Breaking the "Addicting Games" Addiction
How the Games Work, and How to Fight the Urge to Play
Jun 16, 2009 Elisabeth Sharber
Addictinggames.com is a powerfully enticing website, rewarding simple tasks--like hitting 3 bubbles in a row of the same color or making it to the end of a maze--with either showing a colorful explosion or making items such as blocks or bubbles disappear.
The site fosters procrastination in a way that facebook and 4chan don't; facebook and 4chan are social sites filled with boards and threads, but addictinggames gives procrastinators the reward they are looking for.
How It Works
Procrastinators avoid large, important tasks because they feel anxiety over them [The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt- Free Play, Fiore, 2006]. Thus, they are heavily drawn to much smaller, effortless tasks that reward them with a feeling of accomplishment.
Addictinggames is perfect for the procrastinator's situation, because the games reward the player for very little effort by making something disappear (like crossing an item off a to-do list) or showing a pretty graphic. Thus, the player can spend hours on this website without realizing it because he/she is getting rewarded for every small task, as opposed to working on a larger, important task that requires much more effort before the feeling of reward comes.
Fighting the Urge to Play Addictinggames
- Sometimes if a procrastinator cannot stop playing a certain game, changing the game being played will help to break the mesmerizing pull of the particular game, and can ease the person back into his/her original task. But this does not always work and can backfire.
- Changing the environment in which a person works can help him/her to approach his/her work differently. Moving a laptop to a different, cleaner room or a table as opposed to a desk can have an effect on the anxiety of the person.
- Talking to other people about one's procrastination struggles can make one not feel so alone.
- Breaking down a task into bite-sized pieces isn't enough for procrastinators; one must reward oneself for each bite-sized piece like the games on addictinggames reward the player for tiny accomplishments. If one is computer savvy, one might create a small flash that goes off for every finished paragraph or set of calculations. Or, one could set up a movie and watch one minute of that movie for every small accomplishment.
Procrastinators are drawn to addictinggames.com because of its simplicity and easy rewards. To fight against this pull, a procrastinator should experiment with tactics on what works for him/her and be sure to give himself/herself lots of rewards for doing what he/she should be doing.
Bubble Spinner
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Block Drop
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Popopop
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Magic Pen
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