Scoring Points (and Having a Blast) at NYTimes.com In this week's cover story on addictive digital games, Sam Anderson writes about the way games "tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played." Monopoly is a product of the Depression-era "30s; Twister of the free-love "60s; Tetris of the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union in the "80s. Two years ago, a new game was unleashed, one that made perfect sense for an era in which we're fending off the onslaught of digital information on our desks, in our pockets, at all hours. This game lets you blow up Web sites. The game, which has a name not suitable for printing (though it's easy to see in the URL), was invented by Erik Andersson, then a 17-year-old in Sweden, in a scene that could have been yanked from "The Social Network." He was bored in the middle of the night and wanted to do something to impress his ex-girlfriend, he told me, so he decided to make a game. The idea was simple: you use a few keys to move around a hovercraft and blow up HTML elements on a page. He finished it in a few hours. His ex wasn't moved. ("She was like, "Meh," and I was like, "O.K.,"" he said), but about six months later, he posted it to Reddit, to a more enthusiastic response. Among the early fans of the game was Jon Huang, a multimedia producer at The Times, who had the idea to modify Andersson's open-source code to include with Anderson's article. Because the game is open-source, he was able to modify the code to work on The Times's site. "We realized we could tweak the nose or the ear a little bit and share a joke," he said. I wanted to share a joke with the reader. Huang modified Andersson's code to "make it a little more user friendly" by providing starting instructions and to protect the article and the share tools from destruction. (Surprisingly, even the ad sales department was O.K. with letting the ads on the page be blown up. But if Twitter is any indication, readers are getting the most glee from knocking out the "most popular" box.) I asked Zach Gage, an indie game designer whom Sam Anderson interviewed for his article (Sam describes Gage as "the Bon Iver to Rovio's Katy Perry, the artisanal free-range heirloom-turkey breeder to Zynga's factory farm"), what he thought of Huang's version of the game. "It's cool that he made a game that invades that space," Gage said. It forces you to reconsider - wow, this is going to come off really stupid or at least academic - but it forces you to reconsider the object that you're reading and what it is as a fundamental object. It's very easy to read The New York Times in print and read The New York Times online and think that reading The New York Times online is functionally the same. But it's not. It's really different. You're existing in a digital space that has other people in it and is a manipulatable experience. Anderson ends his article with his reflections on why games like Angry Birds and Drop7 are so alluring: Ultimately, I realized, these games are also about a more subtle and mysterious form of wall-building: the internal walls we build to compartmentalize our time, our attention, our lives. The legendary game designer Sid Meier once defined a game as, simply, "a series of interesting choices." Maybe that's the secret genius of stupid games: they force us to make a series of interesting choices about what matters, moment to moment, in our lives. So go ahead. Choose which part of The Times's site you want to blow up.