Addiction, Diablo 3, and Portal 2
Wednesday, August 22, 2012 at 5:47PM In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about nicotine addiction amongst smokers. What you might not know is that nicotine's power varies quite a bit depending on the, uh, victim.
Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is only addictive in some people, some of the time. More important, it turns out that even among those who smoke regularly, there are enormous differences in the stickiness of their habit. Smoking experts used to think 90 to 95 percent of all those who smoked were regular smokers. But several years ago, the smoking questions on the federal government's national health survey were made more specific, and researchers discovered, to their astonishment, that a fifth of all smokers don't smoke every day. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky.
Gladwell goes on to call these sometimes-smokers "chippers." While chippers never feel the need to go beyond a certain level of their drug, true addicts escalate their drug usage over time. I was surprised when I first read that, as I would have imagined that everyone would be caught on the slippery slope toward needing more and more of a drug, but apparently not.
You might ask what separates chippers from more hardcore addicts. In Gladwell's summary of the situation, he says "probably genetic factors." One piece of support for this is a (kind of scary) study where mice were given toxic levels of nicotine. At some point, it's poisonous enough to cause a seizure. Is that point about the same in all mice? Turns out, it's not. While some mice had seizures at X amount of nicotine, other mice could tolerate two or three times that amount. There seems to be a genetic difference here. Further, that range of "toxic to some, but others can tolerate two or three times as much" is the same range for alcohol.
I've never personally been interested in smoking (or drinking alcohol, for that matter), but I drink coffee. It's something I originally did for practical reasons when I needed a bit of a boost to do some work, even though I didn't want the coffee at all, but now I certainly have some sort of chemical addition to it. That said, it's only at the level of a "chipper." I have basically never had more than one coffee in a day, while I know others who have escalated to four, five, six cups, etc.
Oh, and another thing about those mice. The experimenters wondered whether there was a correlation between how much nicotine a mice could tolerate (a genetic factor) and how much nicotine the mouse would *voluntarily* consume (behavioral factor). It turns out the correlation was almost perfect, and that the more a given mouse could tolerate, the more it voluntarily consumed. So I'm willing to be my own personal choice of having some coffee, but not nearly as much as some other people I know, is just my luck of the draw with genetics.
Wanting vs Liking
If you only read one thing in this post, this should be it: "wanting" and "liking" are governed by different circuits in the brain, based on different chemicals. (The wanting-circuit uses dopamine while the liking-circuit uses opioids.) It's actually super important for you to know that wanting and liking are so different in our brains. Things that you want are not necessarily things you will like. This illuminates how bad of an idea it is to expend huge amounts of effort to attain things that you will ultimately not like. The most obvious one here is money. Mountains of research say that if you are not amongst the poorest people in the world who cannot afford clean water and shelter, etc., that more money is not correlated at all with more happiness. But you sure want more money. You'd probably even be willing to work way more hours at a job you don't even really like if you could get a lot more money. You are likely to not actually like this state of affairs, but at least in America, it's very normal to want that.
Because I'm pretty introspective, I've thought a fair amount about that coffee thing I mentioned before. I've concluded that I want the coffee a whole lot more than I like it. I sort of like it, but the want is much higher. Often there's a Jamba Juice place or equivalent near a coffee place (fruity slushy drinks). Several times I've imagined "what if I got the fruity slushy thing, would I like that more? What if I got some coffee-type thing, would I like that more?" And usually the answer is that I imagine I would like the fruity thing more. Most of the time, I choose the coffee because the want is just too powerful. The few times I do choose the fruity slush drink, I have noticed that every one of those times I did in fact like it more than I like the coffee, yet I continue to choose coffee. The point? Wanting things (dopamine) is so powerful that even when you are fully aware what's going on, it's hard to fight it.
Games
Is addition in games at all like the chemical addictions described above? That's too big of a question, and I won't claim to have an answer. I can only offer a guess that yes there are some similarities. I think probably there are genetic differences in how people obsessed people get with games. And the whole business of dopamine vs opioids I think is extremely relevant to games. Let's make that concrete with two examples.
