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"  As I was spending the first few hours of the day contemplating the ten optional answers for the question &amp;quot;What was the best announcement from the iPhone 3.0 OS Event?&amp;quot; on the Gizmodo liveblog, it struck me that none of the promised new features \u2014 copy-and-pasting, turn-by-turn GPS, search capability \u2014 are ever likely to mean as much to me as the app for skee ball. Which is a game so primitive that it was anachronistic even when it was relevant.  In real skee ball, you roll something like a bocce ball up a ramp and into an array of holes for points. It&amp;#039;s like bowling for children. Small children. Toddlers even. Ones whose gross motor skills aren&amp;#039;t coming along as fast as you&amp;#039;d like. And it&amp;#039;s pretty much the same for iPhone skee ball (it&amp;#039;s an app called Arcade Bowling, $1.99 at the App Store.). You use your finger to flick the ball up a ramp. Points are tallied. Your game either continues or it&amp;#039;s over. The sound effects are basically &amp;quot;hard sphere rolling over plywood.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s mindless, fun, and nostalgic. And it represents a kind of archaica. Archaica has been around for years, of course (I mean, it started with the first Macintosh desktop), but the iPhone has pushed the idea further back in time and simplicity \u2014 beyond just metaphorical representations of anachronistic things (like files on a desktop) to a kind of hyper-naturalism. The Labyrinth app (Labyrinth, $2.99) has an interface that looks and sounds like a Labyrinth board. The Pong app looks like table-top Pong (Classic Qong Arcade, $1.99). And those are just games. The notepad app looks like a legal notepad. The YouTube app&amp;#039;s icon looks like a vacuum-tube television. A full-text book app (Classics, $2.99) has an interface that looks like a bookshelf in your grandmother&amp;#039;s house. Archaica doesn&amp;#039;t just make the iPhone fun and accessible. It makes it comforting. And satisfying. But not satisfying like peer-to-peer connectivity. Satisfying like pinball (Pinball, ninety-nine cents).  RELATED STORIES: PROFILE: Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible CRITICISM: Five Things the iPhone Needs REVIEW: Grand Theft Auto IV and the Never-Ending Story "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5721/iphone-games-032009/>