Candy Crush Saga, an experiment

A few weeks ago, for the first time, I opened up Candy Crush Saga on Facebook, just to see what the deal was. I was careful to check the "only me" box that would guarantee that no one would see my progress in their (or my) feed, and, of course, I always blow past the "Invite Your Friends" box that keeps coming up.

The game is basically Bejeweled, except that you can only play five unsuccessful games when your log is "full." Otherwise, you have to wait 30 minutes to get one more game, or you can send games (or "lives") to friends and have them send lives back to you.

I'm finished now, and have some thoughts on the whole thing.

First of all, after playing for a bit, I realized something about me that I think is true in my life at large: I didn't care much how many "stars" I earned in a game. I just wanted to complete the level and move the heck on. You can earn between one and three stars per level, depending on how many points are scored. So, for me, I just want to complete the level. I don't care that 18 of my friends did better than I did.

If I'm passionate about something, I will excel at it. I'm apparently not passionate about Candy Crush Saga. I just wanted to best the level and go on to the next.

Secondly, I don't like bothering people. I'd send lives and moves and requests to people I knew played often, but I'd never have sent anything to someone who hadn't already interacted with me or with Candy Crush Saga within the past two weeks.

I certainly didn't want to brag on anyone's wall, especially when I passed a friend who is deceased.

Third, although the game gets "harder," you don't have necessarily to get better. About 85% of the game is your luck in the way that the candy pieces fall when others are removed. Once you get through the first couple of episodes or whatever the groups of levels are called, you rely on the combination of candies you get a lot more than your skill level.

In fact, that's why I stopped playing.

Level 86

Don't worry about what this means, if you're not familiar. With 35 moves, there is no way to clear this board without at least two of whatever the brown bombs with sprinkles are, ideally three of them. With so few candy pieces in place, lining up 5 of any kind is extremely rare. When you get down to about 15 moves and haven't broken any of the pieces you have to break twice (after clearing the licorice, so really three times), you *know* you aren't going to make it, and the rest of the round isn't fun or challenging; it's just moving stuff around until you can clear the screen for a new run at it.

One of my "things" was that I would not spend money on a Facebook game. Without buying more moves, or advantages, this level just took too long for them to decide to reward me with enough of the same-color combinations to be able to advance, so I stopped.

I did it on four or five other levels... Where I'd know it was impossible, given the number of moves, to make any progress clearing only three blocks at a time. But I could tell from playing a time or two that it was likely that, in fairly short order, the right combinations could happen. This one just wouldn't budge, and I don't need something frustrating to do over and over again on the computer as long as there's a thing called housework.

I think I got the highest score on a couple of levels at least, but the scores are also something that is seriously random, again based on what pieces the computer decides to throw at you. Often, I'd play and clear the board, but have a few moves left, and it just keeps playing things out, throwing your score higher and higher... And I had nothing to do with that.

In the final analysis, I am going to sign up for Luminosity, I think. If I want to play games, I'd like for them to have some purpose. Candy Crush Saga is okay for killing time when I'm on the phone, or just to blow off a little mental steam between thinking about ugly maths and stuff... But in the end, it wasn't ever really fun, except for a couple of levels that had a lot of movement due to wormholes. It was just something to conquer to move on to the next level to conquer to move on to the next level.

But that's just me. Nearly 47 million Facebook users can't be wrong.