The other night, attempting to get some semblance of research done for a research paper that I absolutely should have started work on two months ago, but Netflix, I realized that there was yet another way I could be procrastinating. This hip new game, 2048. Okay, maybe not that new, because approximately half of my Facebook friends have posted pictures of their winning scores like proud parents of someone who just got into Harvard Law. I, naive and innocent as the day I was born, began to play.
This was the worst mistake I have ever made in my life. Goodbye, GPA. Goodbye, spending time with my friends. Goodbye, staying caught up on “Game of Thrones.” You are all second now. Second to 2048, the most terrible and wonderful game I have ever laid my eyes upon. I have yet to get my tiles to reach the desired multiple of 2, but my housemate got there in less than two hours. Since then, I have seriously questioned my worth as a human, and decided that since I clearly need to take a break from playing, I should get my feelings out in writing.
Reasons why 2048 is probably the end of the world:
1) It is literally so addicting that when I am not playing it, I am thinking about how to play it. I’m writing a goddamn article about it, after all.
2) It tricks you into thinking it involves math, but it doesn’t. It really just does some pretty basic addition. This is mean and terrible, because when you inevitably fail repeatedly at winning, you start to question your math skills. At this point, you WILL cry under a table for at least 30 minutes.
3) Once you realize it doesn’t involve math, you start believing in luck. You’ll start muttering to yourself under your breath while you binge eat peanut butter pretzels, “the odds are in my favor…I must win eventually…I don’t need to sleep…” These mutterings will continue to spiral into the until-now unexplored depths of your consciousness. Crazy places. Places that will make you do weird things like create a massive 2048 grid on your bedroom floor out of ketchup and then roll around in it, yelling “AM I GOOD ENOUGH YET!? WILL YOU TAKE PITY ON ME NOW, OH CRUEL MISTRESS!?”
4) After you recover from what most people would call a “psychotic break,” you will talk to your housemate about the game, trying to seem casual. She mentions that she recently won. You will secretly plot your revenge, while smiling and congratulating her. She looks a little off-put by your unusually high pitched laughter and the way you are stroking your eyebrow with a butter knife, but she knows you love her.
5) Instead of turning in any more papers for the rest of the year, you will turn in print outs of your 2048 score. Because, of course, reaching 2048 isn’t good enough. Then you have to reach 4096. You give up on the idea of ever having children or getting married. Nobody has time for that.
I would like to take this time to note that if anyone comes up to me after reading this article and says, “Hey, Lily, after reading this I played 2048 and I won my FIRST TIME EVER PLAYING!” I reserve the right to punch you in the left ear and then tar and feather you, just like in the good old days, before anyone knew what 2048 was.
Editor’s note: Aforementioned housemate, Eliana Catsworth, has since realized that she was not, in fact, playing 2048, but a much larger scale version of the game where instead of 16 tiles there are 25. She therefore has not actually beaten the game. On a totally unrelated note, she has recently reported feeling “much safer sleeping at night.”
I remember my friend telling me and my twin that the world is going to end in 2048 if they keep cutting down trees and that is true because the trees give us oxygen not anything else it gives shad it gives us everything comment if you think it is true