are.

Anthony Carboni here for DNews and Candy Crush is the current champ for most addictive to

the human population- it's got 93 million daily players and is installed on half a billion

people's phones. You probably either play it and love it, or played it, hated it, and

still played it longer than you meant to. What makes it so addictive?

Let's talk about the Skinner Box. The Skinner Box is an experiment where some sort of animal

in a small cage presses a lever and gets a treat. Or an electric shock. Researchers can

change how often a lever press results in a treat to do all kinds of things to the animal-

you could make it totally uninterested in the lever, or you could make it so the animal

obsessively presses it all the time. And neither has to mean the animal doesn't get shocked.

Get where I'm going?

Every time you win in a game, your brain gives you a little bit of dopamine. Some good reward

feelings. By keeping you winning early on and then making it harder and harder, games

trigger some addictive tendencies. It also makes losing hurt- you want to go back to

winning. Winning was awesome.

Free-to-play games like candy crush require some sort of currency like lives or energy.

Lose all your energy and WHOOPS, you can't play for a few hours. Unless you pay to do

it. This does two really nasty things to your brain.

If you don't pay for an extra turn, you're playing into something called hedonic adaptation.

Psychology of games wrote about an experiment- appropriately enough, involving candy. Subjects

were given a piece of chocolate to eat. Then, half the group was told not to eat anymore

chocolate for two weeks. The other half was given two pounds of chocolate and told "Yo,

enjoy this chocolate. ALL OF THIS CHOCOLATE." In two weeks, everyone was welcomed back and

offered a piece of chocolate. The people who abstained for two weeks loved the chocolate.

The people who were gorging for two weeks, unsurprisingly, weren't that into it. By restricting

your access to playing, Candy Crush makes you want to play it MORE.

But what if you're the sort of person who gorges themselves and pays for the extra turn?

You're probably experiencing gambler's fallacy. That's the idea that the more you try something,

the more the odds are that the outcome is in your favor. That's mathematically untrue.

If your odds of getting into a car accident are 1 in 10,000, it doesn't mean after 50

car rides your odds are 1 in 9,950. They reset every time. Pretty obvious. But our brain

gets confused when it comes to games because we believe in our talent. Our brains go particularly

crazy with activity for near-misses. You got SO CLOSE to winning last time. One more move

and you would've had it- and you're so in the zone that if you pay the $0.99 to skip

the waiting period you'll win! You know you'll win. You probably won't.

Games use tricks like this to keep you in your little skinner box, paying $0.99 at a

time for a free game until you've spent way more that you would've to buy an expensive

one that wasn't full of this stuff. Poor dumb brains.

There are games that use your brain's weaknesses for good. Jane McGonigal, the author of Reality

is Broken, created a site called SuperBetter that taps into these same behavior reinforcements

and habit-forming tendencies to make a game that actually helps people make good habits

and recover from injuries. Apps like Habit RPG turn todo lists into roleplaying games

where you get experience and level up. (https://www.superbetter.com/ https://habitrpg.com)

I tend to obsessively play manipulative games like Candy Crush for a day or two and then

get rid of them forever. What about you? Do you fall for this stuff? Let us know down

below and don't forget to check out my other show Hard Science if you dig builds and experiments.

This week we're making $20 cardboard boats and seeing which ones will keep the most people

afloat. Its at YouTube.com/hardscienceshow.