This Is Why All Your Friends Are Currently Addicted To Candy Crush Saga

On paper, Candy Crush Saga sounds incredibly dumb: switch a set of candies around in a box to match three of a kind.

It's Bejeweled, but with candy, right?

But Candy Crush Saga is currently HUGE in the mobile gaming world. It's No.3 in the Apple App Store and is the top game on Facebook, with 44 million monthly active users, according to AppData.

Candy Crush Saga is played more than 600 million times a day and is reportedly bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars to King, the creators of Candy Crush Saga.

The game only appears to be incredibly simple. In fact, it's ingeniously constructed to keep you playing against your better judgment by engaging you in a "compulsion loop." It combines ease of access, random rewards, enforced withdrawal, and constant progress in an almost never-ending stack of levels.

Here's how it's constructed.

First, the game is easy-access. No special gaming skills are required: It's a pick-up-and-play game. You can play it for a couple of minutes or for several hours. The basic idea is to match at least three candies together.

Once you've started playing, Candy Crush never leaves you alone: It's cross-platform, so you can play it on your computer, iPhone, iPad, etc. and always pick up right where you left off.

Second, you are randomly rewarded by the game. There are four different game modes to keep you on your toes. In the Moves round, you have to reach a certain score in X amount of moves. It gets increasingly harder to achieve as you progress.