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Comment by quickConclusion | Hacker News Reader

Addiction.

My main gripe with video games is that they're addictive. Boring or not, they push you to play another 5, 10, 60 minutes... before you know it, you ruined your evening, and wasted your time and the next day at work...

Kudos to the artists, developers, psychologists who can build that. And probably I am weak.

At the end of the day, they are very successful in making me addicted, that's why i am staying away, that's why I am not a gamer.

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I don't think you're weak at all. They do build the games to be super stimulating and addicting. They build reward models into the games that help you form the habit of playing every day for a small reward. Then eventually you're logging in every day to play for something you don't care at all about.

Once you realize that, you're free.

A simple idea is to remove their incentive to make it addictive:

Never buy anything that has in-app-purchases where for $ money you get something and for $$ money you get more something.

If you see a screen that has $1.99 for 5 gold/gems/points/cards and $4.99 for 20 gold/gems/points/card then RUN!

A good book has exactly the same effect; the primary difference is that all books are finite. As a child, I would read books under the bedcovers by torchlight. I'd stay up all night playing chess against my little Saitek. Is Fallout 4 or Hearthstone an objectively worse use of time?

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