Gaming Addiction: Why People Play Video Games

5 min readMay 9, 2019

Introduction

As gaming addiction rises around the world and interest in real life begins to fade away, a variety of questions come up. Could this be good for us? What’s wrong with reality? Are video games the problem or the solution?

Though those questions are out of the scope of this blog, I do want to help you understand why video games are addicting. And to answer that I believe the answer lies in asking why people play video games in the first place.

Why People Play Video Games

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people find genuine satisfaction during a state of consciousness called Flow. In this state, they are completely absorbed in an activity.

In his book Flow, he goes on to say:

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.

Building on top of this idea Daniel Pink breaks the concept down in his book Drive. He describes the state of flow as being the result of actively working on our third drive. The third drive is what Daniel Pink describes as:

The deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand or abilities, and to live a life full of purpose.

So, it turns out that humans instinctively like to work. We like to work ONLY under the conditions that we’re working to fulfill our third drive. When we choose to work on things that we find purposeful and challenging we generate intrinsic rewards such as positive emotions, personal strength, a sense of stronger social connections, and flow.

People play video games because it easily and effectively sets off all three desires of the third drive.

First Human Desire: Autonomy

When we play it is because we choose to, no one forces us, we don’t feel like we have to do it. If we didn’t voluntarily play games, then we would see it as a job and become less likely to play.

In fact, the autonomy humans find in games is essential for a game to be a game. In his book, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse says that the one thing all games have in common is that they must be voluntary. He says:

A principle to any game is that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

You may think, games don’t allow for full autonomy they have rules that restrict people! According to Carse:

The rules of play are not laws; they don’t mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of players.

Rules are not in place to tell you exactly how to go through a game, they’re there to keep the game going and are essential to a game.

In Barry Schwartz’s TED talk called the Paradox of Choice, he makes the point that humans tend to feel paralyzed in the midst of having too many choices. When faced with too many choices we tend to act poorly due to the higher stakes of choosing the wrong option. Therefore, game rules seem to work in our advantage by limiting us just enough to confidently make decisions on our own.

Second Human Desire: Mastery

A game promises the hope of steadily increasing our skills if we keep playing. By giving us clear goals and just the right amount of challenge we are inclined to keep coming back to the game.

In our real lives, we tend to get bogged down with all the possibilities and all the things we can learn and accomplish. Not only that but once we do learn a specific skill, you don’t see a big difference, so what then? In life, it is possible to gain mastery in a specific area through patience and dedication, but in video games, it is made so easy for us to progress with missions and high scores. We can visually see our progress.

As Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broke, says it:

Without a clear goal, work turns into a problem and without clear goals there is no actionable steps which in turn lowers motivation and hinders progress. Well-designed work leaves no doubt that progress will be made. There is a guarantee of productivity built in, and that’s what’s so appealing.

Third Human Desire: Purpose

Lastly, we play for the purpose of having fun. Fun can come in a variety of ways. Marc LeBlanc, a video game designer and educator, discusses the 8 different types of fun that a game can convey.

Fun is to find pleasure through our senses, to see beautiful graphics and hear catchy music or sound effects.
Fun is to immerse yourself in a fantasy where your imagination can run free.
Fun is in drama, to make you live a story filled with uncertainty and inevitability.
Fun is in challenges; it takes you through obstacle courses and puts you up against powerful enemies.
Fun is in socializing and being amongst people with a similar interest.
Fun is in discovering new worlds, in being able to explore never before seen places.
Fun is in expressing ourselves and in discovering what we like or don’t like.
Fun is in making dull moments in life pass by quickly and lightly.

Conclusion

Definition of Addicted: physically or mentally dependent on a particular substance and unable to stop without incurring adverse effects; enthusiastically devoted to a particular thing or activity.

Gaming addiction is the mental dependence we have on the intrinsic rewards we receive from playing. When the playing is over, and we go back to the real world, we are perhaps faced with a boring job or a lackluster daily routine.

The real world does not effectively offer us a way to fulfill our third drives three desires. They have to actively be sought after as opposed to being beautifully packaged for us in a game cartridge.

Video games satisfy our emotional needs by giving us the autonomy, mastery, and purpose that we don’t get in real life. When something as impactful as video games are made so vastly available it is easy to see why they’ve become addicting.

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