Why we can't stop playing Candy Crush? The addictive 'Feedback'

This is a continuation to the previous blog "Is 'Addictive Technology' really making us healthier, social & more ?". This is the 2nd followup of A brief from the book 'Irresistible' by Adam Alter




Candy Crush - We just can't stop playing, can we? It generated more than $600,000 in revenue during its peak in 2013. The downloads range between 1/2 a billion to a billion people (surprisingly the majority are women, which is rare in previous such hypes). This too is a prime example in the phenomenon we will discuss today - feedback.

What Is Feedback?

Here our feedback mainly refers to things like 'a facebook like/reaction', 'the juice and chime when we complete a line on candy crush', 'comments on an article we write', 'when there is a sound on the screen while we play video games' etc. Different forms of feedbacks have been incorporated in the various virtual environments we operate in our digital lives. Most of them unconsciously control us.

Our journey to feedback has been very fundamental to us. Ever noticed a little child press all the buttons in the lift and brim after that? Feedback. Some of us still enjoy doing it. That is exactly why in marketing we have 'buttons' because they work and it is fundamental to our human nature. Previous campaigns by TNT Television, Reddit and many more have gone viral with this being their major success. Some campaigns we'll take up below.

The Pigeon Experiment

A pigeon experiment revealed the amount of dopamine released was much more when the reward was unpredictable. The pigeons seemed to peck frivolously (twice as often) when the reward (food) was unexpected. They pecked feverishly when the reward was success at 50-70% times (unpredictable) vs when the reward was once in every ten pecks(predictable). Pigeon gamblers much?
[Experiment by Michael Zeiler, psychologist]

The Reddit Campaign

Reddit posted a blog with button along with a timer. It said once the post was 10 minutes old the button would start the timer for 60 seconds and everytime a user clicked on the button, the timer would reset to 60 seconds. If all of Reddit users clicked the button, this would run for merely 66years. Rad I say!

Thousands of visitors clicked the button inspite of the fact this button had no value add in return. Users were shown different coloured badges for clicking between certain time frame eg. purple badge was shown to people who clicked between 52 to 60 seconds of timer count. This had people forming camps based on the badge colour which they wore with honor. Millions of people were bonded by feedback (a button).

The Facebook Like Button

This is the new gen crack cocaine ! Yes......welcome to being addicted to hitting that little button each time you are scrolling the digital addiction site. This too came about with an experiment with 200 million users at the time. Users could get real-time feedback on their posts, thoughts, photos with this little 'like button'. People like the pigeons were driven to the unpredictability of the 'like button', you never know how many likes it can garner. A zero like post is like a private humiliation, a social condemnation which means you either didn't have enough online friends or worse your online friends weren't impressed. This was so successful, it was followed by a startup called 'Lovematically'. It automatically liked posts that went through its feed and this was free. You no longer had to work for the real-time feedback. It went out so viral, instagram had get it shut down eventually after 2 hours from its major Valentine Day campaign under the 'Socail Network's terms of use'.

The Casino Case (Curious?)

The casinos use a 'loss disguised as win' psychology for gamblers to stick around. The longer the gambler is present in front of the screen / table of play, the more the casino makes money from it. The human gets tired after a string of losses and finally quits. So they measure a saturation point in each of these gamblers and at the saturation they manipulate the outcome to a 'loss disguised as win' and then the gambler keeps playing more and losing more. Loss disguised as win could simply be a coupon to free drinks at the casino or some credit to play more. This can merely be a fraction of the gamblers money invested in the play. Eventually the gambler's mind thinks he/she won a small bet at the 10th try, however logically it lost 9 tries and won a small fraction of it on the 10th.

The Candy Crush Saga

If you've played previous simple UI games, you may have noticed, making rows of similar blocks were a pattern in some old video games too. They didn't make the hype Candy Crush did. The reason is the little juice that differentiates candy crush from the others. When you form a matching line in candy crush saga, a sound with a flash of light and sometimes words of praise by Wizard of Oz are heard. This is the feedback element here.

The Virtual Reality Drug

Virtual Reality is going mainstream and should impact our lives majorly in a few years. It comes with some benefits but it also comes with some risks. The risks of us never wanting to leave a world as perfect as VR and stepping into the real one. Why live in a real world with flawed people when we can live in a perfect world that feels real ?