Video game design can take addictiveness into account. It isn't always a factor. Everything Zynga makes? Absolutely. Designed like heroin. Starcraft actually curbs the points you get depending on how long you've been playing - the goal is to keep you hooked, but not so hooked that you can't make it into work the next day so that you get fired so that you can't keep paying for Starcraft.

"Virtual" achievement and "Actual" achievement are pretty easy to delineate - a virtual achievement is one that only matters inside the game. However, if that virtual achievement makes you happy, it matters outside the game, too. It doesn't even need to get you laid.

"Gamifying" our lives is an acknowledgement that the risk/reward mechanism evolved during hunter-gatherer society has become removed in our current society. Used to be you'd spend all day gathering berries and you'd come home with berries. Now you spend all day typing TPS reports and in two weeks there will be an abstract number deposited in your abstract bank account that can be abstractly exchanged for goods and services that you abstractly order online. Even the act of paying someone in cash at the end of the day and going and buying apples with that cash is a better somatic experience than what we have now. That's one reason "brick layer" consistently rises to the top of "satisfying professions." People like to be rewarded for their struggle, and they do like the struggle - the sweet spot for success/failure in video games is actually 80% (as in, "you fuck up 4 out of 5 times you try something"). So - contrary to the essay, humans are mired in a tedious web of pointless struggle by choice because the little successes we encounter along the way are a fundamental part of our make-up.