Neuroscience: Amateur Hour

Episode 4: The Neuroscience of Candy Crush and Other Mindless Match-Three Timesucks

January 12, 2022 Neuroscience: Amateur Hour Season 1 Episode 4
Neuroscience: Amateur Hour
Episode 4: The Neuroscience of Candy Crush and Other Mindless Match-Three Timesucks
Show Notes Transcript

They dominate the doctor's office waiting room, the bus ride home, any spare few minutes in our lives that we want to fill with something low-effort and mindless. What are they? Mobile games like Candy Crush Saga and other mindless match-three timesucks. Listen now to learn about how these games are engineered to hack into your brain to make them easy to get into, satisfying to play, and impossible to put down. 

If you have any comments, questions, concerns, queries, or complaints, please email me at NeuroscienceAmateurHour@gmail.com or DM me at @NeuroscienceAmateurHour on Instagram. Citations and relevant papers below: 

Dockterman, E., Candy Crush Saga: The Science Behind our Addiction, TIME, November 13, 2013


Fruhlinger, J., Candy Crush Addiction is Real - and Can Lead to Destructive Results, Observer, (2019). 


Soroush, M., Hancock, M., Bohns, VK., Self-Control in Casual Games: The Relationship between Candy Crush Saga (™) players in-app purchases and self-control. IEEE Games Media Entertainment, Conference Paper (2014). 


Larche, C., Musielak, N., Dixon, M., The Candy Crush Sweet Tooth: How “Near-misses’ in Candy Crush Increases Frustration, and the Urge to Continue Gameplay, Journal of Gambling Studies (2016). 


Madigan, J., Why You Don’t Burn out on Candy Crush Saga, Psychology of Video Games (2013). 


Perez-Truglia, R., On the causes and consequences of hedonic adaptation, Journal of Economic Psychology, Volume 33, Issue 6 (2012). 


Camgoz, N., Yener, C., Guvenc, D., Effects of hue, saturation, and brightness: Part 2: Attention. Color Research and Application, Volume 29, Issue 1 (2003). 


Madore, J., Wagner, A., Multicosts of Multitasking, Cerebrum, (2019).


Duverge, G., Insert More Coins: The Psychology Behind Microtransactions, Touro University Worldwide (2016).



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Good morning! My name is Barbara and this is Neuroscience: Amateur Hour. 


Thank you so much for tuning back in! 



Today I want to talk about candy crush and all other match-three mindless time sucks that we have all played at least once in our lives. These games dominate the doctor’s office waiting room, the bus ride home, any spare few minutes we have that we want to fill with something low-effort and empty-headed. My personal vice is the Tuscany Villa Match 3 Decoration Game. I am just a sucker for interior design. 


If you are one of those people that says - I never play those games, know that I admire you greatly and that you are definitely in the minority. Candy Crush was (as of 2019) the most popular mobile game in the world. I looked up the most popular games in 2021 and while Candy Crush was up there in the top 10 -  I’m pretty sure the most popular mobile games were PubG, Among Us (oh a throwback to early quarantine), and Pokemon Go so maybe we’re starting to drift away from the obnoxious and brightly colored candies. 


At any rate, you can’t ignore the fact that everyone and their mother plays some sort of Candy Crush or its differently-themed clone. All of these games have the same addictive engine driving gameplay with different skins overlaid on top. That way they appeal to as many different audiences as possible, whether you like decorating hotel rooms, drifting through Atlantis, or farming some veggies. 


These games fill what Adam Alter, author of the book “Irresistible” calls “time slack”, the five hours or so during the day that don’t need to be spent doing anything else such as working or sleeping, or eating. Most of us spend those hours watching Netflix, spending time with friends, with family, and children, engaging in our hobbies, and playing silly games. 


It’s also important to remember that these games are wildly profitable. In 2018, players of Candy Crush spent an average of 4.2 million dollars a day. A DAY. ON CANDY CRUSH SAGA ALONE. And that number was up from the year before and up from the year before that. Candy Crush and its lookalikes have made their owners trillions of dollars. 


And for something so simple, these games are engineered to tap into your brain to keep you coming back for more. They are easy to get into, satisfying to play, and impossible to put down.


These games are built on a couple of basic foundations. 