Diablo 3
Diablo 3 is really all about the addiction. I don't actually know if the developers of the game talk about this explicitly as they work the design. They might, though my guess is they don't. I would guess they are simply trying to make a game that they think is fun and has lots of replayability. It just happens that what's really going on is they are trying to find the local maximum of how addictive that style of game can possibly be.
Diablo 3 really doubled down on "randomness." Random maps, random items. Random means new, new, new which is good for the seeking behavior that your dopamine-starved brain wants. It goes far beyond new though: we know full well that a "random rewards schedule" (look that up if you need to) is the maximally effective way to addict animals. Giving out known rewards at fixed intervals just isn't as powerful as giving random rewards at random intervals, and that's exactly what their loot system is cashing in on. There's so much research to support this random rewards schedule stuff, that I won't even go into it here.
So we have great production values in Diablo 3, great art, and a whole bunch of abilities to play with and try out. There's challenge, though a lot of the game is really grinding for gear (or grinding for money to get your gear on the auction house). You can certainly get way into it. You could learn about the math behind the game, and learn how to optimize your gear just right, what to look for, the patterns of the auction house. I don't deny you could experience flow playing the game. It's just that there's something you should keep in mind....
We also know from psychology that people really want to rationalize their behavior. So when you are telling your story about how much fun you are having in Diablo 3, and how much brain power you are using or something, it's possible that that's mostly a story of rationalization. You might have fallen prey to the very well-designed addiction cycle the game is all about. I know I've found myself spending far, far more hours on it than would seem to make sense given the level of fun. I'm not saying I didn't have fun—I certainly have. I also like coffee. I just don't like Diablo 3 as much or like coffee as much as would make sense given the number of hours of Diablo I've played and number of cups of coffee I've drank.
Portal 2
I wrote about Portal 2 a couple months ago. A friend wanted to play the coop mode with me, I did, and I liked it a lot. That took about two days, and I wasn't playing Diablo 3 during those two days. Right after that, I liked Portal 2 so much that I downloaded several player-created maps and played those too. Also great. Portal 2 as an engine is just really super great, in my opinion. It's possible to create really interesting puzzles, and I enjoy solving them.
It's worth noting that Portal 2 is about as far from the Diablo 3 end of the spectrum as you can get though. There is no addiction involved at all. There are no external rewards at all. No leveling up, no XP. There are no random items to grind. It's entirely based on your own internal rewards of feeling satisfaction at solving the puzzles. It's sort of like, "What if a game used *zero* tricks to get you to play, and you only played because of its own merits?" The result is that the game is so good that I've played it a lot, but have not ever played it more than makes sense based on my level of liking it. In other words, the want and like are aligned. It's not like that cup of coffee that I get anyway, even though I should have gotten a fruit slush. It's not like Diablo 3. For that reason, I really admire the game. It's playing it straight, so to speak. I wish this were the norm, instead of the crazy unusual outlier that it is, these days.
There's something else that was interesting to me about the contrast between these two games. Earlier I said I stopped playing Diablo 3 for a couple days to play coop Portal 2. Then for several days, I played various player-created Portal 2 levels. But then what did I do? I actually went back to work. I worked for about a month straight (on my customizable card game) without playing anything. Portal 2 had, in effect, broken the cycle. It was like eating junk food every day, then having several days of eating regular food and realizing "oh, not all food is junk food, hmm." When I wanted to play some game again, I played Portal 2 and discovered there is a "quick play" button in the game's menus that instantly gives me a new level to play! I have played literally dozens of levels this way, and practically all of them have been good. And still, I've never played more than felt like the amount that matched how much fun I was having.
Former Capcom community manager Seth Killian once mentioned something to me about addiction. He said, "If you think you're addicted something, try not doing it for a month. At the end of the month, if you want to do it again, go ahead. If you don't feel like you really need to do it anymore though, then you've exposed that it was just a shitty habit to begin with." I thought about that as Portal 2 had cleansed my palate of Diablo, and I never logged in again.
Until Diablo 3 patch 1.04, that is. I really like the improved effects in combat that make it easier to tell what's going on, and the balance changes seem to be improvements at first glance. Also, there's a new meter to fill up that will take forever (the paragon levels). Even though it's ridiculously transparent that it's just triggering the same old addiction circuits (more level ups! and by the way more super rare legendary items to seek out!), it's almost like seeing through the veil doesn't help. That's how powerful the forces we're playing with here are.
