Can you explain what you mean by “Blaming a video game for the state of ones mental health is some top shelf addiction, you have ater if it makes you feel better.”
If your state of mind is unaffected by games, that is great! I hope it is true.
It seems pretty clear that games are designed increasingly to appeal to basic human compulsion and less as merely an adversarial competitive platform. I recommend the work of Ian bogost on the subject.
Here’s a prescient observation from him over a decade ago:
Many games involve compulsion, and studies that compare the partial reinforcement techniques of slot machines and psychological manipulations to videogames stretch back to the mid-1980s. In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) frequently have been accused of doing little more than compelling players to keep playing; amounting to “brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money” to use Juul’s words from the NYU event announcement. And certainly one could make a convincing case that many other sorts of games build compulsion into their design.
But, as Jesse Fuchs pointed out during the seminar, most games (even MMOs) aren’t just brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money. And in the case of social games, it often seems that they exist solely for that purpose. This is a logic that dovetails well with Zynga CEO Mark Pincus’s infamous declaration, [“I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away.”]
3. Optionalism
Most games require some non-trivial effort to play. Challenge and effort are often cited in definitions of games, as is a tendency toward meaningful interactivity. In these cases, a game’s meaning emerges largely from the choices a player makes within a complex system of many interlocking and contingent outcomes, both user- and system-generated.
Of course, there are also games that one plays for relaxation instead of for challenge—zoning out with Solitaire or Bejeweled, for example. In both these cases, the gameplay may not entail the complexity of Go or Civilization, but the results are earnest and, at times, profound.
By contrast, the gameplay in social games is almost entirely optional. The play acts themselves are rote, usually mere actuations of operations on expired timers. And then more so, even the enacting of those rote maneuvers can be skipped, through delegation or (more often) by spending cash money on objects or actions. Social games are games you don’t have to play.
4. Destroyed Time
Many of today’s console games exert a time crush. They demand tens or even hundreds of hours of attention to complete, some or most of which often feels empty. In that respect, one could argue that many games seem to destroy time. But social games do something even more violent—they also destroy the time we spend away from them.
Compulsion explains the feeling of struggling to return to something in spite of ourselves. Its flipside involves the disrespect of time that we might otherwise spend doing more valuable things—or even just pondering the thoughtful and unexpected ideas that an asynchronous game might raise. Social games so covet our time that they abuse us while we are away from them, through obligation, worry, and dread over missed opportunities.
The compulsive destruction of time in social games does not merely affect players, but also developers. As we are so often reminded, these games are “not products but services.” They are ongoing, never-ending affairs that must extract time and money from players in the most efficient way possible. Developers are told to “listen to their players” and to enact quantitative design regimens to insure that players get exactly what they want—even if they do not know they want it. Just like playing one, running a game as a service is a prison one may never escape.