Indeed, they were something better! They induced my spending as much time on the screen as possible, because the machine would do anything I could figure out how to tell it to do. Something as rule-laden and consequential (or so it seemed to single-digit-aged me) as the physical world itself, except I was allowed to do pretty much anything because no one understood what I was doing!

Modernity presents the superstimuli parent is referring to but removes all the interesting paths into the machine, the better to shear us. If the gameplay was reading O'Reilly books and the lootboxes were full of code snippets, it'd be one thing, but that's not what's happening.