Candy Crush

I have a Kindle Fire, one of those hand-held electronic tablets that I use mostly for watching shows while exercising.  I also took it on a trip recently and played the game “Candy Crush” for the first time.  I started swiping my finger across the screen in order to rearrange colorful little candies in either rows or columns of three.  The game is a big grid with candies arranged randomly across the board. Points are racked up based on how many get lined up in matching stacks or rows.  Once they’re aligned, they explode and disappear, and the ones above them move down to fill the empty space.  It’s a fantastic learning tool that shows just how many things around us are affected by one simple choice we make.  It’s a concept I’ve tried to engrain in my son’s head for many years now.

I’m not much for electronic games, but sitting on the airplane left me with few other options.  I intended to play it until we landed, but couldn’t.  I apparently didn’t meet the expected number of points set out by the designers of the game, so it timed me out.  I was blocked from further play until I took a 30-minute break.  Brilliant, I thought.  This is marketing at its best.  Restricting access to something always creates a greater desire for the thing, so this is how they make their money, on an otherwise free game. For a mere 99 cents, I could buy more lives and keep on playing, but I chose the time-out instead.  The longer my time-out, the more lives I had access to for the next round of the game.  Another teachable point for my son, I thought, about why taking time outs are good when we need to process bad moves we’ve made.

I was all set to use this game as a vehicle to reinforce these parenting principals I embrace, so I couldn’t wait to show Kaleb these life lessons in a format I knew he’d understand.  

As he watched me play the game, he started commenting on my choices.   I was focused on one area, trying to line up three candies, but Kaleb moaned that I’d missed a better move. If I lined up four of five of the same type, I’d get more points.  Each time I made a move, Kaleb gave a running commentary on the poor choices I’d made and all the good moves I’d missed.  I hated his feedback as it sucked the joy of the game right out of me.  He was looking at the overall screen and I was just focusing in on one area, all the while failing to realize there were indeed better choices.  It was then the light bulb came on.

This past school year, Kaleb wouldn’t show me any of his schoolwork he did for other teachers.  He told me it was because he didn’t like me commenting on them.  He wanted to do things his own way.   My comments were as irritating to him, as his were to me while playing Candy Crush. 

And I thought I was the one teaching him a lesson.