That's a slippery slope argument, at best. Every single video game is designed to be addictive to some degree, much in the same way that every chef is attempting to create recipes that bring people back into their restaurant.

What you're saying is that there is a line somewhere that, once crossed, becomes reckless or harmful, and that's certainly true in a way. But where is that line, and who decides it? Is it you? Is it the OP? Is it some committee somewhere? The answer is rather simple. It's everyone, individually. The right decision for you is not necessarily the right decision for me, and our life experiences will always differ in significant ways, which means my line is not in the same location as yours.

Ultimately, the OP's mentality asserts that every business on the planet is acting maliciously and exploitatively, simply because they're trying to make money by retaining customers. And hey, I'm willing to admit that might actually be true -- but it's almost certainly not. Intent matters. It always has and always will.

Just because everyone has different thresholds for addiction doesn't mean that we should therefore not care about it. Some people can enjoy heroin responsibly, therefore opioid addiction is a just a matter of personal responsibility? Of course, total prohibition is the other extreme, but surely there's a middle ground that makes more sense than total apathy. And I'm not really even talking about regulation here, I'm just saying that some people delineate ethical standards in their line of work - with game design, I personally draw the line at exploiting users through addictive design and leaving them worse off.

You're twisting my words. I never suggested that nobody should care about addiction, nor that severe opioid addiction (how'd we even get there?) is purely a matter of personal responsibility. In fact, the whole "line" commentary was about the potentially exploitative actions of developers crossing the line -- not the addictive thresholds of users.

And you're still missing the point. You say that you draw the line at "exploiting users through addictive design." And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time. So that brings us right back to figuring out where that arbitrary line is. Is one addictive mechanism the right amount? Two? Ten? Given that we've already established people have different thresholds, how do you even quantify addiction at the design level? You could implement something completely innocuous by your own standards, but somebody out there gets addicted to it and you make money from them. Does that make you exploitative?

The whole point is that you can draw your own personal line, but you don't get to dictate that line to others, nor publicly declare that any developer on the other side of your personal line is automatically a malicious asshole trying to harm people. Because I guarantee there are developers whose maliciousness threshold is even lower than yours, which makes you the exploitative one in their eyes.

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".

> And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time.

Now I see our problem. You've only played shit games.

Procedural content and random generation are a wave of the future of gaming, happening right now; new techniques that makes games fun without exploitation of brain chemistry. By actually being good, by actually being replayable.

> Every single video game is designed to be addictive to some degree, much in the same way that every chef is attempting to create recipes that bring people back into their restaurant.

This statement is false. There exist significant subcultures of video game development, particularly in the independent sphere, where games are designed with no consideration for addictiveness, including myself. You are beginning to offend entire professions.

> Ultimately, the OP's mentality asserts that every business on the planet is acting maliciously and exploitatively, simply because they're trying to make money by retaining customers.

This statement is also false. It is you who are making that assertion right here, right now. I only ever addressed the video games industry, and the specific practice of designing games that emphasize boring, repetitive, tedious tasks, exploiting brain chemistry to profit from lack of understanding of game design.