Hooked Again

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The first free computer game I fell for was solitaire. I remember that period only dimly. Young children (mine?) squalling in the backround, a wife (mine?) sobbing that this had gone on long enough, and me in my boxers, unshaven and attached like a human peripheral to the PC, playing hand after just-one-more-hand-please of that endless game. To this day, the computer-generated sound of a riffling card deck produces in me the kind of facial tics and palpitations that must be sadly familiar to cult deprogrammers, substance-abuse counselors and others in the desperate-cases business.

I'd like to say that I stopped, that I learned my lesson and never again played a computer game way, way more than is healthy, but I can't. Instead, I graduated to the harder stuff: Tetris, of course, Hearts, Doom, Bust-A-Move3. By then I was also doing console games--PlayStation and Nintendo 64, mostly, with some GameBoy thrown in for maintenance--and had involved my innocent wife as a co-dependent. In fact, she was the first one I hooked when I was recently turned on to a free game called Alchemy.

It's a classic board game. You're given tiles of different colors and symbols that you must place next to others, domino style. If you clear the board, you move up to the next harder level with more colors and symbols. The higher you go, the harder it gets--and the more exalted the rank you achieve when at last you lose. Not to brag, but I have got as high as Alchemist third degree, which is one rank above Grand Wizard. And two above my wife.

After I slipped her the URL, she said, "you bum," only she used another word that means much the same thing. We both knew at once that this would be a very, very bad game. You can find it yourself at popcap.com a four-month-old site that offers a raft of free games, no questions asked. The games aren't downloaded to you but streamed as tiny Java applets to your Web browser. They go away when you close your browser. But why would you want to?

Popcap is a three-man company run out of an apartment in Seattle. John Vechey, 22, its business manager, says the company is already profitable, making money two ways in the face of the dotcom downturn: from advertisements that flash on your screen while you play, and through licensing fees that other companies pay Popcap to use its games on their sites. Popcap's Tetris-like Diamondmine is the No. 1 game at MSN's GameZone (where it's called Bejeweled). When I visited there last Friday morning, 9,032 people were playing it. Bejeweled was too soft for my taste--I was still dimly aware of my kids in the backround. But when I showed them the game, it shut them right up.

Mea culpa: In a recent column, I wrote effusively about a portable gadget called the C-Guard that jams cellular-phone calls. Weirdly, the Israeli company that sells the thing didn't mention to me that blocking cell-phone calls--no matter how loud and obnoxious the caller--is illegal in the U.S. In fact, the Federal Communications Commission can impose an $11,000 fine on offenders. Buyer beware.

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