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v-le · 8 years ago

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My Trip to S. Korea (5/25/16 - 6/2/16)

Hello, friends!! I am back! Ahaha I have several posts that I’ve been wanting to make, but this one in particular has been fueling my interest more than ever these days. Rather than a review or a rant, this post is simply.. a log? :)

On May 25th of last year, I had the opportunity to travel to Korea as a 16 year old junior. I left school a week and a half earlier than everyone else, but it wasn’t just for fun. I was a part of IVSBP, the Interact Vietnam Soccer Ball Project (s/o to my wonderful team: Rotarians Nick, Marriane, Avis, and Sue, Roteractor Oliver, & fellow Interactors Gina and Abdul), a service project that aimed to bring the power of play to less fortunate children in Vietnam. In 2016, the Rotary International Convention (RICON) was being held in Korea, and I was blessed enough to be a part of the team that represented IVSBP with its very own booth at RICON. In this place, over 45,000 Rotarians from all over the world would gather for several special days.

Each and every day, I documented my journey by quickly (and messily) scribbling each entry onto a currency conversion diagram paper that was partially cut up for reasons I cannot recall. Here is my 7-day “diary”, as transcribed word for word from the paper itself, with extra commentary below each entry:

Day 1

Arrive in Seoul Incheon + struggle tremendously to find driver. Astounded/fascinated/freaked out by tons of tall apts. Notes smog. Eat funky dinner w/ ppl, walked late at night.

Yes, I was admittedly spooked by the massive apartments that stretched on and on for as long as the eye could see LOL. The drive from Incheon to Seoul was one that I will never forget. That foreign feeling of being in a country that I dreamed about so many times makes my heart bulge with longing excitement. Also, our lodging was an Airbnb located in the heart of Gangnam. And so, our first night-walk was one that I wished could last forever.

Day 2

Wake at 6:45 am. Go to convention to set up. Kintex was rly cool. Cooler empty. Ate lunch (self-service). slow business. Went home to rest. Took metro home b/c no shuttles running. Took a long ass time & struggled little bit but managed to get it down. Went to COEX. Good shops, not enough time. Son Hoyoung fansigning + mini stage. Ate kbbq alone + did well even though scary. Home @ 11:30. 1:30 am sleep.

RICON was not held in Seoul, but rather in Goyang, which is a city about an hour away from Seoul. Kintex is the convention center, a massive two-structure building, with its own restaurants inside. To this day, I have spotted several shows / dramas / music videos that were filmed at Kintex as well. The Korean metro system is hands down my favorite part about Korea. It is very affordable, convenient, & easy to use once you get the hang of it. My team and I struggled a little bit at first because we were confused by the questionable red/green colors for some stops & routes, but I quickly realized it simply meant express versus “all-stop”. Myself and two others managed to go to the COEX Mall by metro, which was about a mile from our own apartment. One of my goals for Korea was to see a celebrity randomly, and it just so happened on our first full day! I was shopping in Aland with my friend when she suddenly ran up to me and said “Vanessa, Vanessa come look over here, come with me, there is someone singing outside!!”. We hurried outside, and there was Son Hoyoung, promoting his solo album with a mini fansigning event! After shopping, we wandered the streets of Gangnam once again, settling on a random bbq place for dinner. We were just 3 measly American high schoolers in a foreign country, but we ordered, ate, and paid for everything with ease. It was quite an exhilarating experience.

Day 3

Wake 6:45 am. Preconvention. Slow business. (BTW saw Music Works notice about Song yoo bin busking the night before --> day goal: leave & get to COEX by 6 pm) Talked to lotsa ppl. Managed to rush to shuttle station 9 @ 5 pm. Very late bus out of all 20 stations. Eventually wound up @ COEX at 7:20 pm w/ a very distraught heart. Went & finished COEX shopping. Struggled to eat stew at place w/o menu. Abdul + soju = dafuq is wrong w/ you; gtfo. 1:30 am sleep.

