I never liked the description of gaming as addictive, especially multiplayer games — I think its more of a special case of socialization with certain properties

I never liked the description of gaming as addictive, especially multiplayer games — I think its more of a special case of socialization with certain properties that naturally lend to poor outcomes Its really not that difficult to spend 8 hours talking to a group of friends, especially when an activity is involved (book clubs, board game nights, hanging out, etc). There are two major limitations: external responsibilities break up the group, and eventually you get bored of the people/activity. An extra one that appears in things like sports is that you eventually get tired. If you didn’t, you could probably find groups playing soccer for a week straight and still enjoying it... External responsibilities don’t really exist in any major form for kids. Getting bored of a group of people in multiplayer games is trivially fixed: there’s almost no cost to finding another group, or having multiple simultaneously. Getting physically tired doesn’t occur quickly with games: after about 5-8 hours my eyes/head start to hurt, but I’m a-ok after a night’s rest. Any weak member of your group is trivially replaced by point #2. So the fatal flaw is the activity... and ofc thats where games have always optimized for — remaining engaging over long durations. But all hobbies naturally optimize for this (else they wouldn’t really be hobbies!) Which all leads to it being really easy to stay on a game all day long, without being “addicted” to it. At least, that was my experience. Put some 1k hrs into league of legends per year when I was younger... but the day I dropped it, I dropped it without a second’s hesitation. No withdrawal or anything, I was simply finished with it (half the reason I played it so much is that I had few RL friends, so activity-wise I didn’t have anything better to do, and socialization-wise, that was where all my friends were). I think the common case is very similar to friends made over sports, but video games have properties that lend themselves to addiction-like behavior without actually creating an actual dependency.