If you’ve ever watched a grown, adult human wile away hours playing Candy Crush you’ll know that iPhone apps can be seriously addictive. We won’t even touch on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, the full effects of this digital dependency may only be felt generations down the line.

The latest app causing a stir overseas is the brainchild of Siqi Chen, a game of sorts called ‘Stolen’ that has proven to be massively popular. This from Fortune:

The game is easier to experience than it is to describe, but I’ll try: Users pay with virtual currency to “steal” other users from each other. I can “own,” say, Barack Obama, or my colleague Daniel Bentley, or Fortune magazine, if I build up enough virtual currency through the game to steal them. (You can earn the currency by playing the game, or you can buy it.) It’s a free-form mix of a stock market, a Facebook poke, and baseball trading cards, with lots of fun, flashing gold coins. People choose who they want to “own” for any number of reasons – bragging rights, a bet on someone’s price going up, a way to show off their taste, or to mess with their friends.

So who is fetching the highest price? Come on, you know already don’t you…

It’s integrated with Twitter so users can “steal” their favorite celebrities. The beta testers loved it; the price for accounts like Justin Beiber skyrocketed.

Some numbers to make the mind boggle:

Stolen’s servers are getting 10,000 requests (actions in the app) per second. Next-day retention, an important metric in the era of fickle app users who never return, is 90%. Chen has never seen anything like it, even during the heyday of Farmville at Zynga.

Where to from here for the app that could cause workplace productivity to grind to a halt?

The next step is to add moderation to the chat section of the app. Chen believes that the community will be the most important part of the app in the long term, but it will turn into a cesspool of Internet awfulness without proper moderation. Stolen also needs basic functions like search, optimizing to save phone batteries, and the ability to purchase the game’s digital currency.

At present you still need a code to play the game, which are being sold online for a pretty penny, but designers are trying to have it up and running by the end of January.

[source:fortune]