“Mobile games like Candy Crush are particularly addictive because everything shuffles and changes and then you level up so if you have any competitive nature, you can feel successful,” says Strohman. Throw in some exciting sounds and a constantly changing screen - where visuals and audio shift as you go along - and you’ve got yourself a seductive elixir. “Bright colors are dangerous but satiate the brain in certain ways.” “Think of the red underbelly of a black widow spider,” she says, referencing the concept of warning coloration in the animal world. Lisa Strohman, a clinical psychologist, author and founder of the Digital Citizen Academy. The bright colors that we see in mobile games beg for our attention and tap into a primal recognition of alarm, notes Dr. “Slipping through time with something pleasurable can be very inviting.” Those bright colors and hypnotic sounds are no accidentĪlso inviting are the game’s colors and sounds. “When you have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, a major symptom is hypervigilance - being hypertuned to your surroundings,” says Chandler. This is why you lose an hour or three without feeling it.”Ĭhandler also notes that people with anxiety disorders such as myself, can be particularly attracted to the distraction of mobile games. The next level becomes the marker of the passage of time. “Your brain stops keeping track of time and instead measures units of pleasure in the game. Chandler, assistant professor of psychology at Birmingham-Southern College tells NBC News BETTER. “Any gamification platform is explicitly designed to make you want to not put it down and is designed to reward pathway in your brain which can suppress your perception of time,” Dr. This escapism element factors into what makes mobile games so addictive. With addictive mobile games, our perception of time changes
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