I hope this helped you think about these issues in some way. Maybe I could say more, but it's time for some Diablo 3 now.
EDIT: As an epilogue, I'll say the last line was a joke in case you couldn't tell. I have played much more Portal 2 since I wrote this.
Reader Comments (44)
Stephen: The way I internalized can't be easily adapted to other people, but I think "Step 2: ?????" is managing to attain fulfillment at some point below your financial means - that's when you get to "live if for yourself", so to speak.
If I were to suggest an off-the-cuff way to get there, I'd take from the article the notion of evaluating how much you like (not want</I>) individual things that cost you money, and try optimizing for a few months - do more of the things that have a really favorable ratio and less of the ones that were mostly feeding your addiction, cutting down costs and increasing fun.
As a specific example, if you play single-player games at release, you'll pay $600 for ten games, and play a lot of the two you really enjoy. Wait a year, and you can easily tell the three best games, buy them for $60 total, and play the two you really like just as much, and not have to trudge through seven less interesting ones because you feel you need to get $60 of fun out of them.
Less money, more fun. It's quite superficial, but adequately addressing your question is probably worth an entire book...
Very relevant information. You put words on ideas and rationalizations I've had the last year, trying to define what mental pursuits are worth undertaking and which are not. It is an idea well worth spreading.
I want my spare time to be spent on self-improvement and/or anxiety relief. Playing Diablo or non-tactical RPGs, while fun, have a high opportunity cost. I could be doing so much better with Dominion/Warmachine/Yomi.
Sirlin's description of going half time on his job mirrors my own experience. When I decided to go back to school full time I told my boss I would work the job part time till they got a replacement trained, and would just do the critical stuff (which I liked) and not the crappy bureaucratic stuff that had been tacked on (which I hated). After doing that for a few months, I found that I would happily have kept that job for a very long time, even though the pay was low and there was zero chance at promotion, as it gave me a lot of time to work on other projects I wanted to do. I also found that I spent a lot, and I mean a LOT, less money simply because I wasn't constantly stressed out and angry from work and buying models and other stuff to make myself feel better. (Some people buy alcohol, I buy little plastic men...) I was making half the money but still putting money into savings just by being more mindful of what I spent on, and spending time playing with what I had instead of buying things I could only dream of having the time to play with.
So yea, the trick with money seems to be figuring out how much you really need to do the sorts of things you really want to do, find a job you like quite well that pays that, and then do it. If the job is one of the things you really want to do, so much the better. Much better to work part time and make less money, but have time to do other things than work yourself to death and wish for more money and fun.
As a side note, I think economics is slowly realizing that, as a really good partial explanation for the seeming "stagnation" and widening inequality gap is the fact that many people just don't want or need huge piles of money, but rather will trade it for more free time to do other things, while some people just only care about money and are willing to trade everything else for it.
Actually I believe Diablo III failed largely because Blizzard expected it to be carried by the addiction factor just like Diablo II and World of Warcraft. Except this time people saw through it and complained there was no endgame other than gear grinding. On top of that, grinding gold isn't nearly as addictive as grinding items. Turns out when Guild Wars 2 is about to come out you really can't go live with such a tiny and narrow game after such a long wait.
Guild Wars 2 is of course the same thing but actually does require and reward player skill.
And people still bend their areer around being able to afford iDevices which are designed clearly to appeal to the desire for social standing, and don't realise it...
The real issue is generational turn over, Diablo 3 for me was one giant disappointment. I speak as a former diablo 1 / 2 addict that played marathon sessions until the game started to give.
For me I would always begin to lose interest in diablo 2 going into nightmare in the first act.
The real issue is diablo 3 isn't a very fun game compared to diablo 2, diablo 2 was going in the right direction by adding moves to characters like the pally (shield bash + charge, etc). Action RPG's are really fighting games from isometric camera perspective. It's as if you've taken soul calibur 2 and adjusted the camera and combat for isometric perspective.