Ah yes, this day will go down as one of the most frustrating/ stressful/ depressing days I have ever experienced. RICON offers 20 different shuttle stations, each w/ their own buses & unique routes that run all throughout Seoul. The one that was crucial for me that day was Station 9, specifically at 5 pm. I remember stressing out the entire day about how we could get permission to leave early enough, which route to use, and simply making it to Song Yubin’s event with ease. And yes, I was able to successfully figure all that out throughout the day’s activities. It was just up to the bus to take us there. Unfortunately, although each station should have had buses running every 15 minutes starting from 5 pm & onward, Station 9′s bus was late to begin with. In fact, there was just one bus at first, but it filled quickly, and with only 3 seats left, we didn’t want to separate our group of 4, so we decided to wait for the next bus that would come in “5″ minutes. Those “5″ minutes trickled into the longest hour of my life. I remember standing in the burning sun, looking towards the end of the street the entire time, keeping my eyes peeled, standing on my tippie toes, my forehead sweating, my face twisting into distress as each minute passed. We finally made it onto the bus around 6:10. Yubin’s event started at 6. I remember falling asleep on the bus ride there, but waking up every ten minutes or so, just to see if we could still make it. By the time we walked out into COEX’s exhibition hall (the same one that Son Hoyoung was at the day before), it was completely empty. I didn’t cry because I wasn’t that petty, but.... I definitely felt extremely down. I had completely missed a once in a lifetime opportunity. To see one of my favorite, young & talented vocalists before he became popular and ventured into the kpop-idol scene. There was just some terrible kinda fate happening that day, in which the world just really didn’t want me to see him. For dinner, us 4 wandered around Gangnam again, but settled for something closer to our apt. It had no English menus nor pictures at all. And so once again (the other time would be the metro debacle), my handy dandy Korean-reading skills helped us out, and we barely managed to order various ... ingredients?? (only ones that I understood, though) that all went together in some sort of soup... To this day, I’m not really sure what we ate, but I remember it tasted delicious nonetheless.

Day 4

Same wake. Opening ceremony cool = k-tigers + Lena Park. Sleep-inducing speeches. Arrived back to booth @ 1 pm. Mango six yucky bubble tea. Left to Namsan. Actually used diff shuttle route + taxi to end up @ Namsan cable car. Went to tower. Managed to wander into Myeongdong. V cool. Metro home.

RICON officially begins! Lena Park performed and I was awestruck. At the convention, there are hundreds of different kind of volunteers, and some of them aid convention-goers with travels going to and from Kintex. We asked about getting to COEX the day before, and this time, we came back to ask about getting to Namsan, because my friend especially wanted to go there. I remember hearing the girls behind the table whisper about how we were just using them for our own personal, mini adventures, and I started to feel a bit embarrassed ahah. Regardless, the shuttle we took didn’t take us directly to the cable car site; we had to take a taxi after it dropped us off. I remember we struggled immensely with flagging it down and relaying our destination, but the driver thankfully understood perfectly, and took us right to the cable cars. From there, it was smooth sailing to the tower. It was very dreamlike, arriving at the top as the sun was setting, and leaving when the night had settled in completely. I remember taking a panoramic picture of the view, which I later used (and still use) as my facebook cover photo LOL. Wandering to Myeongdong was also quite the adventure, for we tried asking a civilian about “Myeongdong market” or something, but could not receive any helpful advice. If anything, I think we simply wandered farther into the city around Namsan, and *poof* there we stood in the middle of all the stores. And of course, we conveniently used the metro to make our way back home from there.

Day 5

6 am wake WTF?!?! Still left @ 7:30 anyway. V tired today. Kept falling asleep + lightheaded. Ate 떡볶이 & fell asleep disgustingly. Waited excruciatingly long for Nick to decide to go home. Left @ 5:30. Got back to station @ 7:15. Ate expensive bbq. 쌈 so good. Ate the snow w/ signatures like 정유미, 인순이, 박서준, 유아인 etc. 100% milk! Very nice lady :) . Gong cha jumbo. cool. Night @ 12 am for once.

By this time, the long days were getting to us, and we were thoroughly exhausted. However, dinner was quite fun, we ate with other convention-goers from the Bay Area as well. To this day, whenever I eat 쌈(ssam), it never compares to the kind I ate in Korea, and I have immediate withdrawals. And im not sure why i decided to write those names in Korean, but yes, the bingsoo place we stopped by had various signatures of celebs plastered around the walls, like Jung Yoo Mi, Insooni, Park Seo Joon, Yoo Ah In, and more. The “ice” was made of 100% milk, which was the entire shop’s selling point, & it was delish. Also, I, of course, had to get my pmt fix at the gong cha located near our apt. too.

