Cheating at Patience (meta)

[stephbg]

I have a long essay/post on the boil about how and why I cheat at the card game of Patience. At the moment it's also the best candidate as the genesis for my next (first?) semi-serious attempt at science fiction publication after my conference paper. This post isn't it, but I noticed something of interest a couple of days ago.



The short version of why I started to cheat at Patience is that I wanted to extend game play time, as opposed to card shuffling and setup time. This is the extremely short version, which I've just realised is insufficient background for the point I wish to make.

Pretty soon my (recovering) Catholic internal guilt machine decided that I required some form of punishment for cheating, and thus was born the concept of the tainted victory, and many subtle variations thereof. It gets complicated at this point, but from this was born the observation that sometimes I cared about the purity of my victory, and sometimes I didn't. Did I want to play or did I want to win?

I now have enough data points to report that when I am relatively well, I will merrily cheat until the cows come home, happy to enjoy the mindless pattern-matching of well-practised play. However, the sicker and/or more depressed I get, the more I crave an honest victory, and thus the level of cheating is reduced or indeed eliminated. This has the unfortunate side effects of reducing (or indeed eliminating) the chances of both extended play and victory.

The cards tell me that I am currently *very* depressed :-(

Comments

[writerjo.livejournal.com]

I would like to see you do something on patterns altogether. Your fascination with the comfort of pattern matching is something we don't always notice in ourselves.

Hugs and anything else that would help for the depression.