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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.

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