They're Fast, They're Cheap, and I'm Out of Control
How I got addicted to playing games on my iPhone.
By Farhad Manjoo
May 22, 2009
Last month, I became an obsessive air-traffic controller. The culprit: a terrific game for the iPhone called Flight Control. The premise is simple: You're faced with a crush of planes, and it's your job to guide each one to its respective runway. The gameplay, though, is irresistibly difficult. A few minutes in, the planes start to show up at an alarming rate, and you scramble to keep them from crashing into one another. When they do crash, the game beckons you to play again. Flight Control is so addictive it ought to come with a warning label. According to Firemint, the game's publisher, the 99-cent app has been purchased more than 700,000 times since March; at its peak, it was being downloaded 20,000 times a day.
As I succumbed to Flight Control, I tried to puzzle out what made it so hard to put down. Sure, it's well-designed and fun. But there's something else about the game that's infectious: You can play it anywhere, in those moments in the day when you're otherwise unoccupied, bored, and alone. Because the game is repetitive, a bit mindless, and briefyou can play it for a couple of minutes, then put it awayit expands to occupy all your time. I've loaded up Flight Control while standing in line at the supermarket, while waiting at the doctor's office, and during bouts of insomnia. Also, of course, in the bathroom.
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I've never been much of a gamer, so I've never had a DS or any other handheld. How did Apple turn me into a gaming obsessive? Since the iPhone's games go for a buck or two a piece, they're not much of a risk, and many follow the recipe for great games once put forward by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese: They're easy to learn but difficult to master. Nongamers will get the hang of Flight Control in a few seconds, but you'll tear your hair out trying to land more than 50 planesand you'll keep trying. In the meantime, while you weren't looking, the iPhone turned you into a gamer.
It's true that there are many sprawling games in the App Storetitles like Oregon Trail, which takes days to finish, or SimCity, which never really endsbut some of the platform's most successful developers are the startups and one-man shops that can't afford to produce huge games. Instead they make small, easily digestible titles that appeal to a wide audience. The first developer to crack this code was Ethan Nicholas, whose tale of quick riches achieved the level of myth earlier this year. Nicholas was a programmer at Sun Microsystems who'd been facing some unexpected financial difficulties, and he took up iPhone programming as a way out of his problems. Last fall, he spent weekssome of it while cradling his 1-year-old sonwriting a tank-war game called iShoot. The game, which sold for $2.99, hit the App Store in October, and in January, it shot up to the top spotselling hundreds of thousands of copies and earning Nicholas enough to let him quit his job and take up iPhone development full-time.
IShoot was also the first app to pull me into playing games on my phone. The concept was easy to grasp; it's an artillery game in which your mission is to pick the right weapon and guess the correct angle and velocity to shoot at other tanks spread out on a mountainous, two-dimensional landscape. Though its graphics are quirkyamong the places the tanks appear are Mount Rushmore and the roof of the White HouseiShoot is obviously a low-fi production. But that's not a rap against it: Nicholas paid careful attention to the way a novice progresses through the game, and he tweaked the levels of difficulty to make it maximally enjoyable. My $3 turned out to be a wise investment: The game provided weeks of funI fought tanks every chance I got, progressing from "easy" to "extreme" difficulty, growing bored only when I'd become good enough to beat every level.
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