SALON

Friday, Dec 7, 2012 11:06 PM UTC

Video games are designed to get you hooked

The gaming industry uses "pure Las Vegas" psychology to make their products more addictive

By , The Fix

Topics: The Fix, Video Games, UCLA, addiction, Las vegas,

Video games are designed to get you hooked
This article originally appeared on The Fix. It has been corrected since it was first published.

the fix Video games like Farmville and Words With Friends are specifically designed to get people hooked, with the industry even hiring psychiatric professionals to help make them more addictive. And the tactic seems to be working. Recent research shows that video games can be just as addictive as drugs, alcohol or gambling. ”It’s the same exact clinical symptoms: preoccupation, loss of control, inability to stop,” says Dr. Timothy Fong, who runs a UCLA clinic for behavioral addiction. “They keep playing the game despite harmful consequences so, in my mind, absolutely, I believe it is the same disease as alcohol or drug addiction.” While the stereotypical video game player is a nerdy teenager, Fong says that plenty of adults also find themselves unable to put down the controller. “The average age of our patients is about 40. We’ve seen housewives, doctors, lawyers,” he says. One addicted gamer, DiAnn Edwards of Pennsylvania, says she plays Farmville for up to eight hours a day, spending up to $200 a month on the habit. ”It just gets addicting,” she says. “I’m 51 and what am I doing sitting here playing a Farmville game? I don’t get it, but it actually drives me crazy.”

Still, the American Psychiatric Association is unwilling to recognize video game addiction as an official diagnosis. It does however list “video game psychologist” as a “hot career” since the gaming industry is increasingly hiring psychologists as consultants; they use their expertise of the human mind to make the games more enticing — and harder to put down. Ariella Lehrer, a trained psychologist who designs games for middle-aged women, says the psychology behind the games is “pure Las Vegas,” using flashy graphics and sparse rewards to get players hooked within 20 minutes. “We learned this with rats in a food pedestal,” she says. “If you only occasionally give a reward then you keep going. That’s what Las Vegas does. The rewards don’t come every time.”

Continue Reading Close

More McCarton Ackerman.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 20 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Salon is proud to feature content from The Fix, the world's leading website on addiction and recovery. The site features a daily mix of breaking news, leading columnists, investigative reports, celebrity interviews, features on health, science and sober living, independent rehab reviews and hundreds of treatment resources.

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations