Technology

I love it when the title of an article tells me the opinion I'm supposed to have.

The fact is there's a lot of work that goes into designing games to drive behavior. The article details some of the work that game designers do to induce compulsive behavior, like occasional free gifts to keep people from getting frustrated with certain levels. The article then poopoos this idea by pointing out that heroin addicts never get free heroin from their dealers so this can't be a real addiction. Wanna learn a fun fact that I know as a recovering addict that y'all don't know? Your dope dealer will take a short. He'll sell you a ten dollar bag for five dollars. Not every time, but every once in a while, and for the exact same reason that these games do it: he wants you stuck in, he wants you in his debt in particular and he wants you coming back to him. A sick junkie doesn't make anyone any money, we mostly just lie in bed and sob. It keeps you in the reward loop, the same as free gifts to get you past frustrating parts of a video game.

The article also acknowledges that gaming addiction is in the DSM, but tries to dismiss that as well based on notes that say further research is needed. Further research is always needed for everything, especially to do with mental health. The fact that it's in the DSM at all means that, while they may not have found the fire, they can feel heat and smell smoke. The article even concedes that 13 hours of gaming/day indicates that "something is going on here on a psychological level" but because it's not at the level of an active heroin addiction it's not worth discussing despite the author's intuition that "something is going on here" combined with the opinion of the mental health community that, from the article about the DSM linked in this one, "There is neurological research showing similarities in changes in the brain between video gaming and addictive substances."

I get it. I grew up in the 90s, when video games were new and scary and were gonna make us all smoke crack and shoot up our schools. This harmless hobby of mine was scapegoated into being the cause of so many of society's ills, and it turned out to be 100% bullshit every time. But this is different. The people who design games are open about the fact that this compulsivity is what they're designing for. The people who study this sort of behavior have already given the phenomenon a name, they're studying it and they see it as a growing phenomenon. It's likely to end up like beer, where there are people who can enjoy it sometimes in a healthy manner and people who can't. From the psychiatry.org article linked in the OP's article, it seems to be about 1% of gamers who develop problematic behavior around gaming.