Day 6

STOP waking us @ 6!!! Went about the usual day. Learned about fire w/ DC advisers :( . Ate frozen sticky dog for lunch. Fell asleep a lot still. Oliver felt much better: Myeongdong! The travel/transportation ladies seemed to dislike us so we managed to find proper shuttle. Shopped for a while. Felt rly sad that I couldn’t find good stuff for EZ. Going broke. Ate 김치 볶음밥! Yummy! w/ cheeseee. So full; couldn’t finish. Store ppl are scary. Very late. Everyone exhausted except for me. Got home 12:30. Slept 2:15. *written on the side* Gina lost her phone :( .

Not a super eventful day, but we went back to Myeongdong again because we felt like we didn’t have enough time to fully explore the first time we were there. Once again, whenever I eat some form of kimchi fried rice here in the states, it never ever ever compares to the kind we had that night. Literally the best fried rice I ever had. Cheap and generously filled, too. Our team was dead tired by the night, as in they kept falling asleep on the subway LOL. Except I stayed alert, out of duty, amusement, and just pure excitement for another deep night in Seoul.

Day 7

Leftovers for breakfast. Very slow day @ convention. Left later than usual. Fell asleep @ booth a lot. Closing ceremony PSY, but everyone else was p lame. Ravi’s speech was very sleep-inducing; I’m sorry :( . Went to shuttle + left @ 8 pm. Ate super expensive dinner beef 한우 w/ M & N. They r weird. Service 짬뽕! But too spicy. Large Gong cha @ 10 pm; only 5 bucks left :( . But Nick paid for the pmt. Its 1:30 am rn but we gotta wake at 3 am b/c flight @ 7:30 am. I GOT MY PERIOD, FUCK!!!

And that, is how I ended my last log in Korea LOL. The leftovers for breakfast refer to the kimchi fried rice leftovers ahaha. Getting to see PSY was also pretty cool. I’m not sure why I said “beef 한우(hanwoo)“, but yes, it was quite expensive, where like 1 of the slabs of meat costed about 50,000 won! But this restaurant was also where I finally got to experience the concept of “service” in which they gave us free food :’) Also,I’m not sure why I said 5 bucks, but I meant 5,000 won ahaha. Having a flight late at night was quite exciting, for the Seoul nights were my favorite kind of memory overall. Or rather, they were all I really had since I spent all my days at RICON.

Welp, this ended up wayyyy longer than i anticipated, but it was honestly really refreshing to go over some memories that happened over a year ago. Although this trip was mainly for RICON, I had the amazing opportunity to delve into the culture that I had only seen countless times through a computer screen. As Oliver had said, we were volunteers by day, & tourists by night. I enjoyed my time more than I ever expected, and I have promised myself that I will go back. Soon.

Thank you, sk, for treating us so well.

#south korea #travel log #trip #the food was to die for honestly #i will go back to read this each time i feel like im forgetting parts of this trip #i have to go back i swear

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i11a11i-blog · 8 years ago

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dear mom

i know i’m hurting you. and i’m hurting everyone around me. that’s why i didn’t want to go on this trip. i know myself in this state. the crisis is so vivid and real to me and it consumes me. you remember seeing me like this last april, wearing my hospital gown and towel turban in the visiting area of the psych ward.

but i went on this trip, because of medora, because of you, because of family. and we are in this strange empty house and i am so displaced, disoriented. i tried to explain to you why i might need to stay back from this even though i knew that’d be an upset to the family. if you do not understand the burden of living your life as an actor, where everyone you interact with and encounter is a fellow character, i don’t really know what to tell you except that it’s debilitating sometimes. i see printed words writing themselves on paper in my mind when people talk to me. and have for a while now. that’s batshit insanity and it’s a heavy weight to bear. i have all these words struggling to be free. my past, just the past year. it’s getting too much to bear alone in my head. this is my last line of defense. i’ve felt for some time as if i was nearing my death. i told you this. it’s not that i’m afraid i’ll go crazy some night and OD - but that literally something is coming for me. and i feel this manic compulsion to record all of my thoughts and feelings and stories. the love and the loss, the secret emotions, the hurt, the consolation. the grief, the unexpected joy. this is the world i carry around in my head every minute of my life. a week is sometimes a lightyear.

i miss keith a lot these days. i’m fighting to not feel losses pretty deeply, to internalize everything i might have done wrong. i’m tunneling farther and father away from my reality because i feel that it is such a great trap. i did this when in florida. i’ve always done this. it creeps up on me. i found how far i’d burrowed only accidentally in those notes on my phone. i catch myself in the act of tunneling into neverland, into the looking glass. i’m already halfway there by the time i realize i’m anywhere. i think from some angle im probably severely bipolar and OCD and might even have some personality disorder something or other. but from the inside, from this warm world i’ve created, it is safe and free. it is art and experience. euphoria, and the power i never seem to have in my physical bones.

