Clash of Crack

Being in retail, it's important for me to keep up with what's in popular culture.  While I'm not a fan of most of it, it's part of my job, so I try to be as familiar with movies, books, music, and social media memes as I can.  

That applies to games as well, although I try as hard as I can to stay away from them.  I grew up in the era that launched video games, and I spent enough quarters in the Mound Bowling Alley in my youth to fund a couple of college educations.  I flat love video games, and love them too much.  I can easily spend way too much time on them.  I am cognizant of this weakness, hence I do what I can to not get involved with them in the first place.  Overall, it has been a fairly successful strategy.

But one day at work we got to talking about Clash of Clans - the wildly popular game for mobile devices - and I felt the need to learn more about it as we had products coming that referenced characters in the game.  So I downloaded the game, and was bad at it enough at it to be able to put it down and not engage with it too much.  But then a 50 year old golfing buddy of mine (a game addict as well), grabbed my phone one day, gave me some tips, and threw it back at me.

It seems like it's not left my hand since.

The game is wildly addicting.  Game designers have truly mastered the craft of making games with so many varied reward thresholds that it strikes to the absolute core of human psychology.  Thus, it leaves players in a constant mode of "just one more X and I can do Y - I can't wait!"

How long will I play?  Not sure.  Is it an issue?  Yeah, not a big one (yet), but it is.  

In the meantime, I gotta go.  My army just finalized building, and I need to attack to gain more elixir to enable me to build a new castle before someone attacks and takes it from me.