Apr. 22nd, 2014

davywavy: (toad)
Thanks to my computer going bang recently, I've been replaying a bunch of old games from way back when - I've got out Doom 2 and Jedi Academy and I've been slaughtering my way through them in a manner which would have been unthinkable to me the first time I played them. Demons and dark jedi are falling like wheat before the scythe before my wrath.
It got me wondering whether this is a result of my vaguely remembering the patterns of the games - "Oh, this is the scene with the cacodemon, I'll be needing the rocket launcher here", or whether the learning curve of computer games has got progressively harder over time meaning that my skills have been honed to the point where old games just don't challenge. I suspect a mixture of the two, as when I replayed Call of Pripyat a few months ago I found it easier but still got shot in the head by zombies on a reasonably regular basis.*

Anyway, I'm interested in pop-cultural stuff and the recent stock market flotation of King, the makers of Candy Crush, caught my eye. Candy Crush is a gaming phenomenon with millions of players, and a semi-ironic comment from an analyst on the market launch was that "to maintain their position all King have to do is keep making games as popular as Candy Crush" - a clearly highly unlikely achievement - caught my eye so I downloaded the game to have a play.
Candy Crush, in case you don't know, is a variant on the old Bejewelled/ "line up three or more of the same shapes to destroy them and progress" style of game, and what very quickly stuck me about it is that the learning curve is very shallow and success at playing it seemed to be more about luck (in getting the right shapes) than any particular skill.
As I played, I got increasingly interested in how the game is structured. It limits your progression by giving you a set number of lives every day (you can buy more), and whilst most levels you can beat with only a few tries every so often you'll hit a particularly tricky level where it can take days to finally win - if you play enough sooner or later you get lucky, the pieces land right and you can progress. When that happens you tend to go on a bit of a streak where you blast through several levels before you get bogged down again. You feel like you've got the game cracked for a while, and then suddenly you hit the grind once more.
All the time whilst this is going on, the game is offering you minor advantages easily available for a small sum of money - superpowers, more lives, replays and the like - to make beating that tricky level quicker and easier. Just hit the button to buy another go.
As I tried to get through a particularly tricky level where the pieces simply refused to fall to my advantage I found myself cursing the programmers. "Why", I thought to myself. "It's almost like it's in their financial interest to make the game not a test of skill, or even luck, but simply to dole out apparent success or failure in a manner designed to annoy me enough to get me to part with some cash".

And with that thought I immediately deleted Candy Crush from my phone. There's a lot of reasons I'll pay for games. I might think they're good, or enjoyable, or interesting. But because they're specifically designed to annoy me if I don't isn't one of them.



*Especially the time when I drank 213 bottles of vodka to find out what would happen.

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