Candy Crush

Last month my husband and I were visiting a friend for a week, and one day, while the two of them were busy with something else and the wi-fi was down, it suddenly occurred to me that I could play a game on my mobile phone. I've been a PC gamer for most of my life, but for all that, I've been oddly resistant to playing games on other devices. I don't have any inherent objections to the concept, it's just always felt inferior to me somehow. However, that day, the time was right.

I browsed the Google Play store for a bit, initially thinking of playing something "sophisticated" like a strategy game, but everything I looked at just made me think: This looks like it could be a fun game on PC, but with a hundred mobile nuisances tacked on. So eventually I just gave up and decided to find something that seemed uniquely suited to the smart phone as a medium, something that I was never going to play on my PC anyway: a puzzle game. One of the first ones to come up was the infamous Candy Crush.

To be fair, I immediately found it fun! It starts out with some simple match-three mechanics and then gradually introduces things like special candies and combos that add complexity and make you think. However, I could also see that there were a million ways in which the game was trying to get you to spend money, and I immediately vowed to myself that I was going to stay a completely free player. Even with individual purchases being incredibly cheap, it was easy enough to see that with how quickly you're flying through the levels, and with the game supposedly having more than one hundred thousand of them nowadays, even paying for just a small booster or extra move here or there could quickly add up.

I never wavered on that - however, thinking that this would make me inherently immune to the game's predatory mechanics was a mistake. Seriously, it pulls so many different levers to make you feel bad about giving up or to make you feel less bad about buying your way to victory, I'm sure you could write a whole thesis about everything that goes on in this game alone, but the truly insidious thing is that you notice all that and think "hah, I'm not falling for that" but because there's so much going on, there's likely something you don't notice that will eventually get its hooks into you.

In my case it was the competitive aspect, as the game will constantly enter you into "contests" against other players that offer rewards that you'd otherwise only be able to buy with real money, specifically the gold bar currency required to buy extra moves. All these contests require is that you pass a certain number of levels faster than other players.

The thing that got me there was that I figured, if I win enough contests, I keep getting gold bars for free, which means I can use them to get me past difficult levels faster, which means I win more contests faster and so on! I felt really clever for looking at it like that, and at first it did go quite well for me. However, they do seem to add more harder levels as you go up in numbers, which meant that I had to spend more gold bars faster to keep winning, and soon my outgoings couldn't keep up with my free earnings, which meant I just had to fail and wait for the timer to give me more free lives so I could try again.

And honestly, I got a bit obsessive with that! The game played right into it as well, as on two Sunday afternoons in a row, it decided to give me four hours of unlimited lives for free, which meant I could just keep bashing my head against the hard levels over and over to still win some contests. My husband just made fun of me, but eventually it hit me that the game was starting to feel like a chore, with me feeling like I "had" to fire it up every few hours to make some progress in an attempt to win the next contest.

I eventually snapped out of it and was so annoyed with myself that I considered uninstalling the game entirely, but ultimately decided against it for now since I did still find it fun to do a bit of puzzling on the train sometimes for example. I did however have to train myself be patient enough to pass each level without boosters, even if that meant failing dozens of times over the course of several days, and to ignore the contests - which the game makes very hard by the way, as they'll forcibly pop up all the time.

It was just a bit of a wake-up call to see this kind of predatory monetisation for myself for the first time... and seeing it makes it all the more silly to me when PC gamers complain about things like a game having a straightforward subscription fee.