Candy Crush Saga: utilize the addiction commercially
The addiction to Candy Crush Saga is nothing new. The mobile social game had been doing business quite well. The game earned $568 million in 2013 and $1.19 billion in 2020. It had 273 million monthly active users by the third quarter, 2020.
Let’s see what in Candy Crush Saga makes gamers pay for this game.
The Candy Crush Saga is a mobile social game that came into the market in 2012 by King Digital Entertainment, Facebook. In 2016, Activision Blizzard acquired it for $5.9 billion. The game lets users switch and match their way through more than 9000 levels in 618 episodes on the HTML5 version (each episode has 15 levels except for Candy Town and Candy Factory, which only have ten each).
The game progressively offers tougher levels, helps during the process, praises player’s achievements, and a future concept. Players got rewards when they reached certain levels, in the form of a weapon to assist them in facing challenges at a tougher level.
classical conditioning
“The traditional hypothesis for classical conditioning is that the repeated pairing of a Conditioned Stimulus (CS) with an Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS) will cause the CS to elicit a Conditioned Response (CR) in an unconscious, automatic fashion” (Allen and Madden 1985, p. 3). For example, according to Pavlov’s experiment, a dog salivates at the sight of the food (UCS). Pavlov paired the food with sound — a bell or metronome (CS). The metronome is a stimulus; by itself, the metronome doesn’t elicit a response — salivation (UCR)- from the dog. Every time the dog saw the food, he would also hear the bell, and he salivates at the sight of the food. After a while, the dog salivates (CR) at the sound of the bell (CS). The food was not even necessary for the salivation to occur. To put it another way, the dog had learned an association between the metronome and the food, and he discovered a new behavior.
Candy Crush and classical conditioning
Game Level=CS; Win=UCS; Feeling of pleasure=UCR.
The first five episodes with 65 levels present a minimum to no challenge to the gamers, allowing them to form a habit of easy wins without realizing. Each game level (CS) brings a win (UCS). The opioid system in the brain releases the feeling of pleasure (UCR) with each win (UCS). After clearing a certain number of levels the gamer starts to sense pleasure (CR) as soon as they are exposed to a new level (CS), even when the game level is no more an easy win (UCS).
Rehman et al. (2021) suggest that humans learn through both unconscious and conscious pathways. Classical conditioning is one of the many cold learning methods. Classical conditioning is automatic, conditioned reply paired with explicit stimulus.
Designers use Classical conditioning to build habits in their users.
Operant Conditioning
BF Skinner explained the Operant condition as the behavior defined by consequences. Weinschenk explained two types of schedules: Interval schedule and ratio schedule. The schedule can have fixed variation. In the fixed interval schedule, the rat gets food after a specific time interval (the first time he presses the bar after 5 minutes is over). In the ratio schedule, the rat receives food after he presses the bar a certain number of times (after 10 bar presses).
The ratio and interval schedules can have variables variation, which means vary the time or ratio, but it averages out. For example, when the variable applies, you give food pallets sometimes 2 minutes after, sometimes 5 minutes after, but it averages out to 5 minutes; you provide a food pallet sometimes after two bar presses, sometimes after four, but it averages out to 5 bar presses. Therefore, there are four possible schedules: Fixed ratio; Variable ratio; Fixed interval, Variable interval.
Candy Crush applies a fixed and variable ratio schedule.
The mobile social game uses the operant condition effectively. The strategy in level 512 (twelfth level in Ice Cream Caves and the 143rd candy order level) has a fixed ratio schedule as the gamer must collect ten striped candies and 55 blue candies in 20 moves or fewer to pass this level. When he/she completes the level, Sugar Crush is activated and will score additional points.
The relationship between the game strategy and the operant condition pops up when we draw the comparison between collecting candies in 20 moves to pass the level vs. pressing the bar 10 times to receive food.
The number of candies and the number of moves are never the same in any two levels. That indicates the variable factor in the ratio schedule.
The variable factor makes the reward uncertain by having the gamer keep guessing about the complexity of the next level. Sometimes, uncertain rewards are more addictive and striking. The number of times of reinforcement (reward) decides the behavior’s increase. Those rewards are desired over confirmed rewards even though without significant change. Staddon and Cerutti (2003) stated that the behavior developed with Operant conditioning could be called habit.
As Weinschenk (2020) stated, most people make habits unconsciously and carry them out automatically; habit forms through small and easy tasks. For example, a message with a notification with each activity draws users quickly to the application. Apart from that, small physical activity like swipe on a cell phone, pressing a mobile button, and visual and auditory cues are also instrumental for habit-forming.
What Casino does: According to Harrigan (2009), The casinos use the operant condition for business quite well. The slot machine reinforces the gamblers with the win in the variable interval to keep them engaged while not having gambling house losing money.
Conclusion
The addiction to mobile gaming has many reasons. Addiction builds through habit, habit and change of behavior build through classical and operant conditioning. Gamers are impatient, especially when addicted; they pay to get to the next level.
References
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