[freshhawk]

Translating these kinds of addiction studies (mostly in animals for ethical reasons) to making games more addictive (but always referred to as making them more engaging) is a pretty established industry at this point.

It's not my field, and I don't know if the analysis in the blog post was flawed or not, but there are plenty of people trained in the field who work in the video game industry (and the gambling industry) and they definitely show results with pretty solid metrics under well controlled conditions. Balance the reward cycle and tune the levels of challenge and frustration properly and you get players to spend more time in the game.

I agree that it's a stretch to conclude that D3 is less addictive than D2 but I took it as interesting speculation based on actual science.