The article, of course, does not ultimately answer the question it raises, seeing as it's written by relatively dumb scientist monkey-men.
Take this for example:
But recent research into cognitive functions using functional magnetic resonance imaging has shown that these are not the only ways to trip the pleasure centre – and in fact, it's starting to look suspiciously as if whichever aspect of videogames you enjoy, the pleasure centre lies behind your enjoyment.
Wow mister scientist-man, you really think that man's pleasure faculty may be responsible for the pleasure he gets when doing the things which give him pleasure? Awesome. I wouldn't have been able to figure this one out without your diligent hard work -- not in a million years I wouldn't. Thank heavens we have people like you to explain these things to us.
Whoever doesn't understand why I am making fun of this moron, might perhaps get it by reading this (emphasis is mine):
Nietzsche wrote:It strikes me that nowadays people everywhere are trying to direct their gaze away from the real influence which Kant exercised on German philosophy, that is, cleverly to slip away from the value which he ascribed to himself. Above everything else, Kant was first and foremost proud of his table of categories. With this table in hand, he said, “That is the most difficult thing that ever could be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.”—But people should understand this “could be”! He was proud of the fact that he had discovered a new faculty in human beings, the ability to make synthetic judgments a priori. Suppose that he deceived himself here. But the development and quick blood of German philosophy depend on this pride and on the competition among all his followers to discover, if possible, something even prouder—at all events “new faculties”! But let’s think this over. It’s time we did. “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant asked himself. And what did his answer essentially amount to? Thanks to a faculty [Vermöge eines Vermögens]. However, unfortunately he did not answer in three words, but so labouriously, venerably, and with such an expenditure of German profundity and flourishes that people failed to hear the comical niaiserie allemande [German stupidity] inherent in such an answer. People even got really excited about this new faculty, and the rejoicing reached its height when Kant discovered yet another additional faculty—a moral faculty—in human beings, for then the Germans were still moral and not yet at all “political realists.” Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the young theologians of the Tubingen seminary went off right away into the bushes—all looking for “faculties.” And what didn’t they find—in that innocent, rich, still youthful time of the German spirit, in which Romanticism, that malicious fairy, played her pipes and sang, a time when people did not yet know how to distinguish between “finding” and “inventing”! Above all, a faculty for the “super-sensory.” Schelling christened this intellectual contemplation and, in so doing, complied with the most heartfelt yearnings of his Germans, whose cravings were basically pious.—The most unfair thing we can do to this entire rapturously enthusiastic movement, which was adolescent, no matter how much it boldly dressed itself up in gray and antique ideas, is to take it seriously and treat it with something like moral indignation. Enough—people grew older—the dream flew away. There came a time when people rubbed their foreheads. People are still rubbing them today. They had dreamed: first and foremost—the old Kant. “By means of a faculty,” he had said, or at least meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Or is it not rather a repetition of the question? How does opium make people sleep? “By means of a faculty,” namely, the virtus dormitiva [sleeping virtue], answered that doctor in Moliere.
Because it has the sleeping virtue
whose nature makes the senses sleep.
But answers like that belong in comedy...
So yeah. The article is still required reading though.
For some time, game designers have known how to apply the work of the behaviourist B.F. Skinner to videogame design, creating reward schedules (such as levelling mechanics in computer RPGs) that will hook players in and keep them addicted while they play, or setting up short and medium term challenges to overcome in order to produce the same kind of pattern. These reward schedules work because when we win or attain something, the pleasure centre in the brain (the nucleus accumbens) releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is chemically similar to cocaine.
