@Bioautographical

Corporations don't use advertising so that they can market their stuff at 99.9% of the populace. Every succesful business person knows that is not a realistic target demographic.

In the same way, certain video games are marketed at certain people. Violent video games are often marketed towards violent people, games for young girls are marketed towards young girls etc. World of Warcraft and most MMO's are marketed towards competetive gamers with a lot of time invested in gaming. Competetive gamers who like statistics are not like that because they were born with that disposition; events in their life have shaped them into these kinds of people, for better or for worse. This is also why games can, and often do, change people's preferences about things in their life, especially games that are played for hours without pause. Taking a break is the responsibility of the gamer, sure, but can you take a break when you're doing a 40 man instance that takes nearly six hours to complete, and if you drop out it means everybody you play with fail?

I had never played any MMO prior to trying out Eve - Online many years ago. I was an fps enthusiast who spent maybe a few hours a week playing competetively online, but that was it. With Eve, I started playing a few hours each day, and after a week it was a lot more. After another week of that I noticed I spent way too little time studying in addition to being wrecked becose of too little sleep, and so I quit. Would I have done the same if it wasn't for my studies and people who told me I looked like shit? I'm not sure.

My point is that games can in many ways "force" you to keep playing and thus change your behavioral pattern, especially if you play with other people. Sure, it's not directly forcing you to do anything, but by incrementally increasing the time it takes to overcome a challenge, together with higher rewards allowing you to beat even greater challenges, and similar simple approaches, they might make you forget the time you're spending playing them. When you spend too much time doing something without taking a break - that be reading, watching television or any other activity that doesn't require you to physically exert yourself - you change your mental state. Video games can, and do, prey on this.

I love games of all kinds and shapes, but I have found that MMO's in my case are not healthy for me, simply because if I play with other people for a long enough time, I start caring about them. This in turn might lead me to engage in acitivites like raids that end up taking too much of my time, and I will thus end up spending more hours in front of the computer than I am comfortable with. To understand this requires a great deal of reflection, though, and you won't easily do that if a game has become a central part of your social daily routine. Understanding this is at the core of creating succesful MMO's, so my conclusion is that - yes, games can be designed to be addictive and yes, that is the responsibility of the developers.

@bioautographical

All right fine, go and open up your casino and make money from peoples misery. Also in Australia we have pokies in poor areas in every pub and they are taking what little money people have in those areas.

If you can sleep at night making money like that then good luck to you but don't be surprised if alot of people think you are a huge jerk.

Sorry, but I think there is actually some merit to the "game-addiction" arguments.
No doubt, that a lot of things can be addictive and no doubt, a lot of them are far worse in their consequences.
But I know, just from my experience, that there were times, where I was in a condition, that I myself would describe as game-addicted. I don't just mean having a really cool game and wasting a lot of time with it, that's allright and nothing bad at all. But there were times, when I was like 14 or 15, where my brother and I both were completely going insane over it. We were actually behaving like Junkies. We got really aggressive, when the other would block the PC with a game, we couldn't play together and when we were disturbed by our parents we would get really pissed off.
The reason I think, this was more than just fun: I remeber when some day at that time, our PC (yeah, only one... and a fuckin Intel 486 with 2MB Ram) broke down... I was so fucking enraged, but could not get the money together to get it fixed. ... Then after a few days, I felt really really liberated. It was like a big weight had been lifted of me.

Anybody had any similar experience?