First of all they make you wait. You get five opportunities and once you run out, you have to wait a significant amount of time for another life. It creates a pretense of scarcity and instills a sense of wanting. It also prevents you from binging the game and promptly getting tired of it. 


Not only is this game dynamic a means of forcing users to pay to play but is also an example of cheating hedonic adaptation.


Hedonic adaptation is the principle that we get used to nice things over time until they are no longer as pleasurable. 


Nature has evolved an incentive system of prizes and punishments in our brains to drive human beings to be better versions of themselves. We are rewarded for eating nutritious food, for drinking good, clean water, for making children, and generally taking care of ourselves and propagating our bloodlines. Similarly, we are punished for eating things that could harm us or engaging in destructive behaviors. 


When we do something beneficial or detrimental- our brains need to provide an intense enough sensation to fulfill their warning/defense roles. When you eat something good for you, your brain sends a signal telling you to continue doing that behavior. But think about what happens if you repeat that behavior over and over again - your new “rewarded” sensation becomes the new baseline. 


Since our neurological reward systems are adaptable - our representations of specific rewards can “jump back to baseline”, making things that were previously pleasurable - less pleasurable with increased consumption. 


For those of us, like me who sit here panicking about whether I can ever enjoy anything ever again, please know that multiple studies have shown that taking breaks increases your enjoyment when you come back to the activity. 


This is the fundamental reason that Candy Crush and similar games limit the amount of time you can spend playing the game at any one time. They prevent your reward systems from treating the rewarding experience of matching candies or “leveling up” as a new baseline and no longer finding it an enjoyable experience. THEY’RE HACKING YOUR BRAIN. 


Another classic Candy Crush game dynamic is bright colors that grab your attention and keep it. The words are positive like “Sweet” or “Delicious” or “Amazing” and when you finish a level or a puzzle, you receive some affirmation, the game telling you - Good job! You did it!


The bright colors may evoke childhood memories of CandyLand or other comforting toys. But in general, bright colors and high contrasts are known to grab attention. A study out of South Bank University in London, England, and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey asked participants to view a color square on a colored background of various hues, saturations, and brightness and determine which attracted their attention the most. Participants consistently stated that colors of maximum saturation and brightness attracted the most attention. Match three games use these bright colors to keep your eyes glued to the screen and your attention on the game. 


The game also affirms you with every win and every loss, firing up that good good dopamine reward pathway. When I say reward pathway - I mean the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. When you experience something rewarding, a brain region called the VTA releases the neurotransmitter dopamine onto another brain region - the nucleus accumbens which forms circuits with other regions such as the amygdala - responsible for tying experiences to emotions and the hippocampus which regulates memory. 


Furthermore, this game is partially designed to be played one-handed, meaning you can do it at a family dinner, while you’re holding onto a pole on the subway or holding onto your prescription in the waiting room. It forces you to multitask, to split your attention between your commute/job/moment and the game. 


One famous example was when MP Nigel Mills who defended a majority in the Derbyshire Seat of Amber Valley in the UK was caught playing candy crush for two hours during a House of Commons committee hearing about pension reforms. 


There isn’t much evidence that we can effectively multitask in the first place, or more specifically we inflate our abilities to multitask. We can shift our attention from idea to idea or object to object but we can’t place our attention on two objects at once. We do “quote-unquote” multitask often - whether it's driving to work and listening to a podcast such as this one or listening to music and going about our workday but at the core, our brain has evolved to execute one task at a time. 


There are several brain regions and networks thought to be involved in executive control and sustained attention. The first of these is the frontoparietal control network which supports the coding of a task goal and the selection of task-relevant information. When we approach a task, a goal representation in the frontoparietal control network is thought to guide attention allocation to select the information that is relevant to achieve the task goal. This action is mediated by another network called the dorsal attention network -  the DAN if you will - which helps to process relevant information and filter out irrelevant information. 


Thus having multiple task goals places greater demand on these networks which are in turn limited in their capacities. Competing streams of information may disrupt the execution and performance of another task. 


Attention and executive control networks are a huge body of research and I am 110% doing another episode that is gonna delve deeper into this topic because it is so so so cool. 


