Why Candy Crush
Look, I don't play ALL the time, but I admit dabbling with the smartphone/tablet game. I'm terrible at it. In fact, I've been stuck on Level 33 for weeks. I play it once a day riding the subway to work.
It's not so much that my meager Candy Crush Saga skills irk me. It's the mere fact that I actually consider punching it up on my screen. This leads me to my next existential question: WHY DO we play this "match three" variation game?
There's nothing spectacular-looking or eye-popping, that's for sure, but it keeps the interest of almost everyone I know. You see people constantly begging/asking their friends to give them new lives to keep playing. I know one friend (you know who you are) who's gone beyond level 200. If you saw a group of people with their heads down tapping away at their phone, you could put Vegas odds on how many of those folks are sliding and swiping those little pieces of candy on a screen.
Ok, so there's that unanswerable question, and then there's this one: Where does it end? You could say that about any video game. However, there's something unexplained that, like I said, annoys me about Candy Crush Saga. (By the way, Star Wars was a saga. Candy Crush? Meh).
It's not a bad thing, and give credit to King for striking a chord with, quite frankly, the entire human race. It's something about society, social media or the collective gaming culture that bugs me.
Here's an even better question: Why did I even write this blog post? I have no answers to any of this. Will I ever? I still can't figure it out. I'll still have nightmares about Level 33. I'll wait for my new turns/lives to play another day on the train.
Maybe one day it'll hit me, just like an exploding piece of candy.
The B Gamer is a video game reviewer at 77 WABC in New York City
Twitter: @thebgamerpod
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheBGamer
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