Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun had been on the run for months – allegedly for doing something unspeakable – when they were arrested last week in Gyeonggi province in
South Korea. Mr Kim, 41, and Ms Choi, 25, were ardent internet users.
They met online. They had a baby. But becoming parents did not temper
their computer habit. They grew fascinated with an online game called
Prius, which allowed them to raise a virtual “child” called Anima. In
the interests of their virtual child they neglected their real one. Last
September they returned from a 12-hour session at an internet café to
find their baby dead of starvation.

Western readers have been irate over this story since it broke in The Sun. The Daily Telegraph picked it up, and from there it has
spread across the internet. Online readers of The Boston Globe were
divided, with roughly half saying the couple should be starved to death
and half that starvation was too good for them.

It is easy to say that only sociopaths would favour a virtual baby over a real one. But the alleged crime of Mr Kim and Ms Choi is an extreme
version of a problem that is fairly general, at least in Korea. The
government in Seoul opened its first treatment centre for computer-game
addiction in 2002. According to The Korea Herald, a young man murdered
his mother last month when she hounded him for wasting time playing on
the computer. Then he returned to his game.

If we consider the matter neurologically, raising a virtual baby can in some ways be more “rewarding” than raising a real baby. You get points. You get to undo
your mistakes. Like art, video games can seem better than life.

The problem is that, unlike art, video games are increasingly sophisticated and subtle. A lot of recent academic research has focused on how video
gambling machines take advantage of the predictable vulnerabilities of
problem gamblers. Many non-gambling games are built the same way. They
are designed to trick the reward centres of the brain through a variety
of techniques: “near misses”, delayed rewards, illusions of control. In
other words, they induce the same sort of misjudgment of utility that
leads a crack addict to neglect his job. Designing machines to be
pleasurable or useful is one thing – designing them to be addictive is
quite another.

Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a book, Addiction by Design, that will be published by Princeton in the autumn. Five
years ago, Ms Schüll used
gambling" href="http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/597/1/65"">in... and compulsive gamblers to reveal
the tricks the former use to manipulate the latter. Cashpoint
technology, for example, has been worked into the design of certain
gambling machines so that players can transfer money directly from their
bank accounts and gamble it away. In industry parlance, they can “play
to extinction”, or until all their money is gone.

The goal of much design is to maximise “time on device”, and hence profits. But to this end designers seek to confuse users, to work on their brains, “to
increase psychological and financial investment” so that people
“disappear” into the games they are playing or “exit from time” (to cite
some of the problem gamblers who spoke to Ms Schüll). One woman said:
“You’re not playing for money; you’re playing for credit. Credit so you
can sit there longer, which is the goal. It’s not about winning; it’s
about continuing to play.” Separating gamblers from their earnings often
involves misrepresenting choices in such a way as to separate them from
their better judgment.

In 1980, 45 per cent of floor space in Nevada casinos was taken up by machines; today, it is 77 per cent. This is not, one assumes, to save money on labour costs, but because video
gambling machines can now provide a more “satisfying”
(addiction-inducing) gambling experience. The computer scientist (and
former video games designer) Kevin Harrigan of the University of
Waterloo in Ontario has shown how artificially generated “near
misses” can entice susceptible gamblers to play on. And susceptible
is the right word. In Ontario, according to Mr Harrigan, studies have
shown that 60 per cent of slot machine revenue comes from problem
gamblers.

The power of video games is not simply a new wrinkle on an old problem. There have always been people who could not tear themselves away from, say, cards. But cards are not constantly being
worked on by the world’s most sophisticated engineers to make them more
alluring. There have always been misgivings about video games. But most
government studies bark up the wrong tree, focusing on whether they are
too violent or sexual, or whether portrayals of terrorists are racially
prejudiced. The problem with video games, machine gambling and other
computer spectacles is not ideological but psychological.

It is the underside of behavioural economics. For describing the tendency of economic actors to misjudge the utility of their choices, Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Tversky won a Nobel prize in economics. The same
insights produced a bestseller (Nudge) for Cass Sunstein and
Richard Thaler. The point is not that everyone makes mistakes. It is
that certain kinds of misjudgment are predictable. Being predictable,
they will be used to get people to part with their money. People
choosing wrongly may be news to social scientists. But priests and
marketing executives have long understood that people who claim to be
“marching to the beat of their own drum” are often following a
well-trodden path. And that no one is more potentially self-destructive
than someone who claims to be pursuing his own self-interest.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard