Shisen-Sho Metaphor

Minesweeper is one thing, Shisen-Sho another. This is another Mahjong solitaire type game, where you can remove pairs of tiles from the board under certain conditions, but everything is stacked 1 high. Only two matching tiles can be removed at a time. Two tiles can be removed only if they can be connected with a maximum of three lines. Lines can be only horizontal or vertical, but not diagonal. Lines may cross only the empty border. The game is over if future moves are not possible and tiles are left on the board, or the player successfully removes all the tiles.

I played this a lot last year when I was nervous.Apart from being a "time waster" and hence good for procrastination) I also found it a good indicator when I was having vision problems (and I have had some over the last few years, including strange rainbow migraines and glare induced weirdness) it was also a good indicator on analysis and planning on my part. When I was centred I could play the game fine. When I was upset, or sick, there was no point.

The version I prefer to play is by Daniel Valot. In fact I liked it so much I made two tile sets for the game (the one above based on Windows Wingdings, and a SubGenius version), which were later included in the distribution. You can vary the rules and the size of the board, and the window is scalable, so you can shrink it to a corner of the screen. I like to play with some additional rules, namely that a tile can only be removed if one of the pair removed has either the top or bottom edge clear of other tiles (and either top or bottom for the whole game). And my preferred size board is 24 x 12 - any larger than that and it is too easy to solve, and smaller and a solution becomes either trivial or problematic.

Anyway, like Minesweeper, this solitaire game seems to have a life lesson for me. Success in the game is about planning. Often whole sets and areas of tiles are blocked because tiles next to them don't seem to be clearable. But often as well, that only seems to be the case for the current turn. If a player concentrates on the moves they can make - rather than the ones they can't - often either another way of removing those tiles becomes apparent, or it becomes redundant anyway when the tiles can be removed because others have been removed already. Either that, or the situation becomes unsolvable, and if you want, you can try the starting configuration again.

And here I am seeing yet another metaphor for life. Often with my own situations, if concentrate or focus on problems that are not immediate, they often seem to be unsolvable, because I cannot work out how I get there from here. But often if I'm focussed on the now, instead of what was or what will be, it doesn't matter. The imagined problem either goes away (it wasn't a real problem after all) or becomes redundant because I've solved a more immediate problem anyway. Other times if I have just a general idea of where I'm going, but not an over detailed map of what it is, I find that I've been focussed on that while I've been dealing with day-day stuff anway, and I'm closer to the goal than I thought.

So, a second metaphor for life, maybe another dumb one, but just something that struck me as I played the game.