Time for a New Word Order

I spent a long time last night just laying in bed - nearly eight hours, it seemed. But for too much of that time I was engulfed in a mental maelstrom of humanity's rapidly expanding options for cataclysmic end. Visions of an inexplicably infiltrative al-Qaeda, basement-brewed bio-attacks, and the deepening connection between the global powers-that-be and rogue states whose long-term ambitions starkly counter our own swirled in my head and filled me with a dread I haven't felt since I had night terrors as a child.

Then I discovered Scramboni! New, for your iPhone!

Unlike a lot of other iPhone games, Scramboni! takes advantage of the iPhone's blazing 3G speeds to enter a linked-in world of live gameplay with other Scramboners from parts of the world far and wide, like our power-hungry military-state antipode Russia and its rapid regression to Soviet-era tactics, with calculated, unprovoked aggression and near-limitless resources which portend what seems like inevitable world warring. Or Peru!

The strategy is as simple as the Word Jumble in the newspaper you don't read - rearrange the scrambled letters that appear on screen to form a word. But speed is the name of the game (colloquially, at least). You have thirty seconds, and after time elapses, find out where you placed among thirty-or-so other simultaneous participants. There's twenty rounds of edge-of-seat anxiety, uncannily mirroring the Middle East tensions of a US-backed Israel stalemated against a bravado-strong, uranium-enriched Iran which key strategists foresee ending unavoidably in de facto genocide.

Scramboni! also logs your personal high scores, so go ahead and try to beat yourself, just as America finds itself entrenched in an ongoing soul-search to determine nothing less than which national ideology will prevail - imperial hawkism under the veil of Christian mandate, or a more geopolitical approach that seeks to curb the increasing social fragmentation and the intrinsic woes that follow. I'm up to 550!

There are three levels of difficulty in Scramboni!, but you need to earn a certain number of points to move up to the higher levels. It's as though the game is protecting you, like a system of governance that works by proxy with your best interests in mind. Sure, the freedom to hop right in to Level 3 and attempt to decode "imosmlybs" to "symbolism" in 10 seconds has some theoretical virtue, but haven't we reached a point where acting on behalf of the whole's agreed-upon needs outshines the chaos of being beholden to a single individual's whimsy?

Scramboni! is a free application you can find in your iPhone's App Store. Also try Amateur Surgeon, $4.99 from [adult swim games].