When I play Candy Crush Soda (hereinafter referred to as Soda Crush), I am in a battle with the game's algorithm. I am not in an innocent contest to collect candies and win points. This is serious business. I never spend real money, I hoard my free coins, and I only use boosters when they are in infinite mode. I mostly ignore anything that doesn’t get me closer to moving past the current level. I've discovered that if I'm patient and persistent eventually Soda Crush will put opportunities in the round that will let me beat the level. Sometimes I can play a level many times before Crush will let me move on. It wants my engagement. It wants me hooked. It wants me to move on because it presents me with countless reasons to waste my gold coins, boosters and special candies. And when that fails, I have to watch ads. I don’t actually watch the ads. I just watch the bar at the bottom of the screen. Or do something else while the countdown proceeds. I don’t begrudge them the fact that people like me have forced them to present ads. They need to make money too.
The game is stupid. By that, I mean it has no intelligence. It doesn't seem to know I will never ever spend real dollars to get more moves or buy game advantages. I always wait for the free rewards. A problem with Crush is that I never know what updates give me new rules, new monsters, new candies and other challenges, so it's wise to just have a zen like attitude to playing it.
I'm in battle here with the game developers. There are fan wikis and cheat sites. Most of the cheats are actually hints that the player may or may not already know about. I noticed a cyan candy eating monster a few hundred levels back, that’ll remove (i.e. eat) all the same coloured candies off the board if his head comes out of his sprinkle shell. To activate that feature, you have to first feed it cyan candies. At first most people think it only eats the cyan candies, but no. I figured out by accident that it’ll eat any colour, once his head pops out of his shell. I suppose most players do eventually. The monster lives in the lower righthand corner of the screen.
The game keeps you hooked for hours at a time by rewarding you with advantages and extra time. I do love the dopamine hit of a specked chocolate (Special K and I refer to them lovingly as Timbits) exploding other candies. I’m like a rat that goes back for the drug at the expense of eating. I have put a timer on the game because some days I could not control how much I play. One and a half hours is my absolute daily limit. When it reaches the time limit, the timer boots me out. Furthermore if I thought I could get around the time, it greys out the game icon so I can no longer even open it. There is always the cheat where I can reset the system time.
I have a life you know.