Many years ago (I’m dating myself here) I loved playing Tetris. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, it has puzzle pieces in different shapes that you must use to form a continuous line in order to get points. As you progress in levels, the pieces come faster and faster. I realize it doesn’t sound particularly exciting but it was strangely addictive. Writing and everything that goes along with it is very rewarding but also very time consuming. As a result I rarely find time to play games anymore. That doesn’t mean that they have gone away, mind you. They have morphed into new strangely addictive games. I’m not talking about the “Call of Duty”, Tom Clancy, shoot ‘em up games my son is addicted to playing. They are fine but I seem to have lost the hand-eye-coordination necessary to handle the constantly changing action. As a result, I die quickly and usually don’t know how. For this my children give me the title of “Nube”. I don’t quite have the terminology down but I know enough to know it is not a compliment. No, the games like Tetris now are ones like “Jewels, Candy Crush, Farmville” and I know there are others but I guess I’m too much a Nube to know them. Usually the premise for these games is simple. “Jewels” is a lot like Tetris but you have to line up jewels of the same type to get points. I don’t know what Candy Crush is but I know I’ve sent like a thousand lives to friends requesting them. The only reason I have any knowledge of it is because my wife installed it on my phone so she could keep playing after she ran out of lives. Apparently you combine things to make new candies and advance through a virtual board game. Here’s the twist. You only have a certain number of lives and then you can’t play anymore until you do one of two things. Either wait however long to get more lives (I’m told this is excruciating) or purchase more lives and keep playing right away. Friends have told me the game is like crack and it is the most addictive one out there. Some have had to force themselves to quit playing simply due to the obsession with it. My wife is smart and just plays it on my phone when she’s out of lives. I don’t know anything about “Farmville” except it seems many of my friends are inviting me to play it. Perhaps I would try them if I wasn’t so afraid of becoming hooked. Whoever thinks up these games is brilliant. How do they make them so addictive? I suppose the only way to find out is to play them but then I open myself up to being caught up in that digital world. These games are not bad. They just are time consuming. That is really what any gamer is looking for anyway; something to fill their time and make them forget their worries. Considering the hustle of everyday life and the lack of negative side effects like actual drugs, perhaps these games aren’t so bad after all. Yet I cannot help but wonder…how do they make them so addictive?
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