In many cases of gaming addiction, the games under scrutiny are Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPGs.  These are games based on community interaction while playing them.  It’s fun, but it can ruin your life if you get addicted to it.  Some people don’t think it’s possible to get ‘addicted’ to a video game.  They think that you can only get addicted to chemicals and drugs.  This common misconception is not true.  Your brain can get addicted to anything if it brings enough joy.  Joy in the brain releases the chemical Dopamine, which is the chemical that gives you pleasure when doing something right or having fun.  When Dopamine is released, your brain just wants more and more of it.  In essence, it’s a vicious cycle that wont ever stop until we die.  In the meantime, Dopamine is our driving force.  We want to have fun and enjoy life because we want the pleasure from the release of Dopamine.  So when these people play these games, they have everything they could ever want.  A fun game, a place to talk with friends, and the pleasure from the fun their having.  This is the main reason why these games are so addictive.

The second reason, and more noticeable of the two, is the latent escapism that most humans have.  People want to get away from the real world, because the real world isn’t what most of us want it to be.  If a person would much rather swing swords than shoot guns, then they need a whole alternate reality to do it in, or they are labeled by other humans as ‘wierd’ or ‘freak’.  If you’ve never tried this before, then you don’t know what its like to have a completely limitless world in front of you, or you haven’t noticed that life isn’t fair and can’t be controlled.  It’s comforting to people when they have control.  So they look for it elsewhere, because you can’t find that in the real world anymore.