When I was a student, I couldn’t afford to buy my own computer, so I attended programming clubs, and my dream was to create my own complex and innovative game. After school, my classmates and I would stop by a video game arcade (there were no internet cafés back then) to play console games like Galaxian with tokens—each one costing about as much as a school breakfast at the nearby shops. For us, playing those games was addictive, but due to financial constraints we couldn’t play for very long.

Later on, when I finally got my own computer, I got quite “hooked” on games, until I discovered the hit of the time, Caesar III. I spent many hours in front of the monitor playing it, until one day—or more precisely, “a day and something”—I set a peculiar and frightening record of about 30 consecutive hours of uninterrupted gameplay.

After I finally slept and came back to my senses, the first thing I did was uninstall the game. In the following days, I gave the disk away to acquaintances, with a clear warning that this game was a very dangerous thing. That didn’t completely put me off games, but there were no such excesses afterward. Some kind of protective “relay” seemed to have tripped inside me—a sort of instinct for self-preservation. Later on, I crossed over to “the other side,” so to speak: I became a programmer and developed quite a few games myself. Even so, I never thought—and still don’t think—that computer games are a truly meaningful occupation.

The situation with today’s computer games, however, is far, far more addictive than it was in my youth. From a means of entertainment—albeit an addictive one—games today have become a fully immersive tool for surveillance, research, and zombification of people of all ages. Addiction to modern games is lethal—sometimes literally. There are numerous documented cases of people dying from exhaustion or other causes resulting from prolonged gaming from which they could not detach themselves due to addiction.

Today, games are no longer an addition to life; for more and more individuals, they are instead of life. Contemporary games are even beginning to encroach on reality itself. The game Pokémon Go, for example, turned otherwise normal adults into obsessed infantiles, jumping fences and trespassing into yards in search of the next virtual creature called a Pokémon—which in fact exists only on their phone screens and in the databases of the company that created the game. This game was the first mass-scale attempt to merge virtual space with reality through a game-based model. Of course, various augmented reality projects existed long before the Pokémon Go hysteria, but with this game, IT companies literally brought people out onto the streets—and started playing with them.

Games increasingly resemble a separate reality—one that not only absorbs the individual, but also studies and models them, placing them in countless scenarios and transmitting all kinds of data about their actions and reactions to distant, unknown servers. No one really knows how these data are used, or for what purpose.