A good post from two months back:
On the insistence of my cousin’s daughter, I made the mistake of
peeking into the seamy world of Really Bad Games Written by High School
Kids and Played by Tens of Thousands of Users.
As the LoL newspaper
suggests, a lot of people are spending a lot of time doing really,
really silly things. Like giving eachother six septillion gold pieces,
back and forth. Which is wrong on so many levels; for instance, our
silly arabic numeral system deprives players of even the redeeming
feature of teaching people how to spell “septillion.”
Some of
the more popular games in this genre, like the one my cousin insisted I
check out, a) only let you make a few moves a day, b) require you jump
through all kinds of hoops to prove you’re a human, and c) have
absolutely no plot, graphics, or gameplay. Yet *hundreds of thousands*
of people play them. Tends of thousands play them for hours and hours
every week. Entire high school classes are apparently addicted to these
games, whose concept, complexity, and execution are on a level with a
viral form of Pong which made the mistake of interposing lots of text
and windows between episodes of actual action.