KING SNAKE

Admit it: If you have a Windows-based PC, you've played Solitaire, Minesweeper and probably even Free Cell. You're not alone. A lot of people can't stop playing those time-consuming and utterly pointless games — even when they're away from their desks.

Nokia's Snake game has been installed on most of the company's handsets for years. For the uninitiated: Players direct a snake around a box, gobbling up bits of “food,” which makes the snake longer and more difficult to maneuver. Now a U.K.-based researcher has created a Web page dedicated to the little time waster.

Daniel Page's site (http://www.phoo.org/rant/rant-snake.html) leads off with an AA-inspired confessional: “My name is Dan, and I'm a Snake-a-holic.” He started playing Snake with his first Nokia 3210. Egged on by his roommate, Gavin, the “worryingly competitive” Page soon set off on a quest to be the first to break 1000 points. “Gav finally gave up, and I was crowned king of Snake in our flat,” Page said in an e-mail interview with Telephony.

Page is no slacker, mind you. A University of Bristol researcher, his work includes studies into improving security properties and performance characteristics of modern processors during cryptographic operations. So why is he wasting his time on Snake? “I thought the fact that the game is so simple yet has held the attention of countless people is interesting,” Page said. “That is more than some console games do these days. It is interesting that complex doesn't equal good, and is maybe why mobile gaming has a future after all.”

Though Page's battle with Snake addiction lasted only one week, he was so exhilarated after finally topping 1000 that he maintains digital photographic evidence of the event on his site, which also features his thoughts on the simple joys of the game. “The fact that people are sad enough to use their skills on a game which requires pressing four buttons at the right time as a way of getting one over on their mates is interesting,” he said. “OK, this is more sad than interesting, actually.”

Before you deluge the guy with e-mails bragging about your own Snake scores, however, keep in mind that he already knows 1000 isn't a world record. Indeed, Page — who claims to have not lapsed back into Snake-a-holism for some time, in part because he wrecked the buttons on his phone from overuse — believes he could go over 2000 points with the proper phone and enough training time.

“Some kid on the street claimed to have gotten over 5000,” he said. “But I think he was on performance-enhancing drugs.”