pay to watch other people play video games--there are channels devoted to this.

I thought about it for a few minutes and figured I could code and test the Klondike play logic in about a day (with variants for number of cards in a suit--use a Tarot deck, for example), but the graphics to go with it would be much more time-consuming. Maybe I could piggy-back on pysol and shorten the development time. Counting the downloads from sourceforge would be a proxy for measuring popularity. A web page with a java or javascript app would be better (count the connections and connection time), but I don't control my own server and I don't think it quite appropriate to host a game on the experiment's machines. One factor that's hard to control is publicity.

Too much work, too many uncertainties. Though I'd like to see people's reactions :-)