Millions of people around the world have played the silly game with the exchangable gems, which is, for a great part, based on the fortune that the added gems after a succesful sweep allow for another. Ending is a given and some skill may get your far, but is never a guarantee for a (personal) high score. So why does this game have such a great appeal among the general populous?
One reason might be the human tendency to bring order into chaos, jumbling the gems, preferably in greater number, through the night. That, or all that play might just be
'vampires'. Luckily, the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches us that (such) vampirism is thermodynamically undesirable, together with all the junk we find lying along the highways...
Seeing that 'Clean up your room, the game' won't be the Xbox's next hit, I think we can rule the previous argument out. Looking at the gameplay, one could imagine that some form of strategy might play a role. One might be able to use succesive turns to align larger amounts of gems for higher combos... if it weren't for the rule that you have to make a succesful line of 3 or more gems to continue, or stop playing all together (unless you are playing timed, which is even more pointless). Imagine Tetris, where you would have to make a complete row each turn (starting out with an exisitng tower) or die. That's hardly a rewarding game, since you have no control over your next move. For some reason, this is an accepted limitation. If one takes the
Alchemy minigame, one had a limited amount of freedom to remove undesired tiles, which could be regained by adding to the score. This element in Alchemy (no pun intended) allows for soe strategy. A similar addition would much improve Bejeweled.
So if it isn't the gameplay or the challenge that draws so many people to juggle the jewelry each day, than it may just as well be the lack thereof. An increasingly common term for this behaviour used these days is
'casual gaming'. Apparantely people consider 'real games' to be some form of 'the evil that is work' trying to enter innocent people's homes. Games should thus be straight down mind numbing, much like watching wrestling shows or the lastest 'developments' in Days of Our Lives. The latter is actually quite a good analogy to the game: people mingle, some disappear, new ones appear, everyone is connected to everything and if nothing interesting can happen anymore, they just start syndication.
