The gaming industry pioneered the addiction design model Facebook later adopted.

Evidence

The hand-and-glove relationship of technology addiction was not invented at Facebook, but rather it was pioneered, tested, and perfected with outstanding success in the gaming industry, another setting where addiction is formally recognized as a boundless source of profit. Skinner had anticipated the relevance of his methods to the casino environment, which executives and engineers have transformed into as vivid an illustration as one can muster of the startling power of behavioral engineering and its ability to exploit individual inclinations and transform them into closed loops of obsession and compulsion. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1433

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader history of behavioral engineering from Skinner’s operant conditioning through casinos to social media — a lineage Zuboff traces across the book. — connects to: Corporations weaponize game mechanics purely to engineer customer and employee behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 984; Facebook’s design intentionally exploits variable-reward dopamine hits to maximize user time. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1437; Experts framed early video games as addictive and comparable to substance abuse — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 680 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes that platform addiction techniques were not novel to social media but inherited from game design and casino engineering.

Broader Connections

• Facebook’s design intentionally exploits variable-reward dopamine hits to maximize user time. #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1437
• Experts framed early video games as addictive and comparable to substance abuse #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 680
• Addiction researchers apply a five-element framework to explain compulsive social-media engagement. #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1438
• Gamblers pursue a loss-of-self attentional state that machine design deliberately engineers #expands (0.75) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 41
• Gambling addiction may stem from intrinsic surprise rewards overriding negative expected value. #expands (0.72) — Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem, 909