Big Concerns about Tiny Towers

I have been playing the horrifically addictive iOS game Tiny Tower an awful lot lately. To justify the many, many hours the game has taken away from me, I went and wrote a review of it for Paste Magazine that you can read here.

While I was predominately positive in my review and gave the game a good score, the design of the game is potentially problematic and ethically unsound. Jorge Albor wrote a great piece for Popmatters discussing some of the (very valid) criticisms of Tiny Tower that my review just skims over, and follows it up with a few more remarks at Experience Points also worth reading.

Ultimately, Tiny Tower is 'addictive' in the most literal sense of the word, not in the casual 'really fun' sense that we tend to use in writing about videogames. It is designed in such a way that not playing it becomes more and more difficult the more you play it. Truly, it is like a drug: an unarguably enjoyable experience that probably isn't really good for you to do too often.

Anyway, I won't waste more words repeating Jorge or myself here. I find it interesting (and perhaps worrying) that I am enjoying a game so much despite the flaws that I am completely aware of.