Why Is League of Legends so addicting?

There’s just something about League that makes it extremely addicting, to the point where even when I’m thinking “No, I’m not having fun at all” I still feel compelled to keep playing. It’s the sort of the feeling you get when you buy a big tub of ice cream from the store, eat half of it, realize you’re full, and then shrug your shoulders and eat the other half anyways.

But you see, that’s not an accurate comparison. Ice cream always tastes good, whereas in League if you start dying a lot you get yelled at by your team, you feel frustrated for playing bad, etc. but miraculously you still keep going. And if that game gets shittier and shittier, you ignore all rational thought in the post-game lobby and queue up for the next game anyways.

Let’s try a comparison to actual drug addiction. If your brain gets hooked on cocaine, what happens is (from my hazy memory of Biology class) your brain’s dopamine receptors get flooded with dopamine that it shouldn’t have, and then over time your brain only gets happy from cocaine because other natural sources of happiness don’t give enough dopamine. There is a plausible comparison to League here, which is that even though the “highs” of League are few and far between, the feeling when you outplay someone 1v1 or hit that important skillshot is truly amazing. So you suffer through all the “lows” of playing League, farming minions for hours on end just for those few amazing moments. This argument, however, is not good enough. Aside from the fact that it is uncertain that outplaying…