It’s 3 a.m. and your English term paper is due the following night. You gather all of your notes and begin to write the paper, but before doing so, play a game of Snood.

It’s evident by the clock that you’ve spent hours playing and spent no time on the paper & you’ve become addicted to Snood.

David Dobson, a geology professor at North Carolina’s Guilford College and developer of the computer game, made the program for his wife.

“I thought my wife would like it,” Dobson said. “I never thought of selling it until, well, after I had done the first crude version and it seemed pretty fun.”

Snood is a computer game in which people use strategy to advance to new levels. Each game of Snood provides a different experience from the last, prompting game players to become addicted

“It is addicting,” freshman business major Gloria DeLeon said. “People have nothing else to do, so they play Snood because it takes them away from their college studies.”

Dobson said he is the sole originator of Snood. He used his skills to design the graphics, sounds and programming, also borrowing source codes from several Web sites.

When Dobson was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, he produced the first prototype of the game. Dobson was working on a puzzle game and planned to incorporate the Snood game into his program. Although he never finished it, his family enjoyed playing the Snood part of the program.

In 1996, Dobson released the first complete version of Snood for the Macintosh operating system. In 1998, Dobson released the Windows version.

“A lot of people compare it to Tetris or Bust-A-Move or Bejeweled, and it shares some characteristics with those games,” Dobson said. “I actually designed it to follow a solitaire card game model, where the games would be short and you’d have a chance to see how you did quickly.”

Dobson said that college students are addicted to Snood because of the environment college presents.

“College students have lots of unscheduled time, and they also have lots of stressful assignments, so Snood is sort of a procrastination enabler,” Dobson said. “I’m sure I’d have played it in college & I lost a lot of time to foosball and pinball and other video games.”

“There had been a number of neat little puzzle games out by then, including Minesweeper, Tetris, Bust-A-Move and others, and in the grand tradition of video game design, I borrowed heavily from these,” Dobson said. “I wanted to make a game like those that was fun but would be complex enough to hold people’s interest.”

Freshman business major Pradeep Jain said that Snood lets you compete with friends but also have fun at the same time.

“It’s a lot of fun, free if you don’t want to register it and it involves a little strategy,” Jain said. “It’s also easy and you can play for hours but the best thing about it is competing with your friends to get the highest score.”

Even though Dobson remains at his day job as a geology professor, he said that sales from registering the game are giving him more money than teaching.

“I remember my wife and I wondering if it would do anything, and we agreed that if we made enough money on it, to go out to a nice dinner, that would be great,” Dobson said. “It’s been really amazing seeing it catch on all around the world.”

Dobson said he is grateful to those who have registered and given him feedback.

“That has been one of the greatest parts of this whole thing, that something I did for fun to avoid writing my dissertation has made so many people happy, and that they send such nice comments,” he said.

Summed into a few words, Dobson said that Snood is a great way to forget about everyday life in a silly, meaningless and fun way to relax.

“It takes up too much time,” freshman business major Karl Koenigsberger said. “It’s just so addictive that if I play one game, I think to myself next time maybe I will get to one higher level so I keep playing.”

Registering the game allows the use of several features including play of unlimited games at all difficulty levels, custom difficulty settings and competition in tournaments with multiple players.