Whatever the case, there’s something weirdly, maddeningly compelling about Cat Condo. Or perhaps we just appreciate the honesty. It’s perhaps a measure of how conditioned users have become to trading their time for content that the app can be this transparent about its motives and still appeal to us. There’s nothing strategic about Cat Condo. Even Neko Atsume, though, involves some measure of strategy: choosing what food to buy your virtual cats, working out which toys attract which cat, how to expand your yard, etc. In this respect, it’s reminiscent of another peaceful, cat-themed game: Japanese hit Neko Atsume.

In fact, there’s something soothing about its simplicity. But it doesn’t have the wildly addictive gameplay and disproportionate feedback of, say, Candy Crush Saga or Angry Birds.

What does this say about us? What does it say about me? There’s been plenty written about exactly why certain types of games are addictive, and Cat Condo certainly ticks some boxes: pattern recognition, imposition of order, a compulsion loop. But the real key to building your virtual cat collection is watching ads. You can also part with real money to upgrade your carriers and to speed up their arrival. Each cat you collect provides an ongoing source of in-game currency, which can be used to buy higher-level cats. Lunatics like me, however, who can’t get enough cats – virtual or otherwise – will be delighted to know there are ways to short-circuit the process. Objectively, this is absurd: studies suggest the average person can tap about six times a second, meaning if you did nothing else but tap your screen as fast as you could, forever, it’d take about 2,905 years to reach cat #40.Īt this point, a sensible person might put down the phone and, I don’t know, read a book or something. More cats than there are galaxies in the observable universe. In total, there are 40 special cats to collect, which means that to access the final, god-level cat, you’d need to collect 2^39 of the original small white cats.

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