>>14the reason people like to play vidya is because it's entertaining (I use that word very broadly here - you can be entertained by mechanical challenge, competition against other players, story, aesthetics, etc.). doing things that you enjoy is not pathological by itself, and there's nothing wrong with attempts to make those things more enjoyable for yourself and for others (unless maximizing addiction with skinner box techniques is what you're trying to do, but this isn't the goal of most game design and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the goal of your weird chess variants). if you remove all the fun from 'real life' because fun things can be addicting, why would it even be worth living?