The mobile game Clash of Clans doesn’t look like much. Tiny cartoonish characters mill around a cartoon village on a player’s phone screen, building cute little armies that they let loose on enemy camps. Soldiers auto-hack at buildings, walls, and cannons while the player watches, earning gold and other resources for creating more characters, or more structures, in the village. Often, just when things are going really great for the clan, resources run out; then players have to wait a few hours while the game slowly regenerates gold and elixir, or they can spend four dollars and ninety-nine cents to buy in-game currency and keep playing right away.
Since most of us are impatient, Supercell, the company that makes Clash of Clans, has done quite nicely. Those real-money-for-virtual-stuff purchases, or micro-transactions, contributed to the company’s 2.3 billion dollars in sales in 2015. This week, the China-based company Tencent Holdings paid 8.6 billion dollars for a controlling stake in Supercell, and therefore a stake in our need for instant gratification. Tencent is the biggest Internet company in China, with a market value of more than two hundred billion dollars. It controls one of China’s biggest Web portals, the messaging app WeChat, with seven hundred million active users, and League of Legends, an online multiplayer game that reportedly had 1.6 billion dollars in sales in 2015.
With Clash of Clans, Tencent is increasing its interest in mobile games. The Wall Street Journal reported that more than half of Tencent’s fifteen billion dollars in revenue last year came from its holdings in mobile games. Globally, mobile games are set to earn about thirty-seven billion dollars this year. The economic model of Clash of Clans is similar to that of other successful mobile games. In Clash of Clans, like Candy Crush Saga or Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, players get a certain amount of play time when they first install the game. But after a while they hit a wall: the Kim K. lookalike character is too tired to meet more new people; the Clash of Clans village doesn’t have enough gold to upgrade its town hall. The player either waits for resources to build up or makes a quick visit to the in-game store to instantly refresh—more energy for Kim, more gold for the clanspeople.
This willingness to pay feels counterintuitive on a device so frequently characterized by distraction. If flipping and scrolling through one app no longer satisfies, there are thousands more waiting to be downloaded. Yet players of these games cannot stop networking with Kim Kardashian, or managing their Clash of Clans village, or organizing gummies in Candy Crush Saga. It’s not unusual for players to spend as much money on a game that was free to download on their phone as they would on a full-sized game that runs on a PC or console: twenty, forty, sixty dollars, sometimes in short periods of time. Though the games are distractions themselves, they manage to absorb millions of supposedly short attention spans for hours, weeks, or months, mostly through good design and unprecedented opportunity.
They do this by creating what we might call “flow.” We often think of a flow state as something to be achieved—when you’re working on a project, you hope you find a rhythm and get lost in time. In those states, people feel neither too challenged nor too bored; they have an idea of exactly what to do and how to do it, and when they succeed they get unambiguous proof (explosions and triumphant noises, in the case of video games). When the conditions are right, according to the Microsoft Studios researcher Sean Baron, people experience extreme focus, loss of awareness, distortion of the experience of time, and “the experience of the task being the only necessary justification for continuing it.” Baron told me that game designers have become very good at inducing flow states, especially on mobile phones. “There’s very few real-life situations where you can achieve a goal in twenty seconds, a goal that is somewhat meaningful to you,” Baron said. “Human beings are motivated to appeal to our sense of autonomy, competence, social connectedness. . . . If you’re doing things that make you feel competent and autonomous, you are going to enter a flow state.” This sense of autonomy and satisfaction apparently applies to buying your Kim K. character a new Lanvin dress. Right now.
Though mobile games may feel simpler than video games—the best ones require less hand-eye coördination than strategy and knowledge of the rules—people can become deeply absorbed in them. One writer described racking up nine thousand dollars in expenses in Game of War: Fire Age, a mobile game that featured Kate Upton in an ad that ran during the 2015 Super Bowl. Many people—“healthy people,” Baron clarified—choose to spend that money because the feelings they get from the game are worth it to them. “They’re willing to spend five bucks to save themselves three days’ worth of time, because they value what they want to value.” More important, though, is that these games exist on devices that are with us in our most mundane moments, Baron added. Waiting in line, waiting for someone at a coffee shop, sitting on a bus—at these moments, people tend not to feel particularly in control. Phones appear automatically in your hand at such moments, and mobile games with deceptively intricate nested tasks that cascade into waves of accomplishment transport you seamlessly to the other side of the moment you feel trapped in.
People also habitually seek relief from anxiety, Baron said. When they might otherwise sit and think about everything that’s out of their control, or else engage with something that’s emotionally or mentally demanding, they can pull out their phones and focus on something they can control, and feel rewarded for it. Supercell’s games, like Clash of Clans, are immaculately designed for this kind of experience—drop warriors into battle, passively watch them knock down buildings one by one, collect rewards, rebuild the army, build up the city, repeat. While the start of Clash of Clans draws you in slowly, the strategies become insanely complex—players with many hours of time invested are able to attack each other and have developed intricate strategies for defending themselves or breaking down each others’ bases.
Baron, who normally reads his Kindle during moments of downtime, said he recently downloaded another of Supercell’s games, Clash Royale, which pits real players against one another on a field with a random selection of things like soldiers, archers, or giants to fight with. Later, he was in line for something and almost pulled out Clash Royale, just to get one match in really quickly. “I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Then he realized: he was trying not to think about his next meeting.
Clash of Clans Proves That Our Impatience Is Worth Billions
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