Opinion | How Videogames Fell From Art to Addictive

When I was a child in the 1990s, I began my campaign for my first video game console several months before Christmas.My parents, like some parents who came before them and most who came after, were wary.

They associated video games not so much with the thrilling secrets of Super Mario’s undulating hills or the literary flair of Infocom’s interactive fiction games, but instead with vague ideas of truancy, delinquency and probable ruin.My grandmother, a pragmatic woman, took pity.

She secreted under the tree a Game Boy and a copy of the Soviet-era miracle that is Tetris.In the years that have followed, video games have evolved in astonishing ways, often expanding to fill the advancing technologies that power them.Tetris remains as potent as ever, but today’s players are drawn to video games that function more like social media platforms than discrete interactive stories, playpens that employ psychological tricks and gambling-adjacent techniques to dissuade their audiences from immigrating to rival virtual worlds.

It’s a creative shift occasioned by economic concerns, one that has come to actively harm the medium and those players most deeply embedded in it.While the creators and publishers bear responsibility as stewards of that field, so, too, do I and other parents whose choices this holiday season help shape the culture.Video-game makers, like novelists, filmmakers and Netflix executives, have always employed a raft of techniques to keep their audiences engaged.

But there is an especially close link between engagement and economics in video games, where, for the first two decades of the medium’s existence, most players paid to play by the coin.In the 1980s, an executive at Atari, the company behind Pong, remarked that the ideal arcade game should provide a short burst of entertainment before frustrating players, so they insert another quarter to continue: something easy to pick up, hard to master, and with a difficulty curve that followed the traject...