For Goggin (2008), the immersive, seemingly "addictive" character of games today is less evidence of individual pathology or diabolical corporate engineering, and more a reflection of and response to a world made up, on the one hand, of serialized activity, routines and codes and, on the other, one increasingly dependent on the way each of us must manage chance, risk and uncertainty in the course of our daily affairs. Further, she suggests that immersive and obsessive games also work by allowing their players to experience a cohesive sense of self and subjectivity – of control, understanding and agency – in a postmodern moment of disconnection, helplessness, confusion, flux and drift.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 371