Good Read: What Effect Do Hyperaddictive Games Have On Us?

The author of this article straddles two camps of thought about games: "Gamification seeks to turn the world into one giant chore chart covered with achievement stickers — the kind of thing parents design for their children — though it raises the potentially terrifying question of who the parents are" -- and -- "Part of the point of letting them seduce you... is to come out the other side a more interesting and self-aware person; more conscious of your habits, weaknesses, desires and strengths."

Source: Nytimes

In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom. The new product was the Game Boy — a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades.