This is pretty much all the same stuff I heard in grad-school except applied to gaming.
There's so much more that could be said on the topic. We all enter Flow on a regular basis because we need that as humans.
While a gaming-girl is picking up loot in Diablo in hopes of entering a flow-state, a homeless person may already be in a flow state as he goes through your trash for recyclables.
For either human, the gaming-girl or the homeless man, they could choose to blame their success (or lack thereof) in entering a flow state and having fun based on interal or external factors. There's your locus of control right there.
I once played so much while playing MUDs as a kid that when I dreamed, all of my dreams were in pure text. I can still remember the feel of the paragraphs and general shape of the blocks of text as I traveled through a forest made out of text paragraphs.
As a therapeutic counselor, I've seen numerous research studies that confirm this finite willpower concept. This video is spot-on, no pun intended. As with any brain organ, different people are more or less developed. In this way it is similar to intelligence.
For those most susceptible to this, they aren't even aware of why it's getting harder to resist the more hours they play. The earliest, crappiest facebook games using this model raked in record profits off that demographic.
Considering they couldn't even be bothered to run their game demos at e3 on Xbox Ones, I'm going to trust the developers in their assessment that their OS sucks more than windows.
@ddoggbritt16 I assume you are talking about their patent to charge you extra if the connect sees too many people watching a movie? http://kotaku.com/5958307/this-kinect-patent-is-terrifying-wants-to-charge-you-for-license-violation So far, their planned "public viewing fee" only applies to movies, but hey, with greedy old microsoft, they may copywright the phrase "xbox off" and charge us a buck to say it. Plus they say by going online you waive your right to sue them for any wrong-doing on their part.
A single player puzzle game does not make the transition to a free-to-play business model without some serious sacrifices. Namely, a free-to-play business model forces designers to either 1. Remove content and put it behind a pay-wall. 2. Remove playability and put it behind a pay wall. 3. Remove balance and put overpowered pay-to-win items behind a pay-wall. 4. Cosmetic fluff behind a pay-wall.
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