By Brian Chekal
At first glance, it’s easy to mistake the furious keyboard mashing and colorful tiles of 2048 as some new form of measuring typing skills. The game, which took off earlier this month, has seen its amount of daily users skyrocket, challenging students, parents, and teachers alike. So what exactly is it, and where did it suddenly spring from?
2048 is a simple game that is based on the HTML5 computing language. At the start, the player is met with a randomly generated pair of 2′s, 4′s, 2′s and 4′s on any two of the 16 possible tiles. Using the three arrow keys, the players try to combine like terms until they reach their final target, the number 2048. The twist, however, is that only two of the same values can be combined. For example, a 4 and another 4 tile can combine to create a single 8 tile but that same 8 tile cannot combine with anything other than another 8 tile; here, 2′s and 4′s don’t meet up to create 6′s. What’s more, every movement from the arrow keys moves the entire board in the said direction, the player can’t choose a single row or column to be moved without all its neighbors doing the same. Combined with random 2 and 4 tiles being generated with every movement, the game grows incredibly hard incredibly fast.
Earlier this month, a 19 year old Italian programmer by the name of Gabriele Cirulli published his new game on the online programming site GitHub. He claimed to have gotten the idea for his game from the once popular iPhone game 1024, which in turn, claims to be a different version of a game called Three’s. Though each game has a slightly different set of rules and objectives, they all share a key factor. They’re easy enough for the common player to quickly understand but difficult enough for the avid gamer to still find them challenging. Because of this, the rare “you win!” screen one meets after attaining that elusive 2048 tile has become a sort of social trophy, challenging others to try their best and beat it too.
Though it has only been a few weeks since it was released, 2048 has already attracted much attention in the media and online. This meteoric rise, however, is not isolated to this simple number game. Popular iOS and Android games like Flappy Bird and QuizUp have already proven that modern audiences can quickly take strong likings to simple yet competitive games. The question now is, how far will it last before it gets stuck?