[...] Recent Neuroscience Summed Up [...]

The semantic of “addiction” has come to mean ‘uncontrolled and harmful’ and opinions and evidence are not conclusive with respect to games. I can certainly list examples of musicians who let the behavior drift into addictive range and cause harm.

And I think that the “argument” is more the implied “and this is a bad thing.”

I have heard the argument that games cause a form of dopamine addiction several times, but nobody can tell me whether playing a musical instrument, for example, doesn’t cause a similar experience, which means that the argument is very one-sided.

Awhile ago, I saw a presentation by a Harvard professor of medicine that defined music as the equivalent of drugs, so no, the argument isn’t one-sided.

Did you get the email from me asking if you’d be willing to write the introduction to this book? I never got a reply from you, alas, and I left it too late as I was stretched to my limit on the editing tasks. We had to go without an introduction in the end, which was unfortunate, but there’s always the second edition.

Best wishes, and thanks again!

I have heard the argument that games cause a form of dopamine addiction several times, but nobody can tell me whether playing a musical instrument, for example, doesn’t cause a similar experience, which means that the argument is very one-sided.

Ultimately every human experience, good or bad, is connected to chemicals in the brain, but somehow when games are explained in this way it makes them suspect, like hard drugs.

Thanks for linking them up, dude. I had an interesting thought about modeling the negative feedbacks that balance out these reward mechanisms, as alluded to in the article. Unfortunately, I can’t get the table to show up right here, but think of two axis (axes?), Predictability on the horizontal, Control on the vertical. For the four extreme values, we have the following irritants:

Minimal Predictability, Minimal Control: Confusion
Minimal Predictability, Maximum Control: Frustration
Maximum Predictability, Minimal Control: Boredom
Maximum Predictability, Maximum Control: Repetitiveness
(if you want, you can put the tabs back in the following gunk:
Predictability
C Max ———————————
o |Repetitive | Frustrating |
n | | |
t |——————————-|
r | | |
o |Boring | Confusing |
l Min ———————————
Min Max
)
Different people feel more control in different circumstances.
Different people have an easier time predicting different things.
Different people have different tolerances for the different kinds of discomfort, or for the more basic lack of a comfortable level of either predictability or control.

This, to me, would actually explain a lot of the negative-response behavior, and why people have the negative reactions to different things (PvP, too-hard puzzles, “unfair” games) that they do. Assuming I’m on the right track.

And for those who can extrapolate, a good description of why political pundits such as Rush Limbaugh are incredibly successful or have been.

Then a uni-directional no-feedback medium gives way to multi-cast feedback mediated and a new set of media arrive just as the culture decides they are bored with the Girthy One. Who are the experts now?

We are. Pick up your prize.