Exploring Addiction Mechanism of Different Game Types

Abstract

Video game addiction is a term that describes games that dominate a person most of the time. However, the degree of addiction and the amount of time spent playing vary from one type of game to another. So this literature review will explore the mechanism of addiction in terms of different game types, analyzing the relationship between the causes of game addiction in terms of 3 models (dopamine, operant conditioning, and feeling-state theory). In order to figure out what the most attractive type of game is, This is done by classifying all kinds of games into 10 categories and creating a ranking list for all games from 5 different websites. Those websites are chosen randomly from the search engines such as Google and Bing. The results are based on prior studies that looked into the causes of game addiction in each category and analyzed those games by three models. The results suggest that the mechanism of video game addiction varies between games.