Remember when certified public accountancy was cool? When People and Interview magazines profiled all those tragically hip, pretty-boy accountants who blazed through the profession with four or five brilliant tax returns – romantic, incandescent tax returns that defined a generation – then died young when an Aston Martin they borrowed from Peter Fonda flipped over near a ski resort?

OK, the preceding has been a joke. CPAs were never cool. But they never had to be. Once upon a time, a job merely had to pay well, be steady and otherwise support whatever sick things you did on your own time. Now a job has to attract high-strung fashion models and an occasional cult member.

For this or some other reason, the number of accounting students is dropping, and the 19,000-member Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants is trying to counter this by promoting a video game – sort of like if your dull but lovable uncle got his tongue pierced so he could impress 19-year-olds.

Located at www.cpazone.org, "CPA Career Adventure" supposedly tests accounting skills. That must be why it's set on a tropical island and involves poison frogs, tiki torches, volcanoes and other things that actual accountants use every day!

I mock this little video game test. I deride its exotic pretensions. And yes – of course – I failed it.

In the first game, you have a bunch of poison frogs set in a sort of grid. When you jump one frog over another, the frog that gets jumped over disappears. The idea is to get it down to just one frog, which, as the Web site points out, "requires planning and strategy, key attributes that CPAs provide for their organizations."

I figured I just couldn't plan well, since I kept ending up with, like, four frogs. Then I went back and read the instructions, and found out I could jump frogs vertically, horizontally or diagonally! This demonstrates another practice among accountants, reading instructions and understanding what they're doing – a habit that we journalists merely find tedious.

After this and each subsequent round, you read about an actual, live accountant and answer three multiple-choice questions about accountancy, with a few jokes thrown in just to put the "fun" back into the "fundamental principles of certified public accountancy."

In the second game, you have a torch. You have to move the torch away from falling raindrops or the torch goes out. What does this test other than the hand-eye coordination that allows accountants to explain tax law using only primitive grunts and hand gestures? According to the Web site, "CPAs steer companies away from pitfalls and toward success," just like a game player guides his tiki torch around the rain drops. This rationale is – to borrow a phrase my own accountant often uses when discussing my tax returns – "kind of a stretch."

So is the reason behind the next game. You catch a bunch of fish, requiring you "to be accurate and decisive" like accountants are, according to the Web site. And so, like an accountant, you line up the blue hoop of a net with the circle in the water where a leaping fish is supposed to land. I played five rounds without getting even half of a passing score, and I mean, my gosh, how do accountants take the stress of catching these fish all day?!

In the next game … the volcano monster is trying escape! You must trap it before it wreaks havoc! To do this, you pull levers in a certain order. This tests your ability to keep your cool and stay focused – as does the game after that, a sort of cryptogram in which you decipher words by matching letters to hieroglyphics. Once you finish that last game, you can begin an exciting career in accountancy – after four to six years of college and graduate school instruction that, one can only presume, will consist of more video games.

It's understandable but kind of too bad that accountancy has to tart itself up like that. The profession offers a variety of career tracks, from freelancer to CEO. It's a good job.

And the only drawback is that thousands of accountants each year are killed by the volcano monster.