I wonder if they would also fund email spammers if there was money in it.
Games maybe not so much by nature, but the publishers are trying everything they can to increase your time in game.
The classification of sex and pornography as "addictive" has been controversial, and all I'll say about that is that there is no scientific consensus that they should be considered as such.
Porn, you can call it anecdotal, but over a decade in that industry taught me, its certainly addictive for some, and is are some very manipulative marketing going on by the smarter companies. But i do see the opposing argument, people get addicted to all kinds of strange things and nothing about porn per se is addicting. it's that ending they are addicted to, not the content.
I really wish our society could take all of the energy that goes into criminalizing and stigmatizing vice industries and instead use it to offer help to people who are dangerously addicted. Just think of how much free therapy, rehab, and drug research could be funded by the tens of billions of dollars that the drug war has cost.
[0] Gaming is the industry term for gambling
Many people will also say that a delicious food, an entertaining game, or an enjoyable TV show is "addictive", but these do not actually constitute addictions either.
People with scientific backgrounds hypothesize all the time, and they have machines that can make brain scan images, but we aren’t very close to being able to measure addiction on a numerical scale.
The best we have is listening to people, maybe analogous to how we listen to people when they believe they are a different gender, etc. since there is no quantitative measure for ‘feelings’ (see Olympic male/female athlete controversies, et al.)
We may get there some day...
Hard sciences may be, but there are quite a soft science domains such as psychology. We do not yet know exact nature of addiction, but psychological, environmental impacts have not been ruled out, by most scientists.
DeltaFOSB is a gene transcription factor and is the precursor for the development of all forms of what is clinically called "addiction". However what the other commentators suggested [food is not addictive] is not actually true, it has a measurable affect here. In fact, Delta-FOSB can be and often is used as a biomarker of addiction in patients who are already deceased (and can have their brains broken open).
Now, as to the question of addictiveness, nobody mentioned anything about pornography there, but I did hear an interesting anecdote about the raw power that certain addictions have that clearly isn't present in pornography; Delta FOS-B accumulates in the ventral tagamental area and nucleus accumbens, two central regions of the brain, and many drugs have the action of creating floods of FOS-B precursors there, for example, this effect is so strong in heroin addicts, that they nearly always throw up upon recent re-exposure (sometimes newer Methamphetamine addicts as well) where the mechanism here is the flood of FOSB, which an outer region (she had mentioned but I have already forgotten which) interprets as "poisoning". So while it may be true that pornography is "addicting" - when is the last time you saw someone throw up when they looked at pornography (modulo ordinary "disgust").
What was doubly interesting was that she said the change in dopamine regulation (meaning the introduction of new dopamine-like substances + the change in the rate that your body "reuptakes" dopamine) in the most powerful addictions -- benzodiazapines and opiates, aren't actually that high, and compared with drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine aren't much different from marijuana.
It's this secondary affect that creates these changes in reasoning and reward structure with these drugs (she also mentioned that both have "withdrawal", which while technically unrelated to addiction is extremely painful and sometimes life-threatening).
However, to be fair, it was repeatedly stressed that the "secondary" affect was more than just Delta-FOSB. There were changes in signaling, new kinds of peptides that unaddicted people can't produce (???), something about phosphoration of camp ("new notes on camp") and bunch of change to "Dendritic Spiny Structures".
Among the living, questions like "drug-use reinstatement likelihood", "place conditioning preference" (the more addictive the drug, the more you want to use it in a safe, known place), increase in use over time, etc. are how this stuff is generally measured with reasonable economics.
This is not precise, but it seems like an appropriate metric. It's basically the same as defining mental illness in general vs. harmless eccentricity.
Sex is not similar to alcohol, tobacco, or pharmaceutical addictions.
You can have orgasms alone without purchasing anything. There's also debate about whether you can be addicted to sex. 1) It's a normal part of our lifecycles, 2) there's no withdrawal effect after you get off of it, and 3) it's a convenient way to pathologize bad behavior.
E-sports are game competitions, not video games in and of themselves. You can be no more addicted to them than you can be to the NBA.
At least in the US, a majority of deaths by firearm are suicides. And as for potentially addictive drugs (e.g., alcohol), the user can cause great harm to other people, as in drunk driving.
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
Fivethirtyeight says about 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Around 1/3 are homicides. A surprisingly small percentage (to me) are classified as accidents.[0]
The amount of people who know nothing about guns and never shot one under proper supervision and then go out and purchase a firearm without researching anything are extremely low, so accidents remain pretty low.
There are some guns for which the basic dogmatic instruction is probably insufficient. Notably glocks; in some circles "glock" has become a verb, wherein to "glock yourself" means to accidentally shoot yourself in the leg with your glock while holstering or upholstering it. More specialized training can reduce the chances of this happening, but for this specific scenario and some others like it, the standard basic safety instructions fall a bit short in my opinion.
[0] One example: http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp-pcaf/safe_sur/acts-tpto-eng.ht... Other rulesets often have the same ideas worded in slightly different ways.
This is really about boutique/niche product manufacturing. There's usually not a reasonable path to becoming a billion-dollar company, at any degree of risk. That's what "startup capital" wants... to get in on the ground floor of a billion dollar company. They want that 100x return. You're not going to get a 100x return manufacturing a better rifle scope or a boutique handgun.
This is what banks are for. Start business on scraped capital, show real customers and real profit, then go to a traditional bank with a traditional business plan for scaling capital.
Make a consumer product banks can copy and try to prove its viable and I think you'll get that feedback.
That’s also very tangential to the fact that while some areas of banking, finance or weapons dealing may be dominated by large institutions, there’s plenty of other areas that are not. Stripe is a perfect example in how they started out by capturing a retail market that was outside the core business of the large players. Nobody would look at their value prop and say “finance is overfunded”, because that ignores what area they were actually trying to compete in.
If you wanted to make a startup that looked to innovate retail weapons trade, then no investor is going to tell you “you’ll never compete with Raytheon”, because no matter how big they are, they don’t compete in retail weapons trade. What they would more likely tell you is something like “we don’t invest in that vice industry”.