For those of us who find these games too compelling (myself included), it's a problem. However, as the top content of that post at the time I read it said, play

For those of us who find these games too compelling (myself included), it's a problem. However, as the top content of that post at the time I read it said, play is a way to gain intuitive understanding of systems. However, the utility depends on the system. I'm "playing" the iNaturalist Seek app much like I played Pokémon Go (for a few weeks back then, anyway), except the content is more interesting and relevant (I now know so much more about familiar "background" plants) and there are sufficiently few hooks in the exercise to prevent me from compulsively spending a lot of money traveling around to photograph plants and animals. Incidentally, this tendency of ours to catalog everything and pollute the world reminds me of the Judge in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and with that in mind I make time to appreciate the life around me with minimal disturbance.