If Candy Crush and other games feel like insidious mind control devices, it's only because they
are.
Anthony Carboni here for DNews and Candy Crush is the current champ for most addictive to
the human population- it's got 93 million daily players and is installed on half a billion
people's phones.
You probably either play it and love it, or played it, hated it, and still played it longer
than you meant to.
What makes it so addictive?
Let's talk about the Skinner Box.
The Skinner Box is an experiment where some sort of animal in a small cage presses a lever
and gets a treat.
Or an electric shock.
Researchers can change how often a lever press results in a treat to do all kinds of things
to the animal- you could make it totally uninterested in the lever, or you could make it so the
animal obsessively presses it all the time.
And neither has to mean the animal doesn't get shocked.
Get where I'm going?
Every time you win in a game, your brain gives you a little bit of dopamine.
Some good reward feelings.
By keeping you winning early on and then making it harder and harder, games trigger some addictive
tendencies.
It also makes losing hurt- you want to go back to winning.
Winning was awesome.
Free-to-play games like candy crush require some sort of currency like lives or energy.
Lose all your energy and WHOOPS, you can't play for a few hours.
Unless you pay to do it.
This does two really nasty things to your brain.
If you don't pay for an extra turn, you're playing into something called hedonic adaptation.
Psychology of games wrote about an experiment- appropriately enough, involving candy.
Subjects were given a piece of chocolate to eat.
Then, half the group was told not to eat anymore chocolate for two weeks.
The other half was given two pounds of chocolate and told "Yo, enjoy this chocolate.
ALL OF THIS CHOCOLATE."
In two weeks, everyone was welcomed back and offered a piece of chocolate.
The people who abstained for two weeks loved the chocolate.
The people who were gorging for two weeks, unsurprisingly, weren't that into it.
By restricting your access to playing, Candy Crush makes you want to play it MORE.
But what if you're the sort of person who gorges themselves and pays for the extra turn?
You're probably experiencing gambler's fallacy.
That's the idea that the more you try something, the more the odds are that the outcome is
in your favor.
That's mathematically untrue.
If your odds of getting into a car accident are 1 in 10,000, it doesn't mean after 50
car rides your odds are 1 in 9,950.
They reset every time.
Pretty obvious.
But our brain gets confused when it comes to games because we believe in our talent.
Our brains go particularly crazy with activity for near-misses.
You got SO CLOSE to winning last time.
One more move and you would've had it- and you're so in the zone that if you pay the
$0.99 to skip the waiting period you'll win!
You know you'll win.
You probably won't.
Games use tricks like this to keep you in your little skinner box, paying $0.99 at a
time for a free game until you've spent way more that you would've to buy an expensive
one that wasn't full of this stuff.
Poor dumb brains.
There are games that use your brain's weaknesses for good.
Jane McGonigal, the author of Reality is Broken, created a site called SuperBetter that taps
into these same behavior reinforcements and habit-forming tendencies to make a game that
actually helps people make good habits and recover from injuries.
Apps like Habit RPG turn todo lists into roleplaying games where you get experience and level up.
(https://www.superbetter.com/ https://habitrpg.com)
I tend to obsessively play manipulative games like Candy Crush for a day or two and then
get rid of them forever.
What about you?
Do you fall for this stuff?
Let us know down below and don't forget to check out my other show Hard Science if you
dig builds and experiments.
This week we're making $20 cardboard boats and seeing which ones will keep the most people
afloat.
Its at YouTube.com/hardscienceshow.