Addicted to the app

Highly addictive: Tiny Tower gives you control over a tower block
10 April 2012

It's 2am and I'm struggling to stay awake as a team of virtual construction workers edges closer to finishing a new floor on my tower block.

Embarrassingly, at the age of 37, I've become an app addict.

Look around any Tube, bus or even office and you'll almost certainly see my fellow sufferers, quietly tapping away at cartoon-like characters on the screen of their phone.

It started innocently enough, with a few games on the Tube of Angry Birds, the game that has sparked a global phenomenon and led to toys, clothing, even a film.

The 59p game, the most popular paid-for game in the Apple App Store's four-year history, has just passed 200 million downloads. David Cameron is a fan, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even recently thanked Rovio, the firm that makes it, "for creating an occupation for a huge number of officials who now know what to do with their leisure time - and during business hours".

Firebox.com says the game has even recreated its success with physical products. Ryan Collins, the head of buying, says: "The soft toys have been particularly successful, but the Angry Birds-branded iPhone and iPad case have been incredibly popular, too."

However, for serious addicts like myself, Angry Birds is just the beginning of a slippery slope.

Recent months have seen a succession of massively addictive small games that can fill everything from a one-stop Tube journey to an entire evening.

The key to an addictive game is time. It must be simple enough that you can play in bursts of a few minutes, but complex or challenging enough that you'll keep going back for more.

My next obsession was Smurf Village, which saw me taking control of a gaggle of smurfs, controlling every aspect of their life. After a few months I decided smurf genocide was my only option, and my attentions turned to Flick Football, Plants vs Zombies, then Tiny Wings, which puts you in charge of a bird flying over hills and islands.

However, nothing prepared me for my latest problem: Tiny Tower.

It's a simple, free game that puts you in charge of a tower block, giving you control over everything, from deciding what to put on each floor, to which residents work in your block. The problem is that, unlike most other games, it requires constant attention, not unlike the hugely popular (and annoying) Tamagotchi virtual pets.

Within a week I was sneakily playing it in meetings, reaching for it as soon as I got up, and delaying sleep until all my tower's tasks were done. I even managed to spend an entire transatlantic flight playing it.

Last week I decided there was only one option - changing my phone. In the modern-day equivalent of cold turkey, I'm now using a handset that can't run Tiny Tower, and I think I'm finally making progress - at least until the next must-have game comes out.

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