Taking the Free Out of ‘Freemium,’ or How I Will Eventually Blow Through My Entire Inheritance

(iphone-game-cheats.com)

I still tell myself that I can stop anytime I want to. That’s part of the disease, people tell me.

It’s OK, I tell myself; I still have a chocolate-vanquishing Bubblegum Troll and a bit of cell phone battery life left. I look up from the colorful, soothing glow of my screen to see that it’s 2 a.m. Even though Tiffi, the pigtailed main character of Candy Crush Saga, freaks me out because her cheeks do not appear to be attached to her face, I can’t stop playing. Soon, I will need to reach out to someone for a ticket to a new level.

Somewhere, one of my connected Facebook friends must be awake. A real friend, someone who has played this infernal game, will understand. You can’t call it “enabling” if the other person is hooked too, right?

I mean, it’s not like I don’t have choices. I laugh bitterly as I tell myself once again that I can wait out the clock until I rack up more lives. But I won’t dig into my bank account this time. That would show a lack of boundaries, my therapist tells me.

(Leanna Lofte for iMore)

What she doesn’t understand is that I’ve been stuck on Level 169 for a week now, and I’m beyond frustrated. My fingers itch to tap and swipe until the chocolate is gone. I’ve locked myself in a ladies room stall at work and snuck in levels between meetings. I’ve neglected my children to rack up as many color bombs as possible. My life has become unmanageable.

Maybe what I really need is a new therapist, I told her. That’s just the kind of self-deceptive thinking that got you to this couch in the first place, she said. A lot she knows. She still thinks chocolate is a harmless edible.

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Right now I have a few satisfying cascades of sugary explosions, a veritable speedball for the eyes, before … well, I don’t even want to think about it. I’ll just keep tapping until I break through on my own, which, gaming experts tell us, is unlikely to happen.

And that’s exactly the way the makers of these freemium games want it. You download a game that is free for the taking and that is designed to lull you into a false sense of success. To complete those really hard levels, which are scattered strategically through the game, however, you might have to drop some bucks on what are benignly called “in-app purchases.” That puts the “premium” in freemium.

I know I’m not alone; the King.com game Candy Crush Saga alone rakes in $794,253 each day in revenue, which is pretty amazing considering that it bills itself as a free game.

It turns out that there’s some simple psychology behind this monkey on our backs. Zynga, the gaming company that brought us the wildly popular FarmVille and Mafia Wars, calls it “Fun Pain.” Fun Pain is a concept wherein we mindless sloths play for free until we bump up against a hard level and must choose between two states: We either grind through until we succeed, or we get so frustrated that we are “forced” to buy power-ups that will help us advance.

(Themeplus/Flickr)

Haha, what fun, Zynga! I’ll bet you’re a collective riot at parties.

It’s what drug dealers would call giving someone “a taste.” You play for free and you get into the game. You find yourself reaching for your cell phone at weird times. Just one more level before bed, you tell yourself. It’s not like you have to play. But that last level was so easy. Clearly you’re some sort of Candy Crush genius. This new level, though, this one isn’t such a walk in the park. The next thing you know, it’s 2 a.m., you’ve played the same level 49 times, and you would do anything to get past it.

(Shannon/Flickr)

If the game is designed well, you won’t even realize what’s happening to you. Ramin Shokrizade, in his Gamasutra paper on “The TopF2P (free to play) Monetization Tricks,” says: “If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and ‘just need a bit of help.’ ”

Sure, all you need is a little leg up. You keep trying on your own, but the chances are spectacularly low that you will succeed, because the game is rigged that way. After the umpteenth try, you develop the kind of tunnel vision that those freemium game makers count on.

Psychologically, you’re so invested in moving forward that you completely forget that there’s a third choice: You can choose not to be a part of it anymore and just leave the game. But, really, once you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to blast away all of that evil chocolate, where’s the fun in that?

And here’s the killer: Some of these games are said to be adaptive (King.com says that Candy Crush Saga is not designed this way), which means that once you buy that first power-up — it’s only 99 cents; what could it hurt? — you’re pegged as a pigeon, an easy mark. The difficulty level of the game ramps up so that you’re forced to keep buying. Because all you need is “just a little help” to wipe out that pesky chocolate for good.

The good news is that King.com reports that 70 percent of its players complete the game without any of these in-app purchases, so some of us may make it through without going bankrupt. But that still leaves a very respectable 30 percent who plunk down their hard-earned dollars for that “bit of help.” Over and over again. In a game that players downloaded for free, just to take their minds off their cares.

So just remember: You do have choices when it comes to playing freemium games. You can wait out the clock until you get more lives. You can delete the game and walk away. Or you can spend money on that one power-up that will get you to the next level.

At least that’s what my therapist has taken to doing. I’m going to have to make room on the couch for her.

Is there something weirdly popular on the Internet that you’d like explained? Write to Deb Amlen at buzzologyYT@yahoo.com and let her know. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter (@debamlen).