Skip to main content

2048 Game & Life

I am not a typical mobile gamer or even a video gamer for that matter. Yesterday I picked up my tab out of boredom, and tried this 2048 a puzzle game available in the play store. After playing for couple of hours I realised what a simple, elegant and addictive game it is. More than that, I was intrigued by how closely it resembles the real life.

If you have not played it yourself, you should try it at least once. The idea of the game is that there are NxN slots available on the screen. The numbers 2 and 4 appear randomly in any of the slots and you swipe the screen to combine same numbers to form the sum. Your goal is to build bigger and bigger number by swiping the screen up,down,left or right. The game ends when you run out of free slots.

There are other games with similar concept (triple-town comes to my mind) but this one reduced everything to the absolute minimum, that is numbers and moves. The game would have been more elegant if the number started from 1 instead of 2.

Coming to the 'similarity to life' part. Like our life and most other games, this one too presents you with some random situations. But where it differs from other games is that, you don't have absolute control over what you do with the situation. When you try to handle the current situation you end up altering your other goals.

The small numbers are like the small day to day problems in life. You will have to clear them out quickly but if you focus too much on them, you will lose out on the bigger ones. You might play for longer but you may not have achieved anything bigger. If you focus too much on the bigger numbers the smaller problems will clutter your life and you may not be able to proceed.

There are some rules of thumb you can follow to tackle the game but there is no absolute winning strategy. I think the people who try to do the best possible move out of the current situation while keeping the bigger goal in site will tend to score high.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The hard problem

There are two orthogonal, equally valid and equally unverifiable axioms about the foundation of reality that existed for a long time in our society. One is from the west, which is the scientific worldview. It claims that the world is made of matter. This matter came out of nothing, from matter came the life form, the simple organisms first and then the complex one. The complex organisms later developed a central nerves-system, from this emerged the mind and the consciousness. This consciousness, that ultimately emerged from the mater, enables the organism to perceive the material world back. The other theory is from the east, which is the spiritual world view. It claims that the consciousness is the fundamental aspect of reality from which the mind, thought and the objective world emerges. The former aims to unlock the mystery of reality by dissecting the matter. The later does so by introspecting the consciousness.
Post a Comment
Read more

Reality Check

Most people assume that the world we perceive is the world that exists. It is fundamentally a flawed assumption. If you just probe this assumption a bit deeper, you will easily arrive at the conclusion that the world that we perceive is the world that we create. I am not saying that the reality does not exist or that we create the world through our imagination. What I am claiming is that the perception is not a passive act. Image, sound, time and space does not exist outside our perception. There may be something "out there"  (if at all) that correlates to what we perceive . But, in order to perceive a specific form of reality, we have to create them in the first place. Don't forget that the unique point of view of one's individual reality does not exist without him. Every moment of perception is an act of creation through the subconscious process of our neurological network, that evolved over millions of years of trial and error. Let us examine in scientifi...
Post a Comment
Read more