hence, the existential dread. hence, the hours spent sitting on this porch wondering if i am “going crazy.” the wondering why it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between reality and imagination. i don’t know what’s the novel and what’s “life.” they seem to be one and the same far too often.

but you telling me i’m a self-destructive narcissist who’s “turning into your father” (my beloved novelist grandfather who wrote a bestseller, and who my mother despises for his substance abuse and general absence as a parent). those things just reinforce this paranoia that my fate is sealed and there’s no way i can’t fuck this up. and i have to believe there’s a way to balance all of this well. to listen to myself but also have the support to make the constructive choices i need to, in the environment that recognizes and supports my need for creative inspiration. i know that i can do it, and you yelling at me and telling me my shitty situation is my own fault because i won’t accept people’s love and help or “get help on my own” is so unhelpful. do you realize i can’t decide if it would be better to work on this project for another week or so and then end my life so i don’t have to hurt you and everyone else even more, or somehow struggle free of these chains and disappear forever into waking dreamland, away from responsibilities, from judgment, from burden – those two options are the biggest battle in my mind now. this obsessive relentless war of self within self. my mind, this firstborn and eternal child of mine. it pulls and pushes me with every whim.

so i am sorry. deeply. and i love you. you anger me and hurt me so deeply sometimes though. i have come to realize that you do understand me. it’s obvious from our talks over the years that you have lived with and observed this enough with your father. that you understand how big it is. you just do not accept that it is enough of a reason. to you, it is a matter of conformity and morals. for me, it has become only about freedom vs captivity.

i have to believe that it’s ok and an option to be happy someday. to wake up for any other reason than the promise of a new cigarette and the morning light that’ll be in the same spot on this chair. to believe my deepest dreams can be reality. to believe that there’s some other way to live than in fear and dread. to believe that it’s valid that i don’t have to live every day wondering if it’ll be my last just because the sadness is so profound. to believe that i deserve relief from this pain.

the isolation you attack in me is what i feel i have to do to protect those around me from this cloud. i stay away to keep you in the light. so please, don’t yell at me for staying in my room all day, for pacing circles between my room, the bathroom, and this porch, and refuse to see the rest of this shitty town where all the people who live who knew me as a confused child. i am so much more confused and i am tired of being pitied. so please, understand that this battle is legitimate. this pain is valid. people end their lives over this stuff. people self harm a lot. so when i show you my scars in a moment of weakness, please don’t look at me with disgust. it is real. it is valid. it is not a drama show. your father fucked up but he was in legitimate pain and in some ways he was just doing his best with what he had. it is always a valid struggle. some do better, some do worse. i am so sorry for your pain which triggers you. i trigger you and i accept that. i am so sorry of who i remind you of. please know it was not an intentional echo. i was born this way and i am dealing with it the best i can. please try to understand me as i will try to respect and understand you.

you remember me as a child. you saw this mind forming. i know it couldn’t have escaped you. do you understand why my own child scares me so much. emotional abuse is so easy to perpetuate, almost involuntarily. this inability to understand self in relation to other, it is sometimes coped with through abuse of children, whether that’s just steady emotional absence or constant distraction. i know how i tend to withdraw so fully, just vacate my reality and disappear into my mind. that’s kind of what you did. and i am scared of repeating your mistakes. that sounds harsh but i don’t mind saying it. if adoption is right, it will be a good, healthy thing for everyone. i am not abusive person, at least i hope not. i never have been. and i don’t want to become one. i love most everything, except maybe myself. but i am sad, and so removed from my own physical presence. and i would just be so grateful if you understood that this is real pain. that if i could pull myself out of it i would. it is hard to feel nothing and to have to pretend to feel everything that normal people feel. there’s this thing i saw online the other day. it said: “one time, a wise man said nothing.” i like that.

love, satin

#letters #writing

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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How technology gets us hooked

The Long Read: From a young age, humans love to press buttons that light up and make a noise. The thrill of positive feedback lies at the heart of addiction to gambling, games, and social media

Not long ago, I stepped into a lift on the 18th floor of a tall building in New York City. A young woman inside the lift was looking down at the top of her toddlers head with embarrassment as he looked at me and grinned. When I turned to push the ground-floor button, I saw that every button had already been pushed. Kids love pushing buttons, but they only push every button when the buttons light up. From a young age, humans are driven to learn, and learning involves getting as much feedback as possible from the immediate environment. The toddler who shared my elevator was grinning because feedback in the form of lights or sounds or any change in the state of the world is pleasurable.

