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In 2018 I am going to be three stone lighter and read 5 books a week, but only someone who was insane would start a life-changing routine before January 1st (and also it's important to put on as much weight as possible, so that I can lose more and look more impressive- you don't get to be dieter of the year without committing to be really, really fat first). So for now I am still being inactive and playing games on my phone instead of expanding my brain.
iPhone games are the perfect accompaniment to feeding Ernie and I choose ones that I can play on-handed using the non-bottle hand and my thumb. Wheel of Fortune is my current obsession, even though the game continually flips to adverts or tries to persuade you to part with money to buy more diamonds or cheats (there is no need - there is a perfectly good cheat website, which I often use even though I am literally just cheating myself, as I now only play the version of the game where the computer plays the other players). I wish I could let the Wheel of Fortune game know that I am never going to directly pay for their game. Then they could stop trying or just raise revenue from making me watch adverts. But Wheel of Fortune thinks I am going to crack at some point and send them some money. And perhaps that is the real game here. Who will be proven right?
I have downloaded a few games from the adverts, so it has already won in a way (and I only found out about Wheel of Fortune via another game I was playing), but some of them leave me cold even from a 30 second preview. There is a game where you can make doughnuts and burgers for customers, which seems to be taking the piss. Does any young person have the aspiration to work in a burger bar? Maybe. Does any young person have the aspiration to pretend to work in a burger bar in their spare time? I don't think so.
There is also a fruit machine game based on the Wizard of Oz, which always blows my mind. How would the stars of that film feel about their images being used in this way? Would they be amazed to still be recognisable so many decades on? Or annoyed that someone was cashing in? Surprised that this was the role that people remembered them for? Disbelieving that technology would exist which would see them participating in a high tech gambling game played on a phone?
I also became a bit fascinated with a game called Episode which apparently throws up scenarios for teenage girls and gives them choices to make about dating and making friends. So one of the girls' boyfriends is in a coma - is she going to stay with him or date the hot young doctor. Out of all the games this is the one least aimed at me. So I decided to download it and see how I got on.
The first game they suggested was based on the film Pitch Perfect and I was playing an 18 year old woman who was off to college and whose parents wanted her to be a doctor, but she wanted to be a Bella. I got to choose how my character looked (within the parameters of being a hot young women) and her name - I called her Richard. I don't know how many 50 year old men are playing this game, but strongly suspect that it's more than one. It feels like I am doing something deeply wrong. But if a 50 year old man who hate a cappella and snogging teenage boys can't pretend he is a female college student wearing nothing but a towel, then ISIS has won.
But like many of these games this one just feels too mercenary. I know I have an app out that I hope people will pay for, but I also hope that I am giving good value in return. Episode seems especially cynical in that many of the correct choices can only be made in return for diamond payments, which cost money. I am not ever going to be a 50 year old man who is prepared to pay in order to succeed as an 18 year old female singer, so I am forced to take the worse decision. But I don't think they really invest enough in the game to mean it veers off too much from the basic storyline. And I reckon I can get to be one of the Bellas if I stick at it. I just feel a bit bad for the aspirational 14 year-olds who are being fleeced by these games. And their parents who have to pay for it.
Let no one say that I am wasting my time off from work.
And next year I will start reading books again. They might be teengage fiction and about being in Pitch Perfect. I am not strange.
