Weisel: How Minesweeper relates to academia

Procrastinators watch out, Minesweeper is making a comeback. Procrastinators watch out, Minesweeper is making a comeback. The simple computer game with a single goal — find mines and flag them to avoid detonation — requires extreme patience and practiced skill.

As the game gains popularity, the advantages to playing it are becoming more prominent. It is becoming less exclusively a procrastination device and more of a potential substitute teacher. Minesweeper has taught me a number of lessons I never learned in class.

1. Start small

Minesweeper has three different levels: starting with a beginner 9-by-9 grid with only 10 mines and ending at the advanced, 16-by-30 grid hiding 99 mines. If you are an amateur sweeper, you will fail if you try to start on the expert level. You must allow yourself time to learn the tricks and rules of the game on a smaller scale before tackling a larger grid.

Similarly, in school it’s smart to start small. Instead of joining every club on campus your freshman year, join just one or two and get involved before branching out and filling your schedule with myriad meetings and events for which you might not be prepared. In your classes, take the time with your easier courses to figure out how you work best, so that when you tackle harder classes you will be prepared to handle the workload.

2. Just dive in

In a game of Minesweeper, you can’t open up the board until you click a tile. There is no logical way to choose: You just have to bravely face the vast expanse of squares and click. There is no right or wrong, but it must be done. It takes guts to sweep mines, and you have to be willing to make the first move. But once the first move is over, you are free to work the board however you like.

Attack your school work in a similar fashion. Rather than staring at a blank Word document for hours before starting your paper, just start writing words. It doesn’t matter if they’re good or not because you can always rewrite them later. What matters is that you get yourself writing and that your words are moved to create a steady flow of thought. The same goes for your math or chemistry homework. It will never get done if you don’t sit down and make yourself start.

3. When in doubt, rely on logic

In Minesweeper, there are obvious moves across the board. But once these options have run out, you’re left with a handful of numbers and flags and nowhere to go. You have to start logically calculating what tiles could or could not be hiding mines by using the placement of the numbers, already flagged mines and pure playing experience.

When discussing a topic in class or stuck with an essay at home, you can usually reason yourself in or out of an argument. When lost in a world of conceptual notions or abstract thinking, logic will help you shoot up the red sparks and save yourself from the confusion. You just need to take a deep breath, examine the facts and arguments placed before you and try to wrap your mind around their logical connections.

4. Sometimes, you just have to take a chance

As logical as Minesweeper might be, there comes a point in almost every game at which you have to choose between two tiles. There won’t be a logical reason why you should choose one or the other — each will have a 50-50 chance of obscuring a mine. There are no patterns in the grid, so you can’t try and adhere to a previously uncovered configuration. You just have to close your eyes, pick a tile and click.

As in Minesweeper, as in school, as in life, you have to make decisions every day. You can weigh the pros and cons with a heavy hand and ask every person you can think of for advice, but ultimately decisions still come down to you. There will certainly be times when neither option makes sense. You just have to make a decision and suffer the consequences, whether they explode in your face or not.

5. Don’t be discouraged

Both advanced and beginning players find winning a game of Minesweeper challenging.. Combine the risks of making wrong decisions, faulty logic and even simple  mis-clicks of the mouse, and you will inevitably lose some. The key to winning is not letting the losses discourage you. Instead, start a new game and hope that luck will allow you to clear the board.

The same applies to the college experience. You are going to lose. You are going to lose a lot. From bad grades on exams to fights with friends to lost jobs and low bank accounts, you are going to suffer a lot of loss. Yet college is in large part about toughening your skin and building endurance for the trials of life. When something negative occurs, you just need to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again, hoping that next time nothing will explode.

Email Elizabeth at eaw62@pitt.edu.