Tidying up things, in a way." Farmvilleįarmville. Also, you know the game Othello, right? A lot of the fun in that game is the exhilaration you get when you flip a lot of pieces and make more of the board your color. Most people would want to see those bumps removed, as a sort of equalising or 'beautification' process. "Let's say that you have a flat surface with some bumps sticking up out of it.
Game designer Hirokazu Yasuhara, who has worked on everything from Sonic the Hedgehog to Uncharted, put it like this in an interiew with Gamasutra:
From Tetris to Candy Crush to Threes, there is an instinctive satisfaction in correcting something broken, wonky or incomplete. Then of course, there's the simple innate desire to tidy up – to restore order. Providing lots of nudge buttons and other input options – together with flashing lights and sound rewards for successful implementation – fools us into thinking we are skilled players rather than victims of a very clever system. Gambling machines work in a similar way through a system psychologists refer to as "the illusion of control". The game congratulates us for our skill, even though such "combos" are often simply fortuitous – but our brain gets a pleasure rush anyway. In Candy Crush Saga, a successful move is accompanied by flashing colours, upbeat music and affirming words like "delicious", which appeal directly to our reward receptors.Īt the same time, successful moves will often trigger a sequence of subsequent onscreen colour matches, which multiply the effect. Our brains have complex reward circuitry that can easily be triggered by an influx of pleasing feedback. Reinforcement is a key element of the compulsion loop – and in this case, the loop is so tight, it's difficult to escape.Īnother compulsive element of these games is something game designers call "disproportionate feedback" and its something borrowed from slot machines. In Candy Crush Saga, risk, reward and opportunity combine into a smooth and cohesive system, so that we're getting constant pleasure hits, and therefore constant cravings for more. Indeed, critics of Candy Crush often allude to it as glorified Skinner box, referring to psychologist BF Skinner who experimented with variable reward systems on rats. On top of this, the game is based around very tight systems of reinforcement, the idea that behaviours can be encouraged if a pleasurable stimulus is provided. So scanning the Candy Crush screen for possible colour matches is in itself pleasurable. Our brains love to search for systems and sequences in the world around us it is our primary method of reading our environment. Behind the compulsion loop in Candy Crush are two important psychological motivations: pattern recognition and reinforcement. Zuma, Bejeweled and Jewel Quest work in exactly the same way.Īll of these games are based around an extremely effective compulsion loop – the sequence of events that underpin most game design systems: you perform an action, you are rewarded, another possibility opens – and so on. This hugely successful title belongs in a genre known as "match three puzzlers", because it's all about getting three or more similarly coloured objects together within a constrained playspace.
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