They don't cause the severe dysfunction found in substance abuse. Opioid addiction for example is among the ugliest things in existence. Video games, gambling, social media addictions are all bad but not to the same degree.
Video game addiction often leads to children and adults completely destroying their professional or academic lives. In many cases, a child grows up to find a balance between working just enough to afford their videogame habbit.
I have read stories of an adult who was so addicted to a simple cellphone game that they were compulsively telling lies to create more game time and ultimately destroyed all of their social relationships and lost their job. All of that dysfunction stems from their brain's addiction to the rush of progress bars, levelling up, victory screens, and success chimes.
Not all people are wired the same. A lot of brains are hopelessly addicted to these two categories of stimuli and I feel you dismiss them a bit too carelessly.
I do not have a solution to this problem and it is a problem that I myself would contribute to if I was trying to design an app that people would use. Greater addiction mechanisms trend toward wider market adoption which leads to a higher value for shareholders. The current system of incentives to a company makes this focus inevitable.
The job-like feeling is real. Before they even realize it, people start organizing their own schedules around some stupid phone game. Setting alarms to wake up at 3 AM because that's when the timer resets and they can play again.
The thing is I've personally seen opioid addicts do literally anything for a drug. Not for pleasure, just to avoid the pain of abstinence. One guy killed his own mother because she tried to cut off his access to the drugs, he ended up homeless and reduced to crime and was eventually arrested and forced to undergo treatment. The power of these substances cannot be underestimated. As bad as predatory video games are, I'm convinced opioids are worse.
Benzodiazepines addiction is severe as well. Not as bad as opioids but still pretty bad. I've seen patients get violent because a doctor didn't want to renew their prescription for their own good.
Big disagree. I'm not going to say opioid addiction isn't a worse thing, but I watched a friend fail out of college because he played WoW all day every day. For a whole year he barely left his room. It definitely wasn't healthy.
I remember at one point I was playing Everquest all night in high school. My friend had an account and let me use it when he was sleeping, so I'd play from 9:00pm to 6:00am, then go to school, then repeat. I hardly ever slept, which was definitely not healthy. There's a reason they called it Evercrack.
One dorm-mate was kicked out of college because he spent ALL of his time playing WoW (World of Warcraft) and failed all of his classes. (Side note: I remember being scared to go near that game from hearing so many similar stories at the time.) I've known many people who remain unemployed and do nothing but play video games.