But this quest for feedback doesnt end with childhood. In 2012, an ad agency in Belgium produced an outdoor campaign for a TV channel that quickly went viral. The campaigns producers placed a big red button on a pedestal in a quaint square in a sleepy town in Flanders. A big arrow hung above the button with a simple instruction: Push to add drama. You can see the glint in each persons eye as he or she approaches the button the same glint that came just before the toddler in my elevator raked his tiny hand across the panel of buttons.

Psychologists have long tried to understand how animals respond to different forms of feedback. In 1971, a psychologist named Michael Zeiler sat in his lab across from three hungry white carneaux pigeons. At this stage, the research programme focused on rats and pigeons, but it had lofty aims. Could the behaviour of lower-order animals teach governments how to encourage charity and discourage crime? Could entrepreneurs inspire overworked shift workers to find new meaning in their jobs? Could parents learn how to shape perfect children?

Before Zeiler could change the world, he had to work out the best way to deliver rewards. One option was to reward every desirable behaviour. Another was to reward those same desirable behaviours on an unpredictable schedule, creating some of the mystery that encourages people to buy lottery tickets. The pigeons had been raised in the lab, so they knew the drill. Each one waddled up to a small button and pecked persistently, hoping that the button would release a tray of Purina pigeon pellets. During some trials, Zeiler would programme the button so it delivered food every time the pigeons pecked; during others, he programmed the button so it delivered food only some of the time. Sometimes the pigeons would peck in vain, the button would turn red, and they would receive nothing.

When I first learned about Zeilers work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. But thats not what happened at all. The results werent even close: the pigeons pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasnt guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.

Decades after Zeiler published his results, in 2012, a team of Facebook web developers prepared to unleash a similar feedback experiment on hundreds of millions of humans. The site already had 200 million users at the time a number that would triple over the next three years. The experiment took the form of a deceptively simple new feature called a like button.

Its hard to exaggerate how much the like button changed the psychology of Facebook use. What had begun as a passive way to track your friends lives was now deeply interactive, and with exactly the sort of unpredictable feedback that motivated Zeilers pigeons. Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link or status update. A post with zero likes wasnt just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didnt have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends werent impressed. Like pigeons, were more driven to seek feedback when it isnt guaranteed. Facebook was the first major social networking force to introduce the like button, but others now have similar functions. You can like and repost tweets on Twitter, pictures on Instagram, posts on Google+, columns on LinkedIn, and videos on YouTube.

The act of liking became the subject of etiquette debates. What did it mean to refrain from liking a friends post? If you liked every third post, was that an implicit condemnation of the other posts? Liking became a form of basic social support the online equivalent of laughing at a friends joke in public.

Web developer Rameet Chawla developed an app as a marketing exercise, but also a social experiment, to uncover the effect of the like button. When he launched it, Chawla posted this introduction on its homepage: People are addicted. We experience withdrawals. We are so driven by this drug, getting just one hit elicits truly peculiar reactions. Im talking about likes. Theyve inconspicuously emerged as the first digital drug to dominate our culture.

Chawlas app, called Lovematically, was designed to automatically like every picture that rolled through its users newsfeeds. It wasnt even necessary to impress them any more; any old post was good enough to inspire a like. Apart from enjoying the warm glow that comes from spreading good cheer, Chawla for the first three months, the apps only user also found that people reciprocated. They liked more of his photos, and he attracted an average of 30 new followers a day, a total of almost 3,000 followers during the trial period. On Valentines Day 2014, Chawla allowed 5,000 Instagram users to download a beta version of the app. After only two hours, Instagram shut down Lovematically for violating the social networks terms of use.

I knew way before launching it that it would get shut down by Instagram, Chawla said. Using drug terminology, you know, Instagram is the dealer and Im the new guy in the market giving away the drug for free.

Chawla was surprised, though, that it happened so quickly. Hed hoped for at least a week of use, but Instagram pounced immediately.

When I moved to the United States for postgraduate studies in 2004, online entertainment was limited. These were the days before Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and Facebook was limited to students at Harvard. One evening, I stumbled on a game called Sign of the Zodiac (Zodiac for short) that demanded very little mental energy.

