THE MINESWEEPER MORAL PANIC

WHEN COMPUTERS CAME TO OFFICES, BOSSES FOUND A NEW WAY TO WORRY THAT WORKERS WERE WASTING TIME.

- KYLE ORLAND

OVER-THE-TOP VIOLENCE IN such video games as Mortal Kombat and Doom drew handwringing moral outrage from worrywart parents and government scolds throughout the ’90s. Minesweeper—in which players click around a rectangular grid of squares trying to avoid hidden mines, using logical rules to interpret numbers—seemed like it should be safe from controversy.

Yet somehow the game was central to a minor moral panic that formed around pre-installed computer games as Windows spread through offices in the ’90s. Together, Minesweeper and Solitaire were seen as an unwelcome office distraction at best and a dire threat to worker productivity at worst.

That fearful response didn’t start right away, as Minesweeper didn’t receive much critical attention during its initial release in 1990. Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card came closest to predicting the moral panic to come. In a 1991 Compute! magazine story, he called Minesweeper “the most diabolically addictive game I’ve seen lately.” He recommended the game only to Windows owners who had “enough iron self-control to get your real work done before you play.”

Themes of addiction and self-control would become common among writers exposed to Minesweeper in the years to come. Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, for instance, wrote in 2004 that she used Minesweeper as a replacement addiction when she was trying to quit smoking. (She went on to boast that she had “become rather good” and achieved a record of 101 seconds on the expert level.)

And among a certain segment of America’s leadership class, the conventional wisdom was that Minesweeper,