America has had a technological revolution. Everywhere we go, the smartphone is ubiquitous, though you didn’t need me to tell you that. The firm eMarketer released data in August 2011 stating that half of all phones in the country were smartphones. While they make all of our lives much easier and much closer to the world of The Jetsons, they also bring with them a curse: the app game.

    Angry Birds, Temple Run, Fruit Ninja, Tetris, Bejeweled, Need For Speed, the list goes on. These games were designed specifically for smartphone users to be played quickly and on the go. Those two qualities ruin them and video games as a whole. Today, video games are special; they can be literary, gorgeous, visceral, enthralling, and many other adjectives once only used to describe Academy Award nominees and Pulitzer Prize winners. That a game can achieve those merits is a new idea to most, but very true. In fact, video games are so much a part of American media that an entire field of academia has sprung up to study them – ludology.

    The games of today are high-level, complex interactions between a person and a story. Whether controlling a soldier along battle-ravaged streets in Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 or assassinating a Renaissance Pope in Assassin’s Creed, video games allow players to experience narratives in a new and satisfying way. Instead of reading about how the assassin used a sword to take out his target, you become the assassin and must do it yourself. Not bad for an industry only about half a century old.

    So video games spend fifty years growing increasingly more sophisticated and more meritorious and seem to be doing pretty well. But one day, some upstart business exec notices the throngs of people carrying around smartphones and other app-enabled devices (re: everything) and decides to cash in on them. Now, the big video games aren’t the decade-spanning tales of revenge like Assassin’s Creed; the really big-selling games are like Temple Run, which has sold over twenty-million copies. To put that into perspective, Modern Warfare 3 was "record-shattering" for selling about ten-million copies.

    Instead of video games continuing on the path to real recognition, maybe even being considered art in some cases, the medium has become a distraction for commuters; an entertaining way to pass a lazy day at work; a way to discreetly have fun in class or elsewhere. And for what? There’s no prize, no resolution, no denouement at the end of Temple Run. When you lose a game of Temple Run, you start a new one. And that’s it. With the convenience of app games, we deny ourselves the experience of the games that might actually be remembered one day. When there are games like Bioshock, which explores the philosophy of Ayn Rand through adventuring around a ruined utopia, why do we choose games like Fruit Ninja?