2048

2048 is one of those games that give you enough of a ‘hit’ from progressing that makes it very addictive. Developers have recently used this principle to separate people (and parents) from their hard earned cash through games that transition from ‘skill-based’ games to ‘payment-based’, where the only real way to progress is to buy ‘tokens / gems’ or some other items that are abstracted away from real money (so you are more likely to spent it without thinking about it). These games are fairly evil in my view and have recently experienced somewhat of a back lash (e.g. Candy Crush Saga, the recent Dungeon Keeper).

Gabriele Cirulli’s version of 2048 is a more ‘pure’ version with no in game payments or other clutter - just the sole purpose of cleaning up numbered tiles and getting as high a score as you can. I’ve now reached the 2048 square and have decided to put down the ‘crack pipe’ - until the next addictive game comes along at least.

2014-07-30: Update - it turns out that the next addictive game didn’t take very long to appear. In fact it was a variation of 2048, called 2584, that uses the Fibonacci sequence instead of simple matching / addition. This turns out to be possibly even better than the original and you an even convince yourself that you are learning something - although in fact you are of course just throwing away your life - as one of the game’s Android developers happily reaffirms with their name, called as they are: Time Killing Machine.

Meanwhile it might help to memorise the sequence…

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765