Everything is fuzzy and a lot of things are subjective, but that doesn't disqualify them from being a point of contention. I brought up opioids because the sam

Everything is fuzzy and a lot of things are subjective, but that doesn't disqualify them from being a point of contention. I brought up opioids because the same logic applies. Although finer, there's still a fuzzy line between manageable recreational use and destructive addiction. Not knowing exactly where the line is doesn't turn it into a special case where nothing can be said. You're talk about drawing lines but I haven't mentioned anything about that. I don't have some personal line where everyone past it is bad. I'm just saying that exploiting addictive design is bad, and people taking advantage of that are being unethical in proportion to the extent that they are doing it. Also, I was careful to not blame addictive design itself, it's not evil inherently, because like you said, many games have some degree of addictiveness. I said exploiting addiction is the bad part. You can use it to incentivize healthy behaviors that make for a better game, one that respects the player's time and ideally even enriches them in some way, by telling the narrative in a stronger way, or teaching competition or hand-eye coordination in a better way, or just being more fun in a better way. You can also use it to extract more money from players, or more ad views, or more social anxiety, or shallowly pad the experience to feel like you're getting more "value" out of the game. Again, all of this is fuzzy, not black and white evil, it's just that responsible creators should take the time to consider their own values and be conscious of the decisions they make, understanding that what they do have repercussions on others. We should create things in reference to our values - it's easy to just blindly autopilot to the default rubric of "maximize revenue".