The longer you play, the more lives you burn through. Despite a monetisation strategy the video game industry calls ‘free to play’, the game has racked up over $9 billion in revenue through in-game microtransactions, the most common of which is the purchasing of additional lives. Many players will relate to the calming qualities of the ‘match-three’ game – named so because you must match three or more coloured sweets to score points – but there is little altruism about Candy Crush Saga. It is marketed as a means of relaxation: ‘Swipe the stress away’ reads one of the slogans on the game’s opening load screen, ‘Chill and unwind’ reads another. Ten years on from its release, the ‘sugar crush’ of Candy Crush Saga is the clearest expression of the trance-like state the game (installed on over three billion devices, no less) aims to lull players into.

It’s as if the game has come to life – algorithm, code, and graphics rendered as a kind of magic, suspending you in a stupor for a beautiful few moments. Rather than unlocking a new level, seeing the game whir like this is the true reward of Candy Crush Saga, each animation and sound effect seemingly perfectly calibrated to elicit pleasure within your brain. Once all objectives have been completed, a so-called ‘sugar crush’ is triggered: a deep voice with a decidedly artificial twang announces its arrival before the game itself plays the remaining moves on the candy-filled board the screen becomes a cacophony of confetti-like candy, the phone prickles with haptic feedback, all while the score at the top of the screen surges upwards. There is a delightfully onomatopoeic quality to mobile and Facebook game Candy Crush Saga, none less than in the finale of each level.

Now in its tenth year, the sugary sweet mobile game has proven a killer app for an era of rising technological addiction

What is candy crush saga