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Indeed!
I for one am particularly interested in things that may have some lasting effect on their users - forming new memories, changing perspectives, encouraging the imagination or curiosity - as opposed to filling time, or (possibly overstating this? trying it on...) merely providing an alternative context for social interaction where the main draw is still other people. Is this the sort of distinction that you have in mind, or possibly close to it?
> I don't see nearly as much variety in videogames as I see in cinema, literature or music. It's not only the intellectuals that are not being served. It's also people who like romance, people who like comedy, people who like relaxing, etc.
There's a degree to which I think that action and strategy in videogames is a bit like love or rage in songs - the structure of the medium and how it interfaces with the consumer makes those particular applications both easier to produce successfully and also more profound in their effect on the user. While songs can be made about surgery or algebra, they are novelty mostly and lack the sort of reach (even across the many genres) of love songs or angry music. Likewise we can make things like videogames that are mechanically about something other than action or strategy, but they often come across as little more than novelty (often being labeled a "toy" or "virtual experience" depending upon its level of abstraction) to most users, even if they strike a chord with folks that the conventional varieties didn't appeal to.
> In other words: the public wants to be addicted, addiction is no longer a disease that needs to be cured.
There is definitely an element of this going on with regard to smoking here in the US, where (at least from what my self-filtered media exposure has me suspect) it is simultaneously less socially acceptable than in much of Europe but consequently also seen as more rebellious. The same goes for fast food like the double bacon cheeseburger. "Yeah, I know it's bad for me. I don't give a **** it's a free country, and no one can tell me what to do" being a sort of rarely spoken attitude underlying these things.
I think that how much this applies to addiction related to games though very much depends upon the particular audience and type of game. Casual games and Facebook games seem more like minor distractions, that someone isn't even going to try to excuse themselves for ("I was bored, so I did this to fill the time"), as opposed to World of Warcraft, an addiction which I have seen people attempt to hide on a number of occasions due to minor embarrassment over it (telling people they quit, then sneaking in matches when they say they're out with friends, etc.). The main form of addiction-as-defiance may be in the hardcore gamer market, the people that obsess over the latest $60 shelf games for the PS3/360/PC, squirming in rationale to defend gamer culture (which I'm not really sure even needs to be defended? perhaps I'm too close to it?).
