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08/02/2026 On the Road with Chuck & Bernie for Sunday, August 2, 2026

07/29/2026 He-Man, Ghostbusters, and Me The new Masters of the Universe movie is okay by me.

07/26/2026 On the Road with Chuck & Bernie for Sunday, July 26, 2026

2048: A Gosh-Darned Classic

I don't play a lot of video games. Never have. As an adult there have been weeks and probably even months where I haven't played a single game. Every one in a while I find myself splitting my free time between multiple games on my phone and I think, "hey, is this the moment where I finally take a serious interest in gaming?" But it never lasts. Sometimes I get bored with a game, and other times I delete it after getting upset with the amount of free time it's eating up, but usually I just forget about it and don't come back to it. Sometimes people tell me that they feel sad for me because I'm missing out, but it doesn't feel like something I need to correct, so I don't.

As a kid I much preferred designing the games. I wasn't very good because I was a kid, but I do find recreational programming to scratch what I think is probably a similar itch.

Anyway, this evening I was playing 2048, and it suddenly occurred to me that it's a bona fide classic. It's not as old as most of the things we call classics, but it's as good as the best of them. I spent some time thinking about that as I spent 20 minutes shifting my tiles around the screen. I'm good at 2048, which isn't saying much; most people get good at it very quickly when they discover a good strategy, and most people discover the same strategy that I did which is to keep your highest number in a corner, and snake your next highest numbers in descending order along one side (and then back and a row over, and so on) so that once you get a high enough total, you can combine several tiles in a row, one after another. I never lose 2048 because of bad planning; I lose because I inadvertently make two wrong moves in quick succession. Usually I accidentally touch the screen when I'm performing two tasks at once, or my kid grabs my phone. My highest score is 387,064, and it would be higher if I were less of a butterfingers. This paragraph probably made no sense if you don't plan 2048, but you should; it's easy, addictive, and fun.

As I said, I was thinking about what makes a great, classic game of this type. "This type" is a very narrow field; Portal and Super Mario Bros. are classics, but not on the level of 2048, which I'd compare to something like Tetris. Tetris has been ported to every system you can think of and most of the ones you can't. Everybody likes Tetris. People who think they don't like Tetris are still pretty good at it and will pick it up once in a blue moon. Tetris (and 2048, IMHO) stand above a lot of other classics in that they provide an ideal level of friction. Wumpus? Too much friction. You have to get proficient in visualizing dodecahedrons before Wumpus becomes fun. Snake? Too little friction. Othello? Again, too much; you have to think several steps ahead. John Conway's Game of Life? Either not enough friction and too open ended, or too much friction to get really good at thinking about how to design an interesting pattern that won't die out or stabilize. Adventure, Zork, The Leather Goddesses of Phobos? Too much friction, in that you actually have to apply yourself to thinking about them (and any game that tells a story is bound to lack replay value). Tetris and 2048 require just the right amount of intellectual engagement to keep you in an idly interested flow state.

I did post a while back about buying a Picocalc and falling back into the habit of programming dumb little games for fun. It allowed me to bring fruition to a game I've been imagining for a few years, which is a cross between 2048 and Robotron 2084. I called it Roboworld 2048 and... It's fine but not as much fun as I'd wanted it to be. Partly, I've never been a big Robotron 2084 fan, and it turns out that it's more complicated than I'd assumed, but not in a way that improves the game I'd wanted to write. Essentially in my game, you move around a grid as numbered robots close in. If you get two robots of the same number to collide, they combine into a single robot of twice their original value (i.e., 4+4=8). You win by producing a robot labeled "2048," but it's really difficult to do that. Roboworld 2048 is not destined to be a classic game.

I didn't have another point really, just enjoying 2048.