About 12 years ago, I happened to take my Palm Pilot (remember those?) to a friend's house. A friend of a friend asked if she could borrow it. Sure, I said. She proceeded to download a game called Bubblet, then curled up on the couch with it for the next hour.
My curiosity was piqued, and soon I, too, was a Bubblet junkie. It was a simple game — you got a screen full of bubbles and double-tapped to pop connected ones of the same color. Once those popped, the others fell down, Tetris-like, to create new strings of bubbles.
You could tap away like a maniac at small strings, but eventually you'd learn the strategy of creating longer ones, which scored more. The important thing was that the game kept your average score, which you were constantly trying to improve.
Bubblet was, I discovered, viral. Scary viral. I would show it to friends, and all they would want to do was play it over and over. My editor at Time magazine cursed me for introducing him to it at a conference; all he could think about was playing it on the plane home. I even got my mother hooked.
From Bubbles to Dots
Fast forward to 2013, and a Bubblet-like game is suddenly taking the iPhone ecosystem by storm. In case you haven't been exposed to it yet, it's called Dots. It's insanely simple. You have 60 seconds to connect as many same-colored dots as possible. Released 20 days ago with little fanfare, it has since been downloaded more than 2 million times.
More than 100 million games have been played so far, according to Betaworks, the company that developed Dots. That works out to about 3,500 games per minute — 3,500 chances every minute that someone will look over the shoulder of a Dots player and ask: what's that?
What we've got here is a fast-moving virus, potentially fatal to productivity. This weekend alone, I saw another dozen friends hit by the contagion. It always spread via the look over the shoulder.
"Thanks a lot," wrote comedian Baratunde Thurston in the app's most recent iTunes review. "You've ruined my productivity with a game I didn't know I needed." Baratunde may be the most high-profile victim so far. His high score, by the way, is a pretty impressive 446 (the game's all-time high score appears to be 722). I know this because Dots tells you the high scores of all your Twitter and Facebook connections.
So this all starts to tell us a lot about why Dots is a hit, and why it's possibly the smartest move Betaworks ever made. (We wrote about the strangeness of Betaworks, an online media company, releasing an iOS game here; the developer, Patrick Moberg, told us he was playing around with a new design for displaying stories, and "sort of forgot the words.")
But let's break it down into its elements. What turns a normally sensible iPhone user into a Dots zombie?
1) Aesthetics. If Google were to suddenly focus all its engineering efforts into an accessible mobile game, it might end up looking a lot like Dots. The design is extremely clean, and the brief opening explanation could not be more simple. It's colorful. The dots bounce down when the bottom row disappears in a very satisfying manner.
Controlling Dots for 60 seconds is like taking a refreshing bath in abstract eye candy — for you, and for the friend watching over your shoulder.
2) It's a microgame. You play a round in 60 seconds. Each round is another shot at glory (a new high score, or at least upping your leaderboard totals). What spare 60 seconds of your day will you not risk for glory in an eye-candy bathtub?
And yet, being a microgame means you can control the habit. (Or at least, you can keep telling yourself it's under control.) It's the perfect thing to play in line at the post office, on a plane, waiting for a bus or during the boring parts of a meeting. We know, you would never do that last one.
3) It's social, but not too social. We really don't need to be playing at the same time as each other to have a fun mobile experience; that's what the success of Words With Friends and its ilk have shown.
Dots is really one giant Facebook and Twitter-connected leaderboard. Advancing up that leaderboard means bragging rights among your friends and family. I am now obsessed with beating the three or four Facebook contacts ahead of me. A good friend and I have been exchanging screenshots of high scores, an extra level of smackdown I can highly recommend.
4) Points mean prizes. Every 60-second game is also earning you Dots, which can be redeemed for...
5) Level-Ups. There are currently three dot-popping powers you can buy. Very soon, I have no doubt, there will be more.
6) There's more to it. Play Dots for any length of time and you'll realize: it's not really about connecting lines, it's about making squares. This excellent strategy guide explains all.
7) Caution: may help you relax. Your mileage may vary on this one, but Moberg says his aim was to create a game that "reduces stress" during and (more importantly) after play. He may be on to something. A game of Dots — if you can keep it to one game — turns out to be a great way to quickly reset the brain after stressful situations. (Though more study is certainly needed.)
The game will upgrade fast. "There's still a lot for us to do," co-founder Paul Murphy tells Mashable. He and Moberg say they have a solid product roadmap, with plenty of features they left out of the original.
Whether that means Dots will suffer feature creep remains to be seen. Personally, I hope they add just one thing: an average score. This is the one thing that made Bubblet so addictive all those years ago.
Then again, that could turn this scary little game from a virus into a full-blown epidemic.
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