I found both Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 underwhelming games - they are merely milking the unwashed, stupid and inexperienced. Most mass market gamers are not gaming/money smart.
The fact that 6 million plus people bought a DRM infested game is proof enough that most gamers are morons. Diablo 3 didn't realize (sadly) that it's combat mechanics are weak and the classes and skills largely suck.
People who like D3 are just newer gamers without a huge gaming history and are just too easy to please and undiscriminating leading to mediocre games like Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 (which is just a rehash of SC1, no innovation).
Just read the last couple of comments on here. There's some law of nature that says you can't mention Diablo 3 without someone coming in to tell you just how much it ruined the genre after the godly creation that was Diablo 2. It's somewhat funnier to see it in the comments of a guy's blog who had a post up about why he likes the D3 system so much more than D2's. It's even funnier than the last poster complains about Starcraft 2 just being a no-innovation rehash of SC1, when so many of the comments about D3 are about how they screwed up a system that was working just fine.
Looking back on this post, I can't help but wonder if the addiction / skinner box thing was a part of this rabid love for the older system. I've heard people say that the lack of respecs meant that your Diablo 2 character MEANT SOMETHING to you, it had feeling and uniqueness rather than just feeling like any other member of your class. What that actually meant, of course, is that if you wanted to experiment with new skills or try a different combination, you had to put an extra ten hours of gameplay into a new character, driving that addiction home even farther.
@dreamshade
I don't think you get why people loved diablo 2 to begin with, it's not that Diablo 2 didn't have problems with over-relying on loot gambling (it definitely did) the problem is the diablo 3 is NOT made by the same people who made diablo 2 the feel of the world, the games story, the characters, the classes, are all different in a bad way. People on higher edge of the intelligence scale can see the subtleties that go beyond your limited abilities. What happens is most people use social proof to change their opinion and attitudes to go along with the crowd, there's a scientific reason why people are so prone to believing propaganda and rationalizing why "d3 is better". Marching to the beat of serious analysis takes lots of time, dedication and playing Diablo 3 and diablo 1+2 back to back so that you can tease out those differences in your unconscious mind and identify them. Provided your not a blithing idiot. Most people don't do that kind of thinking when forming opinions about games so they blather unintelligent nonsense.
Those of us in the sciences know that most peoples opinions on D3 are idiotic because most people don't understand the science of how their brain works. You could be given the most fact based mathematically sound opinion on why d3 is not very good and you'd still reject it because that isn't how your brain works.
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
When you come along blaming skinner boxes or 'nostalgia goggles'. You're not being intelligent. Game mechanics are directly connected to aesthetics AND quirks (even though they may be 'irrational') in human psyche. The problem isn't the bad aspects of diablo 2 (which everyone knows) the problem is the designers who made d2 would have taken Diablo 3 in a better direction then the diablo 3 team which basically copied diablo 2's formula and and dumbed it all down for the moron wow masses.
Games are a communication between developers and the gaming audience and many gamers really don't like what the devs behind D3 farted out. Part of this has to do with lazyness and expense of developing games. The random dungeon element of diablo 1/2 wasn't perfect but the were going in the right direction. In D3 there is next to no sense of randomness or novelty in dungeons and this makes dungeons pathetically uninteresting because the repetition is just too overt and not more obscure and hidden like it was in prior games.
Many of us could write essays on the subtle aspects of diablo 1 + 2, diablo 3 just doesn't have the same excitement factor d1 and D2 had. Whenever doing 'analysis after the fact' 10 years after diablo 1 + 2 were released lots of game design lessons have been learned since then, trying to pin it all on nostalgia is weak minded at best and shows you are part of the mouthbreathing WoW generation at worst.
Diablo 2 had game mechanics going in the direction of a more action oriented game which were cut short by diablo 3's shit classes. Most of d3's classes are utterly boring as fuck to play. Don't tell me many people wouldn't kill to get improved versions of older classes from D2 into D3, you bet they would because the find the new ones so pathetically designed.
Anyone who doesn't think there are huge issues with D3 has already proven their inability to form a cogent opinion about gaming and should not be listened to in serious discussions in trying to break down why things suck or are unfun.
