LogFAQs > #970085833

adjl posted...

Direct deaths? Generally not. Financial ruin, potentially to the point of driving people to suicide? Absolutely.

The analogy doesn't require the scale of the harm to be the same, only the fundamental process behind it. Much like Big Tobacco actively denied and downplayed claims of addiction and harm for the sake of making profit, the AAA video game industry actively denies and downplays claims that they have designed their games to be addictive and predatory, banking on the ignorance of a judicial system populated entirely by people whose knowledge of video games peaked at noticing that Pac-Man existed to keep exploiting as many people as they can for as long as possible. To that end, the analogy is apt.

There is still a lot of leaps to go from "Cigarettes kill people" to "So do video games". Hell, you can die from popping a zit on your face (regardless of how rare it is) so apparently I should sue all the pimple popping creators out there.

While I am not going to say the company isn't somewhat at fault, it is still overwhelmingly the individual's responsibility. Yea, the company wants you to spend money on something that probably isn't healthy but at some point you have to take scale into account otherwise the concept of personal responsibility is worthless.