Tom Colebrooke

Designing ‘Addiction’: Can We Make a Game Too Fun?

In parliaments and courtrooms, clinics and classrooms, conversations are taking place about game design. Various moral panics have orbited the medium of games since their inception, but growing calls for legislative regulation of game design – couched in broader anxieties about the ‘addictiveness’ of games – are being answered and enacted with little intervention or oversight from professional designers. Industry in general has been reluctant, perhaps understandably, to acknowledge or seriously engage with these difficult and slippery, often anecdotal, notions of ‘video game addiction’ or the WHO’s ratified condition ‘Gaming Disorder’. However, simply ignoring the increasingly frantic public mood around unethical game design systems is a luxury we can ill afford. Governments, clinicians, and consumers are coming to conclusions about what game design is, what it sets out to achieve, and who it might be harming through manipulative ‘dark patterns’.

This session presents the findings and recommendations from a five-year ethnographic inquiry into an online community of self-described ‘video game addicts’, blending a deep analysis of public sentiment, game design practices, anthropology and philosophy to generate fresh insights into this phenomena.

Session Takeaway

• A thorough understanding of ‘video game addiction’ as a concept, as a social category, and a contested diagnosis, and how it poses a meaningful challenge to our collective assumptions as designers: a challenge we can no longer ignore.
• Evidence-based recommendations for proactive reflection on ethics in contemporary game design, from monetisation to core loops.
• Case studies of self-regulation and other moral panics that provide practical tools for navigating public and institutional engagement, that designers might be better advocates for their practices and industry.

Session speakers