Minesweeper for Peaceniks

Stumbled upon this tale from a Microsoft programmer about the perils of Minesweeper -- that classic time-waster in which players must use their smarts to clear a pixilated field of landmines.

Well, turns out there were some political issues with Minesweeper. For starters, in some parts of the world, where the threat of stepping on a landmine is more than just an abstraction, this game doesn't seem so cute. (Although one would think that since the purpose of the game is removing mines, that would mitigate the offense somewhat, but apparently not enough.)

So, in designing the next version of Windows, Microsoft programmers decided to include an option in which users could hunt for flowers instead of mines. The programmer writes:

We added a preference that allows users to change it from looking for mines in a minefield to looking for flowers in a flower field. Now, personally I am not a fan of using flowers here - I mean, you WANT to find flowers, right? - but this was an established alternative in the market and none of the other ideas we had (dog poo? penguins?) could pass the legal/geopolitcs/trademark/etc. hurdles.

Sounds like a simple, even if hokey, fix, right? Wrong. It gets more complicated:

Once that was figured out, the next step is trying to determine the correct default setting. After much discussion,we decided that the default should be based on locale. So if you install in North America you get the mines, but in a mine-sensitive area the default would be the flowers....

This is when another issue arises: it turns out that the help for the game, as well as the game summary, all talks about mines, uncovering mines, and not blowing up. The technical writers are quickly engaged to figure out what the text should say.

Testing revealed another issue: If we default to flowers, does it really make sense to call the program "Minesweeper" and have a giant mine for an icon?

Oh yeah, there's that. There's also this:

There was also concern that if we changed the name, it might generate support calls from people who are asking where minesweeper went....

Just when these their way through the system, another issue arose. It turns out that some countries were taking this even more seriously than we had initially considered. Merely changing the default was not sufficient - they didn't even want to have the *option* to switch to mines! ... so we suggested that if mines were completely unacceptable than those countries should probably just remove minesweeper all together. So the various legal and geopolitics and localization people went off to discuss that one - whether it would be acceptabled, and if so which countries should pull it.

Who new PC could be so problematic for PCs?