If you take the presentation literally, yes it was overblown. However, I think he made a few very insightful points: 1) Understanding psychological factors is

If you take the presentation literally, yes it was overblown. However, I think he made a few very insightful points: 1) Understanding psychological factors is extremely powerful, and probably even more important than good game design. i.e. WoW isn't successful because of art design and gameplay, it's successful because some people find "the grind" very addicting. Farmville isn't successful because a videogame about farm animals is fun, it's successful because it integrates with your Facebook friends. 1b) Discovering, understanding and exploiting new psychological factors is extremely profitable. 2) The rest of the world has a lot to learn from game design on how to optimize products to take advantage of these factors. I agree with you that gamers are hooked on the point systems more than everyone else, but I disagree that it's a binary system. Like alcohol, nicotine, and gambling, it probably affects everyone to differing degrees. The definition of gamers has had to change a lot over the last decade. When I was a kid, only nerdy kids played games. Now those gamers are fathers. Now mothers and grandmothers play farmville / scrabble / bejeweled. Even if you're right that this only affects gamers, the percentage of the population that are classified gamers is growing. With hundreds of millions of potential customers, even small changes are extremely profitable. Take Starbucks. If they convince one new customer to make starbucks part of their morning routine, that has an expected value of like $1000/year. I heard they started offering coupons to people in the morning, that are only valid if they come back later that day. If Starbucks figures out to apply the Farmville secret sauce, watch out.