I’d suspect that games have two things working against them on that score:
A lot of what happens on smartphones, while explicitly designed by ‘audience engagement’ experts to be as addictive as reasonably possible; also looks like an extension of ‘real life’(and it often is). It’s not clear that hitting the ‘social’ networking real hard is actually so different from playing an MMORPG with lousy graphics and limited art direction, but clever use of player generated content in place of static NPCs; but it looks a lot different: like a continuation of social activity in another medium.
Games, by contrast, tend to be visibly distinct from other activities. This can actually make them less dangerous: every time you pick up a phone for some actual reason it has a chance to hit you with a few notifications and try to draw you in to something you hadn’t planned on; while plunking down and booting up the xbox or l33t gamer PC is quite deliberate; and whatever is confined to that hardware has few opportunities to waylay out when you go about your daily business. However, it also makes “gamer holes up with game for 30 hours” obviously abberant; where “teen sent how many texts during last 7 days?” can be accomplished with fewer visible gaps.
And, as in the case you mention, games(not wholly unsurprising for well polished escapist material set in a world engineered to be fun, empower the player character, provide discrete, achievable, win conditions, etc.) do serve as a passtime and/or obsession for a number of dramatically self-destructive people. Both on the basis of games’ distinct imperfections compared to reality; and more personal experience than I’d really have preferred to have, I would suspect that games are often the proximate but rarely the ultimate cause of these cases; but it’s the proximate cause that is most visible.
At a population level, I suspect that phones win hands down in terms of person/years of unhealthy compulsive behavior. They are wildly common, have so many innocent reasons to pick them up; and team social/mobile is very, very, dedicated to user engagement metrics(my favorites at Dopamine Labs, actual slogan “Dopamine makes your app addictive!” apparently decided that was just too mustache-twirling sometime earlier this year; and are now hiding out at the much more anodyne ‘boundless.ai’, albeit selling much the same services); and, as anyone who has ever had the pleasure of trying to get someone to stop half-paying-attention while staring at their phone can tell you, they don’t have that nice, sharp, dividing line between ‘doing’ and ‘not doing’; which makes it easier to rack up more hours than you would expect in the ‘doing’ phase.
When it comes to becoming a seriously troubled recluse and spending 16-20 hours a day hiding from life until some aspect of it catches up with you, though, the normally-helpful ‘discrete boundaries’ and ‘occupies your attention and you and everyone else know that’ effects make your self destruction that much more visible.
Edit: Just tell me that “Becoming a user’s habit is necessary for an app’s survival. Fortunately, habits are programmable: we do what we’re reinforced for.” isn’t something that sounds like it would come from either a cartoonishly evil dealer in a DARE video or a soon-to-be-disgraced psychologist whose interest in classical conditioning exceeds his willingness to put up with IRBs. Rather than being something you are proud enough of to put on the front page of your rebranded-to-be-less-threatening addiction optimization solution’s site…
wtf
