Candy Crush Rehab

The American Psychiatric Association (which is by no means a congress of saints) requested a few days ago that the phenomenon of Candy Crush Saga, whose number of addicts keeps increasing, be recognized as a national epidemic, and that a virtual crisis center be put into place to help detox from it.

Created by the British company King in 2012, Candy Crush Saga (along with its Asian equivalent Puzzle & Dragons) is the most widely downloaded application in the world. It counts 80 million users and earns 700,000 Euros in profit every day. Video game analysts wonder: how can such an idiotic app, based on multicolored floating sweets, surpass the most sophisticated games developed for years by Nintendo programmers?

But the key to success for Candy Crush lies precisely in its defects: the childlike, inoffensive nature (there’s no violence or sex), the constant beginning-again (there are up to 410 levels), along with the absence of specific cultural content that could arouse acceptance or rejection. Chastity, idiocy and disinterestedness are the conditions for the globalization of dependence.

Candy Crush is a discipline of the soul, an immaterial prison proposing a constant deferral of desire and action. The game is addressed to generic subjects stripped of their secondary social defenses (which might explain why the largest number of players are what we socially call “women”): the game establishes a closed circuit between the limbic brain (which manages emotional memory), the hand, and the screen. Candy Crush is not a training game that exercises the player’s skill in order to improve it. It is a simple game of chance installed in one of our most accessible, intimate external techno-organs: the mobile phone. It’s Las Vegas in the palm of your hand. The aim of Candy Crush is not to teach the users anything, but to capture the totality of their cognitive capacities during a given amount of time and to appropriate their libidinal resources by making the screen into a surrogate masturbatory surface. In Candy Crush, the players never win anything: when they finish one level, it’s the screen that has the orgasm.

What’s more, Candy Crush calls into question the relationship between freedom and “free” defended by supporters of piracy: the new strategy to colonize the virtual world involves creating a game as simple as possible that is offered for free, so that the potential player spends a maximum number of hours online playing it. Once the game has been grafted into the user’s living habits, it’s the time of the game itself and its associated forms of expense (additional lives and boosters) that produce the profits.

The Candy Crush players manage a multiplicity of screens: they are often physically situated facing a computer or TV screen that no longer functions as main visual frame, but rather as peripheral background, while at the same time they maintain a constant to-and-fro between Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Instagram… The chaste contemporary tele-techno-masturbator is like a virtual traffic controller locked in a quixotic control tower from which with one hand they “update” while with the other they arrange the rows of digital sweets.

The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phone, but directly onto our cognitive apparatus. While René Schérer teaches us that pedagogical disciplines developed during modernity have served to set the masturbating hand to writing and working, we now understand that the new digital disciplines set the assembly-line hand that used to write and work to masturbate the screen of cognitive capitalism.