No one plays office politics just for fun – not even the types who read Machiavelli on the beach. But the developers behind a new iPhone app are hoping to change that.

In the game "Office Politics," players get promoted up the rungs of the corporate ladder by backstabbing as many co-workers as they can in a kind of cubicle whack-a-mole. Since manipulating co-workers hardly seems like the recipe for the next Angry Birds, Billy Shipp, vice president of "Office Politics" publisher Iddiction, says the company needed to take some poetic license.

"This is what games are good at," he says. "You take something that is stressful, complex, and unpleasant and give people a way to escape that reality. You re-contextualize the problem and provide a new way to interact with it." (There are no plans as of yet for DMV the game.)

In the game, when enemy employees have their backs turned, a simple tap of the thumb provides the fatal blow. Those facing forward need to be flipped around with a sideways swipe and stabbed (the same two-part touch screen move used to delete an email) before they hurl what appears to be crumpled laser-printer paper. Get hit enough times and the game is over.

"It was said that the office was once a peaceful and harmonious place," the game begins, "where everyone was kind to each other, where rainbows and marshmallows" could be seen everywhere. This nameless company's once pleasant culture turns toxic with the arrival of Arnold Chocolate Face, who pits employees against one another, shows favoritism and convinces the staff that hard work is no longer the path to success.