As far back as at least October 20, I have been hooked on this game called Disney Emoji Blitz that I saw in an Instagram ad. There I said it.
It looked legit associated with Disney although reviews say that the app used to be owned by Disney and that since its break from the company, has been on a decline. The load time was aggravatingly slow, as if you had all the time in the world each of many times you open it per day. And the rewards were very puny, all according to the reviews. Since I don’t play many games, I don’t have much of a frame of reference.
At first, I was “honest” and only spun the wheel for rewards every four hours when I was eligible again and then I started to “watch” videos for Free Spins which ranged from five seconds of my life to over 30 seconds. I got inundated with Vessi, McDonald’s, Tru Movement, Head Space, Door Dash, Telus telemedicine, and CIBC ads, to name a few. NPY likened me to his parents – and I would abashedly agree and I’m not even earning anything worthwhile like free hotel stays in Vegas. Nope, just official-looking Disney character emojis that I never use.
At some points, I felt like the game was truly, truly yanking at me. It first occurred to me that it was yanking at me during the “Versus” games where you “food fight” with another use. It was a super-aggravating challenge that made me feel like I was quite terrible at the game and then I started to wonder if my opponent was actually real, especially since my opponents always seem to wrap their games after I did for some reason. During other Villian Events, I started to wonder if the computer was deliberately withholding the Item I wanted so that I would keep playing. Because other times, I could truly tell that things were too coincidentally happening too, instances the computer was trying to help me. I figured that once I could consistently create Rainbow Stars, I was done with the game.
Further, I have no idea why the game was hogging over 900 Mb on my phone. I was really aggravated and knew I needed to get it off my phone but I was in the midst of my addiction.
Finally, the rewards – multi-faceted to keep you half-way towards finishing any challenge. There were the Villian Events which I pursued enthusiastically when I had a Lucky Emoji. There were mission levels I got to 30 with only the most pitiful rewards upon competion. There were Item Collections to complete and those spanned weeks to complete and those Items are added to your emojis available. You earned coins which could purchase a Silver Box (15,000) where I collected 26 of 30 emoji and hence was getting duplicate emojis frequently. They stated that getting a duplicate was a good thing in that your emoji’s power increased but – really – you just want more variety of emoji. It took more time to save coins for Gold or Series I/II/III Boxes (30,000) of which I had about 20% of each of those boxes emojis and it was super frustrating to hit upon a duplicate emoji (also could be the computer messing with you). The most difficult was to earn enough Gems to buy those boxes as Gems were only earned through spins and other activities I didn’t partake in. Naturally, I was never tempted to actually spend money. Just my worthless time. >.<
It was like an experiment on myself, how deep down the rabbit-hole will I go? I was figuring out all the mechanisms to pull me in and I toyed with it. I turned off Notifications, coinciding with finishing watching The Social Dilemma and wondered if the app was spying on me but – meh – I was really addicted back then. I even played with the sound off because I was playing next to sleeping kids and I could still be drawn in. It was because I knew what blinging was going on, the Blitz events that seemed randomly awarded sent a little jolt through me to push me onwards. And sometimes the app was really messing with me putting similar coloured emoji on the board so I had to look really carefully. That or my eyes are getting old.
I finally tailed off at the beginning of this month and am ready to delete the game. I was reading Ryder Carrol’s The Bullet Journal Method and maybe implicitly I knew that continuing to play the game is not aligning with organizing my life. I had just frantically and consistently watched ad videos to earn enough Gems to buy a Star Wars box and get a Mandalorian emoji much to Kiddo’s delight.
The only “bad” thing about deleting the game – as I must because it’s a space hog -is introducing Kiddo to something cute and we’d play together.
… There’s always the Funko Pop version to check out ….
That all being said, here are all the character emojis I heard – darn it, I earned them – and the cuter Item emojis as well. The game is such a hog because for each character emoji, there’s also like 10 different versions of the character pulling a face. That adds up.
