Candy Crush

A month or two ago I downloaded a new app onto the iPad for the kids. It’s called Candy Crush Saga and it has become way too large a part of our lives. Have you played it? It’s a little brain-teaser game that starts out easy, and then gets progressively harder. I have heard there are more than 300 levels to clear.

We all started playing it, and pretty soon, we all got majorly hooked. We all wanted to be the one who finally cleared the board and made it past a level. We would play rounds and clear all but one spot on the board before we ran out of moves and be absolutely convinced that the next round would be the one that finally did the trick… and then ten rounds later, we would still be playing. I am suddenly a lot closer to understanding how a heroin addict must feel.

The thing is, when you’re playing this game, you only get a limited number of lives. If you fail to clear the board before you use up the lives you have to wait for a certain time to pass before you get more lives. I heard a neat trick to overcome this… just manually roll the time on your device forward. Unfortunately, I passed this trick on to the rest of the family. At last count our iPad was set roughly 4 years into the future. This meant I could not get Facebook or Instagram updates or access some of my favourite websites, because none of the content supposedly existed yet.

(Chad maintains that Liam is responsible for the huge date gap because he doesn’t ‘get’ that you only need to roll the time forward in half-hour increments for the trick to work. I think Chad just underestimates the number of hours that he himself spends on this game.)

Regardless, we made it past level 100, and then we decided that it had to end. We deleted Candy Crush Saga from our iPad and reinstalled it. We were set back to Level 1. It’s laughable how easy it is to play now, but some semblance of restraint has been restored in our home.

I’d like to think that there are some redemptive qualities in the game. It’s a brain-teaser and you have to think ahead and be strategic to move through the rounds. I’d like to think that it’s less like Pac-Man and more like a Rubik’s Cube… that making those synapses fire is actually a good thing. Time well wasted, indeed.