Anonymous comments tend to be much lower quality. There was exhibit A.
@sirlin
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110903142411.htm
People who have opinions contrary to the group are cast out because of unconscious bias. Given your level of investment in and being too close to developers in the industry. Your analysis of my post is suspect. Unconscious desire to protect and defend people you know and/or your commenters on your blog or your strong feelings for diablo 3 is not insight.
You live on a world of stupid killer human beings, a world riddled with war and poverty, this says something about human minds capacity to perceive reality - it sucks. It takes way too much time, effort, energy to do serious analysis. And we can be certain most people who casually comment here at your blog and even you haven't done enough. I do brain research for a living. The problem is the human mind is not an infinitely flexible machine. There are places people can reach that you simply can't because it's a matter of unconscious processes that work at a superior level of efficiency and it has nothing to do with arrogance, it's just a matter of the universes functioning.
Intelligent people have a level of humility but they also have their limits given the intractable nature of human communication on the internet. What I've intended and what you've interpreted are two separate things.
Don't confuse style with substance. You're only seeing what your brain is forcing you to see. The real issue is once you learn or master a given game or system the stickyness begins to wear off and you want novelty or more things to do. Diablo 3 didn't do any of this. So those of us who've experienced the same game with slightly updated graphics and crappier loot grinding with worse randomized dungeons and questionable classes have serious issues with D3.
There is a reason D3 created such a divide, those with actual curiosity into how different brains work and experience games will be the ones cracking the 'fun code'. It's all a matter of persistence and a cubic fuck-tonne of boring work given sufficient talent.
Just because you think someones opinion has no basis in reality doesn't mean that is true, your mind gives you a 'beginners model' a suggestion based on your past experiences whether something is 'true' or 'bullshit'. Given the limited level of your education and actual research in the field itself of the brain sciences you have no idea the things that have been discovered are undermining entire idea of 'subjective/objective' distinction, there will be a science of fun one day and we'll have scientific reasons why people like or dislike something sooner or later and be able to point out specifics. The enlightenment was wrong about how the human mind operates but it was also wrong about the subjective/objective division of the world. The real problem is thinking clearly about these issues and it's obvious you don't have the expertise to form high level opinions on a lot of what you comment on.
Real creative intellectuals are resisted because of modelling problem of the mind given its limited resources, if you are as intelligent as you think you are then you should know that your mind doesn't live in reality, it lives in it's 'model of the world' and given that most of your opinions, ideas, likes, dislikes are a matter of biological functioning you identify with whatever your nervous system is generating. Questioning whether the words and ideas passing along it when they are generated have anything to do with reality is intelligent, assuming you know and not engaging your curiosity is not.
That being the case I'm also a human being with a passion for games and am not immune from intractable nature of communication on the internet. That being said, some games have been dumbed down over the last 10 years and anyone who says differently is definitely ignorant of reality.
Anonymous: No more posts for you here. If you want to post walls of nonsense that try to sound legit because they mention some science, try the forums (where you will be ripped apart mercilessly). It's not even about liking Diablo 3 or not liking it. It's entirely reasonable to say that it's a horrible, horrible idea to make someone replay an entire game to change a talent point. It's not because of nostalgia or groupthink or whatever. Quite the opposite. It's you who is suffering from that. I'm sorry, but the quality of thought in your posts if waaaaaaaay below the bar of acceptable. Bye.
Obviously no real reason to respond to Anonymous, but I love the idea that removing broken stuff in RPGs equals a "dumbing down." Like, yeah, typing g-a-m-e-f-a-q-s-.-c-o-m into a browser and pressing enter, then finding the guide for your class, then following it exactly, was really hard. So much thought required! Something similar when Skyrim was under development and Bethesda removed wear-and-tear on weapons, meaning you no longer had to carry around hammers and then sometimes click "Use" to repair your weapon. A lot of RPG fans went nuts over this loss of a clearly vital and compelling system of pressing a button periodically.
What gives? How are these annoying, fiddly bits that don't involve any thought at all considered to be intelligent?