Zodiac was a simple online slot machine, much like the actual slot machines in casinos: you decided how much to wager, lazily clicked a button over and over again, and watched as the machine spat out wins and losses. At first, I played to relieve the stress of long days filled with too much thinking, but the brief ding that followed each small win, and the longer melody that followed each major win, hooked me fast. Eventually screenshots of the game would intrude on my day. Id picture five pink scorpions lining up for the games highest jackpot, followed by the jackpot melody that I can still conjure today. I had a minor behavioural addiction, and these were the sensory hangovers of the random, unpredictable feedback that followed each win.

My Zodiac addiction wasnt unusual. For 13 years, Natasha Dow Schll, a cultural anthropologist, studied gamblers and the machines that hook them. She collected descriptions of slot machines from gambling experts and current and former addicts, which included the following: Slots are the crack cocaine of gambling electronic morphine … the most virulent strain of gambling in the history of man Slots are the premier addiction delivery device.

These are sensationalised descriptions, but they capture how easily people become hooked on slot-machine gambling. I can relate, because I became addicted to a slots game that wasnt even doling out real money. The reinforcing sound of a win after the silence of several losses was enough for me.

In the US, banks are not allowed to handle online gambling winnings, which makes online gambling practically illegal. Very few companies are willing to fight the system, and the ones that do are quickly defeated. That sounds like a good thing, but free and legal games such as Sign of the Zodiac can also be dangerous. At casinos, the deck is stacked heavily against the player; on average the house has to win. But the house doesnt have to win in a game without money.

As David Goldhill, the chief executive officer of the Game Show Network, which also produces many online games, told me: Because were not restricted by having to pay real winnings, we can pay out $120 for every $100 played. No land-based casino could do that for more than a week without going out of business. As a result, the game can continue forever because the player never runs out of chips. I played Sign of the Zodiac for four years and rarely had to start a new game. I won roughly 95% of the time. The game only ended when I had to eat or sleep or attend class in the morning. And sometimes it didnt even end then.

Casinos win most of the time, but they have a clever way of convincing gamblers that the outcomes are reversed. Early slot machines were incredibly simple devices: the player pulled the machines arm to spin its three mechanical reels. If the centre of the reels displayed two or more of the same symbol when they stopped spinning, the player won a certain number of coins or credits. Today, slot machines allow gamblers to play multiple lines. Every time you play, youre more likely to win on at least one line, and the machine will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes. If you play 15 lines, and you win on two of the lines, you make a net loss, and yet you enjoy the positive feedback that follows a win a type of win that Schll and other gambling experts call a loss disguised as a win.

Losses disguised as wins only matter because players dont classify them as losses they classify them as wins. This is what makes modern slot machines and modern casinos so dangerous. Like the little boy who hit every button in my lift, adults never really grow out of the thrill of attractive lights and sounds. If our brains convince us that were winning even when were actually losing, it becomes almost impossible to muster the self-control to stop playing.

Every time you play a slot machine it will celebrate with you by flashing bright lights and playing catchy tunes Photograph: imageBROKER/Rex/Shutterstock

The success of slot machines is measured by time on device. Since most players lose more money the longer they play, time on device is a useful proxy for profitability. Video-game designers use a similar measure, which captures how engaging and enjoyable their games are. The difference between casinos and video games is that many game designers are more concerned with making their games fun than with making buckets of money. Bennett Foddy, who teaches game design at New York Universitys Game Center, has created a number of successful free-to-play games, but each was a labour of love rather than a money-making vehicle.

Video games are governed by microscopic rules, Foddy says. When your mouse cursor moves over a particular box, text will pop up, or a sound will play. Designers use this sort of micro-feedback to keep players more engaged and more hooked in.

A game must obey these microscopic rules, because gamers are likely to stop playing a game that doesnt deliver a steady dose of small rewards that make sense given the games rules. Those rewards can be as subtle as a ding sound or a white flash whenever a character moves over a particular square. Those bits of micro-feedback need to follow the act almost immediately, because if theres a tight pairing in time between when I act and when something happens, then Ill think I was causing it.

The game Candy Crush Saga is a prime example. At its peak in 2013, the game generated more than $600,000 in revenue per day. To date, its developer, King, has earned around $2.5 billion from the game. Somewhere between half a billion and a billion people have downloaded Candy Crush Saga on their smartphones or through Facebook. Most of those players are women, which is unusual for a blockbuster.

