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You’ve seen them. Absorbed in their phone like it’s a portal to the eternal orgasm. Pushing through crowds without looking up at London stations, Venice canals and Parisian boulevards, playing Candy Crush, AKA the portable lobotomy. As Scott Adams once said, ‘You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public’, something the creators of Candy Crush know very well.
It’s hard to know what’s more infantile, this or the farmyard game, where fully grown, at least in size, adults, endeavor to collect virtual farm animals (read this out aloud people). It’s unclear for how long children might tolerate this inanity, but some adults are so addicted that in 10 years time you’ll be banned from playing it in pubs. They play it before work, on the way to work, and if you’re an MP at work; until the duller colors of real-life become an irritant, something to glance at when forced to change trains like it’s a relative you don’t quite recognize.
It’s for people lacking an inner life, who are sated by primary colors and pointless activity, it makes watching ITV1 appear positively productive. There are people desperately in need of better lives, yet see morons wandering around head-deep in phones wasting theirs. Wake up and smell the roses? Only if you get bonus points.
Policing what people do with their lives is questionable, but these candy crushers might as well be chalking daily lines on cell walls like they got life, which is exactly the one thing they won’t get, permanently mind-spun in lurid pre-school world. What happened to daydreaming, to the delicious time travel of novels? Games once bought people together, Candy Crush isolates them, unless chatting color bombs, meringues, and nerfing counts as conversation, which they know doesn’t, so they don’t. As Phillip Hensher recently said: ‘The world today offers us more ways to retreat than ever before.’
If Candy Crush enables escape from the crushing pointlessness of life then they’ll struggle to find anything more pointless next time; they’re cornered by inanity. 160,000 years of evolution – the death, the blood, the emergence of language and natural selection peaking with some moron collecting candy that isn’t real. Our ancestors would rewind evolvement if they saw us hunters turned to such easy prey. They say it’s addictive. Addictive? Really? Just don’t pick it up. Be more than your phone. You got life, now get a life.
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A version of this post was previously published on Lifeassistanceagency.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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