I would lie if I said the same thought hadn't crossed my mind... while we are still in the era of comments like yours (and mind) being brushed off somewhat half-jokingly, can you even imagine in 10-20 years what kind of addiction-causing experience games will be?
I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games like WoW and the new Star Wars MMO will be child's play.
In 10 years I expect the phenomenon of losing your job or your relationship over game addiction will be much wider spread and we may see an effort by the govt to put caps on experiences in 15 years.
Once you can capture most all the methods of input from a player and produce multiple levels of output all for the purpose of engaging the player longer and longer, there has to be a governor at some point... until 25+ years from now where the tech is so advanced that some people's jobs are just to exist in these virtual worlds (i.e. marketers for Apple sitting at social hubs inside of Galaxy of Warcraft 50.0 talking people into checking out the new iPad inside the game where they can click a button to pre-order it in real life after playing with a 3D model of it in virtual-life).
China has the demographics for pervasive addiction today with its moderately educated, underemployed, sexually-suppressed overpopulation of males (35M more males than females in 2009). This should lead to massive political unrest as in the Arab Spring and the knee-capped Iranian revolt of '09, but hasn't. I suspect that a significant force behind this pacification is gaming. Instead of banning Skinner boxes like WoW outright, the Party asserts control by dictating how much XP such games can deliver (cynically, drip), at what rates, for how long per day.
Without doing anything 105 Men are born per 100 woman. With a population of ~1.338 billion you would expect up to 1000/205 * 5 = 32 million extra men. Men don't live as long as woman on average which tends to balance the genders. But, China's population demographics are also messed up from 1 child policy so it's a little more complex than you might think.
I agree there is a mental pandemic to be. Imagine 20 years out when ultraporn, AI, and VR helmets are a suitable replacement to having a relationship with real humans. I'm all for tech, but I think that tech that splits us up and disconnects us really does make us a little less human. There's another side to it that lonely people could technically be happier in such a configuration, so maybe my argument is nullified by realizing it's just a tool and it's people that are at fault. I think I just did a 180 in a single post.
I am very familiar with this thought process... "being totally hooked in is evil and detrimental because movies show me they are!" -- but then you think about it... what if your life IS just better in the virtual reality? How is that a bad thing?
You are here to have an experience, logging on and having that experience elsewhere is fine if it isn't destroying lives around you.
Then you think 40 or 50 years out with undetectable differences between virtual reality and real-reality and you wonder if at some point we did get lost in a virtual world we created for ourselves a la Matrix... how would we know?
You could also imagine a world within a world once the virtual world is so real it isn't as fun.
I lost a couple years of life to playing MUDs a while back. Still occasionally log on, the ability to type commands makes it much easier to have a complex game and environment, but not so much with the pretty pictures.
Luckily, I've sworn off Blizzard since they sued the bnetd guys, so D3 isn't a concern for me.
I play minecraft with my son, who's 10, but it doesn't appeal to me that greatly beyond playing with him. Dwarf Fortress and Crawl, on the other hand, can end up sucking hours of my day if I'm not careful.
The great thing about roguelikes is that you can only play them so long before you decide to make a random map generator, and then a line of sight algorithm, and implement A* pathfinding and suddenly you're making your own.
I think we are still 2 generations of game tech away from it, but at some point the addiction many people experienced with pathetically unadvanced games like WoW and the new Star Wars MMO will be child's play.
In 10 years I expect the phenomenon of losing your job or your relationship over game addiction will be much wider spread and we may see an effort by the govt to put caps on experiences in 15 years.
Once you can capture most all the methods of input from a player and produce multiple levels of output all for the purpose of engaging the player longer and longer, there has to be a governor at some point... until 25+ years from now where the tech is so advanced that some people's jobs are just to exist in these virtual worlds (i.e. marketers for Apple sitting at social hubs inside of Galaxy of Warcraft 50.0 talking people into checking out the new iPad inside the game where they can click a button to pre-order it in real life after playing with a 3D model of it in virtual-life).
sigh I don't stand a chance...