After months of watching game updates slowly devour my Facebook newsfeed, reading about addictions to the game in the clever quips of seemingly every funny person on the internet, and even hearing in person from my friends how I both should and should not start myself down this slippery cellular-gaming slope, I finally downloaded Candy Crush earlier this week.
I’ve had, as predicted, a rocky relationship with the game pretty much from the outset. I have loved Candy Crush. I have hated Candy Crush. I have talked about Candy Crush, and I have pretended it is base and unworthy of my time. In my short but very serious time with the game, I have decided one thing: Candy Crush is degrading.
Yes, ladies and whatever gentlemen have been somehow tricked into surfing this website, I firmly believe that this manipulating, scheming little smartphone game has a brain. Candy Crush uses this humanoid brain capacity to enact its greatest dream on all of its users: making you hate yourself.
This reality makes itself most clear in the social element of the game. As a rule, I avoid linking my smartphone games with my Facebook account. I recently made an exception to this rule for the eerily enticing Quiz Cross, because I’m not particularly bothered by the idea of 900 of my closest friends seeing how awesome I am at destroying other people in trivia contests. In general, though, my mind-numbing video games are my business.
When I first downloaded Candy Crush, I foolishly believed that I would be able to both play the game and uphold this standard of smartphone gaming. You don’t have to sync your progress with your Facebook in order to get started, and I played a good twenty rounds thinking I’d be able to keep it that way.
Before long, though, you come to an impasse at the entry to a new “episode” of play. When you hit one of these, you see, you are literally forced to either pay 99 cents of real money – a downright outrage, if you ask me – or get three of your Facebook friends to endorse your forward progress.
In order to even play this stupid game, you have to not only link your progress to your Facebook account and publicly admit to your friends that you play it – you have to beg your friends for their help.
If this mere fact of the game weren’t enough to convince you of the game’s conniving and entirely human nature, consider the process of choosing which friends to ask for help. The very act of asking is embarrassing in itself, but choosing who of your 400 Candy Crush-playing Facebook friends is least embarrassing to ask is an unnaturally lengthy process.
The most obvious choice of helper-friend is that random acquaintance who started sending you Candy Crush requests from the second you signed up for the game. If these people are shameless enough to ask you for help after meeting you once at summer camp half a decade ago, you should obviously feel no shame in asking the same courtesy of them.
The other choice of helper that comes immediately to mind is close friends. Unless said Candy Crush player is your bestest friend in the entire world, though, there’s still some element of weirdness to this. It’s summer. The deepest communication you’ve probably had in the past few days with even most of your closest friends is an Instagram like or two. And now you’re groveling at their cyber-feet for help in a video game that you’re moderately embarrassed to own? Come on now.
Beyond all of these things and the many more degrading elements of Candy Crush, the worst thing of all is that it makes you feel this passionately about it. I may have abandoned actual play of Candy Crush for a few days now in a dearth of willing Facebook savior-minions, but I still have enough feelings about it to craft a 700-word article out of it. Candy Crush exists solely to make its users hate themselves. And if you still don’t believe me? Just wait for the day when your afternoon’s entertainment relies on your onetime Sunday School teacher’s willingness to grant you an extra life.Â