Imo, gaming addiction is bullshit. The only thing that can be an addiction IS an external chemical that alters your internal chemicals. If it's something like games or books or tvs or movies or whatever it's not an external chemical altering your internal make up. It's just the internal reacting to an external stimulus and that stimulus could be multiple things. Blaming the stimulus when it's the body's make up that decides the reaction is silly. That's like attacking the symptoms instead of the cause.
Andrew's post implies the following. If a scale of addictiveness ranged from 0 to 1000, and we put heroine at 1000, then the set of ALL possible things that aren't themselves chemicals, but that interact with your own brain chemistry (such your dopamine)...they ALL have addictiveness level of exactly 0.000. That's a very, very strong claim. It flies in the face of everything known about gambling addiction, for example. So uh, no that is not a correct stance.
Gambling addiction is less strong than heroine, sure, but literally 0.000 on the scale? I mean, there are actual drugs that are less addictive than gambling to some people who are especially prone to it. There's also a certain kind of brain damage and a certain kind of medicine for stroke victims that causes gambling compulsion to be so strong that it's life-ruining. This goes to show that even normal people who rolled unlucky genetic dice and have that part of their brains formed a bit differently than other people can be more susceptable to gambling addiction than the rest of us.
Stephen yeah, and it's a common problem in fighting games. If there's some fiddly thing that adds nothing to strategy, a whole lot of players will complain when that is fixed, claiming the fix "dumbs the game down." So the removal of something with requiring no thought such that things requiring thought have more emphasis is "dumb" to them. Examples are kara throwing (press some extra button in a fiddly way whenever you want to throw to increase your throw range) or L-cancelling in Smash (press L to have 0 recovery from a move when you land instead of non-zero recovery). These add 0 or nearly 0 strategy, it's just some tax you have to pay, yet somehow a lot of people see that as great. Who knows why, I think they are just not thinking critically about what's going on.
Another example is the command to block in Soul Calibur. You might think the command is to hold the guard button down, but that's wrong. The command is "hold guard while rapidly mashing A and B." This will break throws 50% of the time and there is no drawback at all for doing it. I think if that particular thing is fixed *maybe* people won't call it dumbed down? I really don't even know. But it's fiddly and stupid and should be fixed.
Hi,
I was wondering if you felt like the competitive ladders for games like Starcraft were fulfilling, a cheap addicting trick, somewhere in the middle or a whole different concept?
I am impressed at the matchmaking system in terms of how well it finds your skill level and how genuine the progress can feel getting from gold to platinum, for example. Plus tracing your improvement through a reliable method should be valuable.
On the other hand, people do grind for hours on those games in order to achieve higher rankings, progress up through the levels - probably due to want rather than like. And there is not much of an end in sight - I'm a Masters player but if someone asked me if I was any good at the game I'd laugh and say no, not really.
Thoughts?
Alex: I think that's a good question. In my opinion, if the real goal is to test your skills or prove yourself, it has to be a tournament. Ladders are always gamed somehow (win trading, cherry picking, etc), or require a lot of grinding or whatever. So ladders are kind of "for fun" to me. But, they are a lot better than nothing. When they have skill based progression like elo, then they are some measure of your progress. Same with Starcraft 2's--it's heavily sugar-coated with how it's displayed, and it does have a grind element to it, but also an actual skill test.
Starcraft 2's ladder is designed to get you to play a little more often than you otherwise would. I think there's a point at which that's exploitative and bad, but I don't think Starcraft 2's system reaches that point. In fact, I think it's actually good. They are encouraging more play, which gives everyone more opponents, but not like "forcing" you. The tricks are relatively mild and kind of help the community.
The best advice I can give you though has to do with you how approach playing on a ladder. There's a trap, and I have to fight so hard not to fall into it myself on games with ladders. It's just human nature. You can't help but try to play in a way that maximizes your ladder ranking. That can mean not branching out to try new things when the same old things will work. I think you're better off trying to IGNORE your ladder rank and just get better. That's really hard to do and like I said, I fail at that sometimes too. But if you just try to get better, ladder ranking will come. If you try to maximize that ranking, you're going to be going way too short term and it might push you into a plateau that you'll have trouble getting past.
