It's morally wrong to trick someone biological and psychological in order for them to play games in order to generate income for a game company. But I think there's a way to balance between making users like the game thus generate income for the company and making users biologically and psychologically rely on the game.
In the end, is there really any difference between making a game that is fun and a game that is addicting? I really don't think there is even if they went in with the idea of "lets make this game addicting".
I've never once seen a game that is not fun, but is addicting. Although my friends have said Master of Orion 3 fits that description, but I never actually saw them ever play it so I think it was a joke.
There's a great talk about this from some guy at Digital Illusions. He found some definition of what a "game" is and compared that definition with Farmville, it failed on every single bullet. I can't remember the exact details but it contained things like it has to be challenging, a skilled player should easily beat a newbie, not requiring grinding. What's interesting is that the definitions are not designed with the sole purpose of bashing farmville, all of them really make sense and origin from even before computer era.
If somebody knows where to find the talk please post it, my google-fu is weak today. He also compares the iphone to a swiss army knife and the ipad to a "swiss-army-kitchen-utensil" (i.e too bad to be really useful and too big to fit in your pocket). The talk was just a few weeks after the first ipad release. It also contains alot of other talk about the future of gaming for the general masses, facebook games and gaming anything in life(like shopping), etc. If that's enough to trigger anyones memory.
