[Newspoetry] Minesweeper

[DL Emerick]

Minesweeper

A nice game keeps you alert.
I've played it countless times.

The Expert board is 30 by 16,
with 99 bombs hidden in there,
you click on a unknown cell,
if a bomb is there, it blows,
and the game is soon over.

A clock counts off seconds,
you play against time,
seeking to beat the fastest,
my best clocks in at 144,
but usually when I win,
I clock in near 200.

There's no win-loss counter,
and almost no one cares.

When you start a game,
everything is chance --
there's no best opening move,
as far as I have found.

If you're lucky,
you get a break,
because the game exposes
neighboring empty cells
if you step on an empty one.

The third type of cell
is an informative one,
telling you the count
of neighbor cells with bombs.

After you play awhile,
you begin to recall patterns
of informative cells,
such as 1-2-1 or 1-2-2-1,
for one has bombs on the 1s,
the other a pair on the 2s.

Playing the game, repeatedly,
is the only way to play,
because you become fast
at decoding the patterns,
clicking on the cells.

Still, you lose a lot,
but once in awhile,
all the bombs are marked,
and the clock stops,
a happy face smiles on you.

Playing the game, you find
three kinds of errors:
one of the body,
you put the cursor on a cell
where you know there is a bomb,
because your hand slips
or the cursor jumped there;
a second kind of error
is a slip of the mind,
you didn't calculate well enough
from the pattern information,
and directed the cursor
to a cell where you ought not,
where you should have known
a bomb was hidden there.
Erros of the third kind
are informational deficits --
you just can't decode a cell
because the information is lacking;
it's like the start of the game,
one of taking a chance,
leaping on a cell,
knowing it's a risk.

Post-moderns might rate the game
a perfect example of Heidegger,
for he stressed the thrown-ness
as an essential feature of life,
beyond body-mind excellence,
where logic runs out, gaps occur,
how man must hurdle himself
across voids in information,
or quit the game of life.