Apps and Chips

My boyfriend told me about this smart phone app where you are supposed to be a pet shop owner. Every hour you have to check in so that you can accumulate game money. But if you pay the game real money, you can accumulate game money faster. Apparently some person wound up spending $10,000 on this one app in one year.

The article he read had a scene where the game developers were huddled around a table, plotting how to make this game maximally addictive. They had to make it easy to play, gratifying, and requiring emotional investment. I'm sure the room was lit only by torches set into the tower walls while lightening struck just outside the window. Very sinister.

But just now I realized that this isn't at all novel. Take Doritos. It's easy to eat a ton of them as they have no nutrients, they're oh-so-delicious, and they evoke warm and fuzzy feelings of childhood. Are they really evil, if people love them so much? But I bet that people could easily spent a couple hundred dollars on them over a year (though perhaps not 10,000 . . . that would mean you ate about 30 bags each and every day . . . eww.)

I bet the developers of Doritos have the exact same meeting as the app ones. I read a New Yorker article about Pepsi recently. It certainly described the Pepsi brewers trying to make it as easy as possible for people to have as many Pepsis as they wanted.

So it makes you wonder. Junk food is an accepted part of our society. But junk apps . . . they seem to make people much more upset.