Copy and Waste

At the beginning of my biology class, my teacher asked a classmate, who was focusing his attention on his phone, sliding in all direction on the screen, “What are you playing?”“2048,” he responded. After finally realizing that the class was starting, he put away his phone. I recalled when my dorm mates were playing this game together, competing for a higher score, and when I saw someone playing the same game in Agora during uni-free. Clearly the game of 2048 is becoming the new Flappy Bird around campus, and probably in many other places. Before there was any chance that it would disappear from the App Store (an occurrence I hope unique to Flappy Bird), I decided to download it on my phone as well.For those of you who don’t know, 2048 is a game which one slides some number tiles around in a 4 by 4 grid and combines the identical numbers into their sums. The goal is to create a 2048 tile before the board is filled up with new tiles coming up after each move.After typing in “2048” in App Store search box, I got 193 results. After a brief scan, I discover that a majority of similar games are played in the exactly same way, with only some variations in graphics or appearances.Although it’s easy to see that the first application with the most downloads is the original one, it’s a curiosity that clones of this game are so prevalent in the App Store.In fact, after 2048 first appeared as a webpage game, created by a 19-year-old Italian boy as a weekend project, copies or other simple variations like different sizes of the board or pictures instead of numbers were soon created on the Internet. There is even a website which allows creation of one’s own 2048 game. What’s more, as noted on the original page, even the game itself is “based on 1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes by Asher Vollmer,” which are two games created earlier. Similar to Flappy Bird, 2048 is also a game that has become viral and a subject of duplication soon after its release. While it would be difficult to fully explain why people get addicted to this game, the reasons for imitating this game are apparent enough to be listed here: the simplicity, the popularity, the low-cost process of development and the potential profit along with this game.Among all the similar works, we can see that there are at least two different levels of cloning: One is to improve or modify the game to make it more enjoyable, like in this case, 2048 removed the original unmovable “stone” that is in 1024 game board and simplified the scoring system, making the game less complicated and thus more addictive. The other is merely copy-pasting, having nearly no differences from the original game, hoping to get some downloads and money from advertisements. Clearly the former is better than the latter, just like building on someone else’s results is better than blatantly using them (without citing).But no matter what or how gamemakers clone or imitate others’ games, what most gamers would really love to see is a brand-new game which can bring them a completely different experience. Therefore, creativity is and will always be the core of the game-making industry.