now, tastes more like real life

Friday night I spent about an hour being mesmerized by a couple of guys I know playing this bizarre game called Katamari. The general point is that you are this little man running around with a little sticky ball thing that somehow manages to pick up everything in its path (as long as the things in the way are smaller than the ball itself). You have been instructed to do this by the King of All Cosmos, who is some strange purply gray guy/bootcamp instructor who mocks you for having katamari (that's the ball thing) that only get to be, say, 500 meters in diameter. If you don't complete your target (which you can set for yourself the way you'd pick out a workout on a treadmill) in the designated time, then you lose. If you complete your target, the katamari you made becomes something like a star or a moon.

Don't let me explain it to you though. Please read this Wikipedia entry about it. And while you do, think about this: who the hell sat down one day and said, let's make a game where you run around picking up erasers, piggy banks, squid, and white-out bottles until you make a sphere as big as the moon?

And more importantly, how did they know the game was going to be so addicting?

(Because as we speak I have the urge to play it again. I realized that it's a game I can actually play, because all it involves is the two toggles on the PlayStation 2 controller, which you can move in exactly three configurations. I can actually manage that simple of a video game.)