I have read that they cause a release of dopamine which causes addiction. I read somewhere that they eventually decrease your dopamine, making you apathetic.
I will try and find links for this later today.
Can’t answer right now-- on the bonus level!
All pleasurable activities stimulate release of dopamine. If you want to classify that under addiction, then painting, playing guitar and fishing are also addictive.
If not physiologically addictive (I have no idea but I’d assume not given that they’re played, not ingested/injected/inhaled), some games have components to them designed to be psychologically addictive. Short term rewards for immediate gratification, ramping difficulty so you get invested but it takes longer and longer to progress, time sensitive goals so you feel compelled to play and not lose your progress, etc. Often you can pay real money for a bonus: Faster leveling, better gear to help you progress or a longer delay between time limits.
MMORPGs and other “cash shop” or subscription model games (especially those Facebook games) thrive on this model since, the longer you play, the more money they make.
Here’s an interesting Cracked article called 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted
5: Putting you in a Skinner box.
4: Creating virtual food pallets for you to eat.
3: Making you press the lever.
2: Keeping you pressing it…forever.
1: Getting you to call the Skinner box home.
Written by one of the more serious writers, not funny but very well written and interesting. Oh, and depressing.
If you’re Lord Zartan, 88th level Fighter and an all around bad-ass and important person in your MMORPG, it’s probably pretty frustrating and despair-inducing to quit playing and be Ron Grubbs, 300 lb bearded telemarketer who’s unable to pay his bills in real life or get a date. (to use a hypothetical and extreme example)
I think a lof of people fall prey to that particular fantasy/reality divide, and get more and more invested in their MMORPGs as a result. It’s an escape from reality, and the bigger the difference between that escape and your reality, the more likely you are to want to play more and more.
The subscription models of a lot of MMORPGs just adds to it.
Im one of the people who spent an absurb amount of my childhood on the computer. This may be a more psychological post than anything else, but this is how I see it now looking back (I still use the computer often, but I try to shy away from games and try to do more useful things)
When I was younger I could spend 80+ hours on the computer a week at times. I essentially wasted my childhood. I dont remember thinking about it at all (or at least it was rare) during school, but when school was over I would immediately switch my focus over to the computer, unless there was an immediate distraction like a friend wanting to do something. I would rarely initiate activities outside of the computer because I was almost always thinking about going home right after school.
I attribute my time on the computer as an escape from my family. I am otherwise an ordinary kid, maybe I was a little bit more shy/naive and had lower self esteem than the others, and I think that certainly grew over the years because of time spent alone. I dont think I ever turned down time with friends to play on the computer, so in that regard I could leave it at any time to do other things. My problem was I had no desire to initiate other activities with my friends (this seems essentially like addiction to me).
Part of my problem was also, as somebody noted above, that I was “indebted” to the game in a sense. I played call of duty (for a period) and was in tournaments/leagues playing against the top teams in the country, and I was proud of this and saw no reason to stop it.
Now in my life, the computer is simply somewhere to go to waste time. I would rather be doing other things. No major event happened to me to change my perception of it, and I certainly dont feel withdrawl when i dont use it. I think it is simply a mindset that causes people to use it a lot.
I certainly regret wasting a lot of my childhood, and for my kids in the future I will certainly try my best to shy them as far away from it as I can. I apologize for this mind-dump, as it may be incoherent and poorly organized. I really dont know if it should be called addiction or not, but it sure affected my time/mindset like an addiction would. Now that I read this and knowing my history, it seems like I may have been trying to live a double life to avoid my real one.
In everyday conversation, “addiction” seems to just mean someone doing something more often than I consider sensible.
But the definition of “addiction” is rather more specific than this. Being addicted means doing something because you feel you have to, rather than for enjoyment. It means experiencing withdrawal symptoms if you go without the thing.
I play games a lot but if I’m in a situation where I can’t play for a couple of weeks, I don’t miss it, or even think about it.
To return to the OP, video games are a very broad medium. Generally speaking I think people spend a lot of time on them because they have a lot of content to experience.
But as some have already said, I think the design of some MMORPGs take advantage of “addictive personalities”, deliberately or otherwise.
Davebfd, it is a generational thing. Plenty of people have done the same. I have played on loads of different consoles. I still had other interest’s though and kept active.
Can people be addicted to gambling? If so, then I think they can be addicted to video games for much the same reason. With a video game the reward is different, but it’s the same action -> reward impulse.