We Went in for an Hour, Lost a Day: Why We Get Addicted to Match 3 Games

It’s hard to say exactly which game served as formative for the genre. The mechanics of the “three in a row” game are similar to many board games in which you have to search for the same elements. For example, mahjong, dominoes, various solitaire games and tic-tac-toe.

The rules of the “three in a row” game are very simple: identical figures located on the field can be connected by three (or more) and removed. The goal is to completely empty the board of the pieces initially placed on it. This simple idea became the main hook of these puzzles.

Perhaps many still remember the game Candy Crush Saga, which was one of the first hits in the “three in a row” category. At its peak (2014), over 93 million people played the game and generated over $493 million in revenue in three months!

There are many free match 3 games for your phone today. They work both offline and online.

Many psychologists believe that simplicity is what makes match 3 games appealing. At the first levels, the user quickly manages the tasks, obtaining a sense of satisfaction. Our brain takes this as a reward by releasing dopamine. The insidiousness of play (and our biology) is that dopamine also plays an important role in learning, reinforcing our behavior and prompting us to perform a certain action.

However, if the match-3 game remained so simple, we would quickly get tired of realizing that “the mechanism is worked, the scheme is mastered”. But as levels get harder and new challenges appear, wins become less frequent, which means dopamine bursts become more intermittent. We want more, so we keep fighting.

Certainly, despite the fact that we believe that the success of the party depends on us, the developers of match 3 games admit that everything depends on luck, that is, on a set of flowers you received at random, not your skills. This means that we don’t know when the next triumph will come, and it makes the game even more attractive!

Another feature of the match-3 game that greatly influences our addiction is the time limit. Of course, you can buy “lives” in the app, but initially you only have 5 attempts, which means you can’t get enough of the entire game. This effect is perfectly demonstrated by an experiment conducted by Harvard researchers. They recruited two groups of volunteers, giving the first the opportunity to eat chocolate during the week in any quantity, and the second to abstain from any sweets. After seven days, the participants were reunited and treated to chocolate. It turned out that those who were deprived of sweets rated the bar higher than those who could eat chocolate all the previous week. Deprivation makes the reward so much sweeter!