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In the iPad game Crabitron, you are a giant crab in outer space. Naturally, you need to eat as many people as possible by deftly crushing their spaceships with your invincible claws. For some reason, eating people yields money, which giant space crabs apparently have a need for.
You'll accomplish this by pretending that two of your fingers on each hand are the claws. Dragging and squeezing on the screen manipulates the giant crab's stretchy arms.
It's immediately obvious, and incredibly hilarious. The game itself is little more than a clever twist on a classic 2-D shoot-'em-ups like Galaga, but the novelty of controlling a crazy-eyed crab with finger-pincers is wonderful, silly fun. You can upgrade your claws as well, equipping them with deadly spikes or increasing their crushing power. In between crushing spaceships and eating hapless travelers, there are fun little minigames to play.
But that's not why Crabitron is good.
Crabitron is fun in the way that making noises with your armpit or doing a bad impression of a politician is fun. Playing it will bring you back to 2008, when you'd just downloaded an "app" to your newfangled smartphone that made fart noises when you pushed a button. You'll show it to your friends, and you'll laugh, and they'll laugh.
Even the App Store page for Crabitron is clever. It features two review quotes, one of which is from Gabe Newell, president of Valve Software. Crabitron designer John Millard emailed Newell to tell him about his game, and Newell responded with a one-sentence reply: "I've always wanted to be a giant space crab." This quote is proudly posted at the top of the game's in-store description text.
Crabitron fits nicely into a sub-genre of touch-screen games that are fun specifically because they make us feel ridiculous. It's impossible to take yourself seriously when you're making hand-claws and pretending to be a giant space crab, just as slashing the squishy pears and melons in Fruit Ninja is childishly entertaining.
An older iPad game called Fingle took this same idea to a whole new level. That game is like an exceedingly sexualized two-player version of Twister that you play using just your fingers. The fun isn't in the rules but in how it makes you aware of what an idiot you look like.
Years back, artist George Kokkinidis took some photographs of the smudges he left on his iPad's screen after normal use of a few popular apps.
Each of the smudges told its own story: Kokkinidis' use of the mail app resulted in lots of evenly spaced out cubes of smudge on the bottom half of the screen (from the on-screen keyboard) and his tinkerings in Angry Birds left most of the smudginess in the bottom-left corner of the screen, where the slingshot would go.
I examined my iPad screen after playing a few rounds of Crabitron, and noticed tons of swirling figure eights, tracks left by my imaginary pincers. There probably aren't any other apps out there that would result in smudges like that.
In fact, if you were to play Crabitron in public, bystanders might assume that you were furiously zooming out of a Google Map, quickly soaring all the way to outer space. (Which, come to think of it, might actually be the first app that let us pretend to be space crabs.)