Its hard to understand the games colossal success when you see how straightforward it is. Players aim to create lines of three or more of the same candy by swiping candies left, right, up, and down. Candies are crushed they disappear when you form these matching lines, and the candies above them drop down to take their place. The game ends when the screen fills with candies that cannot be matched. Foddy told me that it wasnt the rules that made the game a success it was juice. Juice refers to the games surface feedback. It isnt essential to the game, but its essential to the games success. Without juice, the game loses its charm.

Novice game designers often forget to add juice, Foddy said. If a character in your game runs through the grass, the grass should bend as he runs through it. It tells you that the grass is real and that the character and grass are in the same world. When you form a line in Candy Crush Saga, a reinforcing sound plays, the score associated with that line flashes brightly, and sometimes you hear words of praise intoned by a hidden, deep-voiced narrator.

Juice amplifies feedback, but its also designed to unite the real world and the gaming world. The most powerful vehicle for juice must surely be virtual reality (VR) technology, which is still in its infancy. VR places the user in an immersive environment, which the user navigates as she might the real world. Advanced VR also introduces multisensory feedback, including touch, hearing and smell.

In a podcast last year, the author and sports columnist Bill Simmons spoke to billionaire investor Chris Sacca, an early Google employee and Twitter investor, about his experience with VR. Im afraid for my kids, a little bit, Simmons said. I do wonder if this VR world you dive into is almost superior to the actual world youre in. Instead of having human interactions, I can just go into this VR world and do VR things and thats gonna be my life.

Sacca shared Simmons concerns. One of the things thats interesting about technology is that the improvement in resolution and sound modelling and responsiveness is outpacing our own physiological development, Sacca said. You can watch some early videos where you are on top of a skyscraper, and your body will not let you step forward. Your body is convinced that that is the side of the skyscraper. Thats not even a super immersive VR platform. So we have some crazy days ahead of us.

Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2bn in 2014. Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift gaming headset that went far beyond games. This is just the start, Zuckerberg said. After games, were going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court-side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face just by putting goggles in your home. VR no longer dwelled on the fringes. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people, said Zuckerberg.

In October 2015, the New York Times shipped a small cardboard VR viewer with its Sunday paper. Paired with a smartphone, the Google Cardboard viewer streamed VR content, including documentaries on North Korea, Syrian refugees, and a vigil following the Paris terror attacks. Instead of sitting through 45 seconds on the news of someone walking around and explaining how terrible it is, you are actively becoming a participant in the story that you are viewing, said Christian Stephen, a producer of one of the VR documentaries.

Despite the promise of VR, it also poses great risks. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanfords Virtual Reality Interaction Lab, worries that the Oculus Rift will damage how people interact with the world. Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interact, function as a society?

When it matures, VR will allow us to spend time with anyone in any location doing whatever we like for as long as we like. That sort of boundless pleasure sounds wonderful, but it has the capacity to devalue face-to-face interactions. Why live in the real world with real, flawed people when you can live in a perfect world that feels just as real? Wielded by game designers, it might prove to be a vehicle for the latest in a series of escalating behavioural addictions.

Some experiences are designed to be addictive for the sake of ensnaring hapless consumers, but others happen to be addictive though they are primarily designed to be fun or engaging. The line that separates these is very thin; to a large extent the difference rests on the intention of the designer.

When Nintendos superstar game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created Super Mario Bros, his primary aim was to make a game that he himself enjoyed playing. Thats the point, he said, not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. Its the very core feeling we should have in making games.

When you compare Super Mario Bros regularly voted by game designers as one of the greatest games ever to others on the market, it is easy to recognise the difference in intention.

Adam Saltsman, who produced an acclaimed indie game called Canabalt in 2009, has written extensively about the ethics of game design. Many of the predatory games of the past five years use whats known as an energy system, Saltsman said. Youre allowed to play the game for five minutes, and then you artificially run out of stuff to do. The game will send you an email in, say, four hours when you can start playing again. I told Saltsman that the system sounded pretty good to me it forces gamers to take breaks and encourages kids to do their homework between gaming sessions. But thats where the predatory part comes in.

Super Mario Run was primarily designed by its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, to be a game he enjoyed playing Photograph: PR

According to Saltsman: Game designers began to realise that players would pay $1 to shorten the wait time, or to increase the amount of energy their avatar would have once the four-hour rest period had passed. I came across this predatory device when playing a game called Trivia Crack. If you give the wrong answer several times, you run out of lives, and a dialogue screen gives you a choice: wait for an hour for more lives, or pay 99 cents to continue immediately. Many games hide these down-the-line charges. Theyre free, at first, but later you are forced to pay in-game fees to continue.

