How addictive mobile games hack your brain to drain your wallet

It's the middle of the night. You have work or school tomorrow and you really should be fast asleep – but you're not. Instead, you're on your phone matching gems or defending your base from enemy raids.

Sounds familiar? It's a situation I've also been in. Like many other people my age, I've also had a hard time letting go of a video game – not for long, thankfully, but for long enough to notice patterns and elements that made me wonder whether that game was deliberately designed to be hard to quit. And if there really are tricks to make a video game addictive, are game developers using ...