That kind of reminds me of some weight loss advice I've heard. Some trainer person said don't base everything on your weight on the scale. Instead, make sure you are doing your exercises and eating the best you can and the weight will come off in time. Sometime it's better to watch the metrics out of the corner of your eye, when your focus is on actual improvement.
How "shitty" a habit is isn't measured by how addictive it is, it's measured by how damaging it is to your health and life. Smoking is still a shitty habit whether you do or do not feel the craving for it a month after you quit cold turkey. Not to imply that gaming or any game out there is shitty, that's simply a matter of perspective depending on whether one is objective enough to see if it damages their life or not.
Conversely, exercise is always good whether you do or do not want to go back to it a month after stopping. One might ponder if some games are like exercise and some like smoking for you, heheh.
Sirlin, from a purely original technical stand point of the word "addiction" (not what's changed over the last few decades), anything that WAS NOT an external chemical acting on your internal chemicals could not be claimed as an addiction. And to claim gambling or gaming are the cause of your "addiction" honestly is something foolish and not well researched anyways. Most of the time it's not even those things that are the cause, but they are merely triggers for a deeper psychological issue that generally deals with compulsion and impulse problems and it just so happens gaming or gambling or working or sex or working out happens to be the thing which triggers it. The cause is not the activity, they are merely the activity which brings the internal problems to light.
Most who claim "gaming addiction" I've also found to have a motive to be extremely against gaming just as many who were against gambling or casual sex or whatnot will claim someone who engages in those activities is "addicted" and "harming themselves" and other bs.
Andrew: Your statement that addiction can't include external things like gambling is fabricated, made-up. I don't even know what to tell you, you're just making stuff up that doesn't match science and what is known about things such as gambling addiction. As I said before, there's a known link between brain damage in very specific part of the brain (also when that part is affected by some medical treatments) that triggers overwhelming gambling urge and ruins their lives. There are documentaries on this, research papers, etc. Some people, without any medical treatments or brain damage, happen to have similar (though less extreme) tendencies. There seems to be genetic basis for it regardless of you what your uninformed opinion would theorize.
It's also false that "most" people who research that care at are against casual sex, gaming, or whatever. You're making stuff up again.
"L-cancelling in Smash (press L to have 0 recovery from a move when you land instead of non-zero recovery)"
That's not how L Canceling works. It's halved landing lag, not zero. However you're right when you say it adds zero strategy.
Sirlin,
You deny that the definition of addiction has changed over time?
http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/data/PDFS/dsm-i.pdf
DSM I, the only thing classified as addiction were drug and alcohol. Foreign substances.
http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/data/PDFS/dsm-ii.pdf
http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/data/PDFS/dsm-iii.pdf
http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/data/PDFS/dsm-iv.pdf
In fact, it's not until DSM V that we finally see an official change of the word to include things like gambling or behavioral things. And there's a problem I have with this change. It opens up a problem that suddenly EVERYTHING can be considered an addiction. You go to the bathroom or have sex and perhaps frequently or enjoy it (something that evolutionarily makes sense so that people would do these things that are for the good of the body and/or species and not something a person would shy away from cause it doesn't fell good to them) and suddenly those can now be addictions?
True, many people in the medical world have written papers about "Gambling Addiction" and the sorts, but ever actually read them? There are agendas behind all things. A better term to be used for such behaviors be compulsive. That's far more fitting a term to be used when it comes to games, sex, working out, gambling, etc. But addiction? The original medical definition? No. Sure the definition has changed, but if they really want to do that they need to better define it as to when a behavior becomes an addiction compared to when it is just something they enjoy to do frequently. And medically you can't say "when it starts to interfere with the rest of their social obligations" or the sort I've seen people try and claim.
So no, I'm not fabricating anything. The very definition of addiction has been changing. And it's been people trying to include behaviors, not just external substances. Why? Well, honestly, most of the papers I've read that state such behaviors are addictions, do some background into who is funding it or the researcher's past and suddenly you find some of them have been effected by someone who was obsessive over gambling or sex or something. They let their personal experiences interfere with their research. They have a goal to prove something is addictive because something that's addictive tends to be seen as bad and suddenly you can push for laws or regulations against it. Suddenly you start regulating people's hobbies and interests. It's a form of social control.