If you are minutes or even hours deep into the game, the last thing you want to do is admit defeat. You have so much to lose, and your aversion to that sense of loss compels you to feed the machine just one more time, over and over again. You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.

A game in which you always win is boring. It sounds appealing but it gets old fast. To some extent we all need losses and difficulties and challenges, because without them the thrill of success weakens gradually with each new victory. The hardship of the challenge is far more compelling than knowing you are going to succeed. This sense of hardship is an ingredient in many addictive experiences, including one of the most addictive games of all time: Tetris.

In 1984, Alexey Pajitnov was working at a computer lab at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow. Many of the labs scientists worked on side projects, and Pajitnov began working on a video game. Pajitnov worked on Tetris for much longer than he planned because he couldnt stop playing the game. Eventually Pajitnov allowed his friends at the Academy of Science to play the game. Everyone who touched the game couldnt stop playing either.

His best friend, Vladimir Pokhilko, a former psychologist, remembered taking the game to his lab at the Moscow Medical Institute. Everybody stopped working. So I deleted it from every computer. Everyone went back to work, until a new version appeared in the lab.

Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Tetris spread from the Academy of Science to the rest of Moscow, and then on to the rest of Russia and eastern Europe. Two years later, in 1986, the game reached the west, but its big break came in 1991, when Nintendo signed a deal with Pajitnov. Every Game Boy would come with a free game cartridge that contained a redesigned version of Tetris.

That year I saved up and ultimately bought a Game Boy, which is how I came to play Tetris for the first time. It wasnt as glitzy as some of my other favourites, but I played for hours at a time. Nintendo was smart to include the game with their new portable console, because it was easy to learn and very difficult to abandon. I assumed that I would grow tired of Tetris, but sometimes I still play the game today, more than 25 years later. It has longevity because it grows with you. Its easy at first, but as your skills improve, the game gets more difficult. The pieces fall from the top of the screen more quickly, and you have less time to react than you did when you were a novice.

This escalation of difficulty is a critical hook that keeps the game engaging long after you have mastered its basic moves. Twenty-five years ago, a psychiatrist named Richard Haier showed that this progression is pleasurable because your brain becomes more efficient as you improve. Haier decided to watch as people mastered a video game, though he knew little about the cutting-edge world of gaming. In 1991 no one had heard of Tetris, he said in an interview a few years later. I went to the computer store to see what they had and the guy said, Here try this. Its just come in. Tetris was the perfect game, it was simple to learn, you had to practise to get good, and there was a good learning curve.

Haier bought some copies of Tetris for his lab and watched as his experimental subjects played the game. He did find neurological changes with experience parts of the brain thickened and brain activity declined, suggesting experts brains worked more efficiently but more relevant here, he found that his subjects relished playing the game. They signed up to play for 45 minutes a day, five days a week, for up to eight weeks. They came for the experiment (and the cash payment that came with participating), but stayed for the game.

One satisfying feature of the game is the sense that you are building something your efforts produce a pleasing tower of coloured bricks. You have the chaos coming as random pieces, and your job is to put them in order. The game allows you the brief thrill of seeing your completed lines flash before they disappear, leaving only your mistakes. So you begin again, and try to complete another line as the game speeds up and your fingers are forced to dance across the controls more quickly.

Mikhail Kulagin, Pajitnovs friend and a fellow programmer, remembers feeling a drive to fix his mistakes. Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation. You never see what you have done very well, and your mistakes are seen on the screen. You always want to correct them.

The sense of creating something that requires labour and effort and expertise is a major force behind addictive acts that might otherwise lose their sheen over time. It also highlights an insidious difference between substance addiction and behavioural addiction: where substance addictions are nakedly destructive, many behavioural addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. The illusion of progress will sustain you as you achieve high scores or acquire more followers or improve your skills, and so, if you want to stop, youll struggle ever harder against the drive to grow.

Some designers are very much against infinite format games, like Tetris, said Foddy, because theyre an abuse of a weakness in peoples motivational structures they wont be able to stop.

Humans find the sweet spot sandwiched between too easy and too difficult irresistible. Its the land of just-challenging-enough computer games, financial targets, work ambitions, social media objectives and fitness goals. It is in this sweet spot where the need to stop crumbles before obsessive goal-setting that addictive experiences live.

This is an adapted extract of Irresistible by Adam Alter, published on 2 March by The Bodley Head in the UK and Penguin Press in the US on 7 March

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