Why your favorite apps are designed to addict you
Finally managed to kick my Clash of Clans habit the other day.  I realized I had been logging in 1-2x&#x2F;day for multiple years with maybe a couple weeks of breaks after buying shields around the holidays.<p>My life has become increasingly cluttered with feeds, needing to login to games I like to get bonuses and such, and it has started to pile up so I decided I needed to make some changes, starting with CoC.<p>At first I had a lot of anxiety because the mechanics of the game would penalize me pretty harshly if I was away for a few days&#x2F;weeks and wanted to come back.  The lizard part of my brain started urging me to play it in a way that was so urgent it felt like I could almost reach out and touch it.<p>But I had deleted the app from my device, and I sat myself down and told myself that those urges had no weight because the consequences would never be felt since I wasn&#x27;t going to play the game again.<p>Now I&#x27;m past the hump, and while I still have many more things on my list to extricate from my life in my path towards simplifying things, I definitely feel a bit better. One less responsibility.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong--I&#x27;m still a gamer, and likely will always be to some degree.  But I&#x27;m so jaded by games with super transparent mechanics like this that they are starting to lose their hold over me.  Started playing Pillars of Eternity last night and it was refreshing to get into something story-driven that didn&#x27;t devote a significant chunk of the initial gameplay to introducing me to various IAP mechanics.