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Fun or addictive? Addressing warranted concerns while avoiding moral panics around video games | Celia Hodent

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Fun or addictive? Addressing warranted concerns while avoiding moral panics around video games | Celia Hodent

Celia Hodent, a veteran game user experience strategist and a neuroscientist who wrote The Gamer’s Brain, is one of the thinkers of the game industry.

She’s leading an effort to get the game industry to adopt a code of ethics, and she believes it will be good for the game industry to address warranted concerns around potential addiction problems around games while avoiding “moral panic.”

Hodent spoke on a panel at the GamesBeat Summit 2026 event in May. And I asked her to take a closer look at the issues related to fun vs. addiction in games, partly because Matthew Ball’s slide deck on the industry pointed to how the fun of games was losing ground to other addictive industries such as short videos, social media, Only Fans, AI companions, sports betting, online gambling and prediction markets. Those industries are growing so fast that it could prompt game companies to improve monetization by veering toward addictive features in games such as loot boxes, salacious themes and more.

How does gaming win the “attention war” against those industries, while still staying on the side of fun? In her own work, Hodent emphasizes user experience strategies as a mindset based on four pillars: human-centered, grounded in science, collaborative process and benevolent (based on ethics, accessibility and inclusion).

Hodent noted media coverage of games often leads with sensational moral panics such as creating fears that games can cause addiction, violence and mental disorders. While Hodent doesn’t dismiss these fears, she approaches them from both a scientific and ethical point of view.


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