Ditch Tinder for these smartphone games

When all else fails, there's always phone games. Photo / Getty Images

By Ruth Spencer

None of us use our phones to speak to people anymore, but we're only just beginning to appreciate all the ways they can get us out of living our lives entirely. One of the best of these is the phone game. Call it a hobby, a creative outlet, or the reason all your friends turned up for the "intervention", phone games are here to stay. And no wonder: look closer at the popular ones and you'll see they reflect our deepest hopes and fears.

Candy Crush Saga

Put lollies together, they disappear. We see the truth of this at every child's party, but Candy Crush speaks to us as a nation, too. What could be more relatable to New Zealand, the Land of the Long Lost Lolly? Snifters and Tangy Fruits have already vanished from our sweaty, multi-coloured palms. Jaffas and Pineapple Lumps threaten to become crushed candy too, moving offshore in what is most definitely a saga. Maybe the loss will ultimately help us give up the sweet stuff, but sugar is harder to quit than a Brokeback cowboy and it's difficult to imagine Stevia Crush Saga catching on.

Temple Run

A game in which you run for your life along the ruins of an ancient civilisation, so a bit like jogging the terrifying shared-use path on Auckland's proposed East-West Connection. Temple Run allows you to run forever if your reflexes are sharp enough, so finally all that blow your celebrity hairdresser gave you is going to come in handy. You'll swipe left or right faster and faster to avoid catastrophe, so it's bound to speed up your Tinder game too.

Design Home

There are lots of great ways to lose money online. Gambling, ASOS and helping out Nigerian princes are all popular choices, but Design Home beats them all. It's a game in which you spend actual real money to buy pretend furniture for a beautiful home you will never own. If that wasn't insult enough, random internet people then criticise your design choices. It's like being an Auckland property shopper while also being Sally Ridge.

FarmVille

A game that really captures the essence of agriculture, it involves planting seeds and waiting. If your life is so out of control that virtual carrots seem like something you need to have, you can use your credit card to pay for your crops to arrive instantly, the very same economics that brings us July's $5 supermarket mangoes. If only we could have a sustainable, seasonal locavore version, perhaps called FarmersMarketVille. It could train us to save money and air miles, wintering frugally and flatulently on broccoli and experimental goat salami.

Angry Birds

The birds in Angry Birds catapult themselves at pigs who steal their eggs. It's a drama we saw play out earlier this year when the free-range eggs we thought we were buying turned out to have been stolen from prison-ranged chickens by exploitative swine. Unfortunately the majority of the country's hens live in cramped conditions; if their homes were any smaller they'd need a body corporate. It's no wonder they're angry birds.