Gaming isn't gaming isn't gaming. There are games which, I believe, will turn out to be as damaging to the human brain as opium and other addictive substances.

Gaming isn't gaming isn't gaming. There are games which, I believe, will turn out to be as damaging to the human brain as opium and other addictive substances. Those consist of applying the science of addiction: - If you miss logging in this week, you miss the weekly bonus. - If you want to collect your crops, you need to log in every eight hours - Every four hours, clicking gives a random bonus ... and so on. This is a science. I'm drastically and intentionally oversimplifying, but UPenn has a nice course ("Gamification") on how to get people addicted. That contrasts with analyzing chess positions, or their modern-day video-game equivalents. If you go on a forum on some types of games, such as RTS, you'll sometimes see in-depth analyses with mathematical models, game theory, and similar. Other games will have genuinely hard puzzles. One step up from there, you have things like DragonBox, nandgame, Core War, Green Globs, and sinerider. These deeply integrate learning of complex concepts into the game dynamic. I'm fundamentally skeptical of the results of any study which lumps FarmVille, StarCraft, and Core War together.