Finally, I would argue the most addictive game mechanism is that there’s always something more and you feel like you’re about to get there. There’s always another level, another design challenge, another swipe to do. You never get stuck in the game. If the board runs out of match-three options - it immediately reshuffles and you can keep swiping. And when you run out of lives, you get frustrated. 


Games like candy crush bank on your feelings of frustration. Think back to the last time you played a level and you can see that you’ll finish the level in just one or two moves and all of a sudden - bam - you’re out of moves. Those kinds of “near-miss” outcomes are also prevalent in other addictive games like slot machines. Imagine getting 2 out of 3 bananas you need to hit that jackpot. 


Gambling institutions have long known that near-misses have been shown to invigorate participation despite other frustrating outcomes. Because a near-miss reflects a thwarted goal, it tends to promote a negative emotional experience. Players will rate a win as being pleasant and near-misses are unpleasant and even more aversive than normal losses. This is measured by looking at the amount of time between the player being informed of the outcome (a win, loss, or a near-miss) and their choice of starting the next game. After a win, players would wait a significantly longer time than a near-miss where they would start a new game almost immediately. This is thought to help overcome the unpleasantness of a thwarted victory. 


Much of this research has been conducted in connection to gambling and slot machine players but researchers out of the University of Waterloo examined the heart rate, sweat level, arousal, and frustration levels of Candy Crush players to look at whether near-misses to leveling up increased the urge to keep playing. 


They found that yeah - Candy Crush did result in an elevated heart rate compared to the baseline indicating that playing is an exciting, arousing experience. And as predicted, near-misses in Candy crush produced significantly higher levels of arousal compared to regular losses. The frustration of a near-miss is highly motivating to keep playing, potentially even more so than a win because a “win” could be considered a natural stopping point. 


While the game algorithms are undoubtedly a company secret, I do believe there is some sort of game engineering that occurs to increase the number of “near misses” players experience. Candy Crush is meant to and successfully make a shit ton of money by capitalizing on the fact that when people get frustrated, they’ll spend money to keep playing. At the moment, these microtransactions are only $1 or $5 but over time they can add up. 


In fact, in May 2018, a petition with over 10,000 signatures asked British MP’s to discuss the idea of loot boxes and microtransactions in relation to UK gambling legislation. This tie between these games and gambling doesn’t come out of nowhere. At their core, Candy Crush and its look-alikes build off the same neurological principles and game mechanisms that are engaged during gambling behavior and addiction.


Consequences of long term candy crush gaming:


Given the increasing popularity of free-to-play and casual games, some researchers have sought to investigate the effects of being faced with frequent purchase decisions within these games on players. Theories of self-control suggest that people have limited resource pools of self-control and facing frequent frustration and purchasing decisions may deplete this resource. I found a paper out of the University of Waterloo which investigated various factors impacting player behavior, specifically focusing on self-control. They observed that the more time players spent on in-app purchases correlated with lower levels of self-control. However, they also observed that purchases and self-control levels were not significantly correlated with the amount of time people play, game addiction, or problem video game playing. 


Thus, increased exposure to purchase decisions in Candy Crush is related to lower levels of self-control but is not related to gaming addictions. 


In summary, candy crush is a fun new form of gambling. A game engine wrapped in a variety of pretty packages that have been specifically engineered to hijack your basic neurological foundations. Deceptively simple, they have a few basic game mechanics such as bright colors, forced waiting, and built-in frustration that keep your eyes glued to the screen and you coming back for more. 


In small amounts, there’s nothing wrong in taking your mind off of the many things that keep you busy in your life but I do want you to know how these games operate and how they’re meant to get inside your head. 


But that is a bite-sized overview of the neuroscience of candy crush and other match-three games! I hope that you enjoyed the episode and you learned something new! I’ve cited all my relevant sources and papers in the show notes and you should keep an eye out on Instagram for some cool figures I think are pertinent. 


Please rate and review and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, queries, or complaints please email me at neuroscienceamateurhour@gmail.com or DM me at NeuroscienceAmateurHour on Instagram. This podcast is available on pretty much any platform I can think of so please recommend it to your friends and loved ones! Also if you have something you really want to learn about - please contact me and you’ll probably see an episode about it soon!


Happy researching! Hope to see you again soon!