addicition versus supernormal stimuli

Supernormal stimuli are stimuli that have an overpowering effect on an animal. There is a bird that when it is a fledgling will peck at a tongue depressor with two red dots on it instead of its mothers beak in a futile attempt to get food. The bird have evolved to peck at things with red dots in order to get food and the psychological mechanism is easy to hack because there is no evolutionary pressure for the fledgling to be good at figuring out that its being tricked. Evolution is sometimes a very efficient craftsman and in this case the the feeding motivation is very simple "peck at things with red dots" and because of whatever peculiarities of the instinct, more red dots is more attractive to the fledgling bird.

Could we say that this bird is addicted to red dots to the exclusion of food? That it has lost itself in its attraction to basic and over-simple pleasures to the detriment of its nutrition and future well being? This seems obviously wrong.

Its an animal with simple drives and it is being tricked by an artificial environment designed to exploit the way that it thinks. And is it in anyway a failure of the bird that it was not given the capacity to discover such a perverse fraud? That seems like blaming a rhino for being bad at ballet, its true but you can hardly expect it to matter to the average rhino in the wild.

I've been thinking about all of this because of a book that I'm reading Supernormal Stimuli. But while I was considering the implications of this an old debate came to mind, that of behavior addictions. What is it when someone plays too many video games?

It clearly isn't the same thing as alcoholism, or cocaine addiction. But it (in the strong case) is clearly compulsive and damaging in a related way. That the person is doing something that they themselves will tell you that they would rather they weren't doing. That the afflicted person is out of control of themselves in some problematic way. That the felt rewards of gaming have fallen out of alignment with the actual rewards of (going to work, socializing, hygiene, you get the idea).

Perhaps there is something supernormal about gaming, or subnormal about a customer service job. Addictions is a strange category and clearly has too many disparate members to be a coherent category. And I think, especially in the case of the behavioral addictions the role of (super/sub)normal stimuli is at least interesting.