Games that feel addictive mirror the risk-management demands of everyday life

Evidence

For Goggin (2008), the immersive, seemingly “addictive” character of games today is less evidence of individual pathology or diabolical corporate engineering, and more a reflection of and response to a world made up, on the one hand, of serialized activity, routines and codes and, on the other, one increasingly dependent on the way each of us must manage chance, risk and uncertainty in the course of our daily affairs. Further, she suggests that immersive and obsessive games also work by allowing their players to experience a cohesive sense of self and subjectivity – of control, understanding and agency – in a postmodern moment of disconnection, helplessness, confusion, flux and drift. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to deWaard’s cultural argument that finance colonizes everyday imagination — games as training for speculative risk-management subjectivity. — connects to: Going viral produces an addictive physiological thrill unlike ordinary attention — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 396
• DEEPTHINKING: Games’ addictiveness arises not from corporate manipulation alone but as a structural mirror of a world demanding constant chance-and-risk management — game worlds offer synthetic control in a postmodern drift.