This is absurd. Neither of your memes provide a shred of evidence that Civ is optimized to be addictive, which is literally the point that I was contesting in my comment.

> Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?

This also clearly indicates that you didn't read my comment before replying. I was exclusively referring to the claim that Civ games were optimized to be addictive - not that they "were addictive".

You know what other things are addictive, despite having no intentional design put towards that end? Scrolling Hacker News, the New page on Reddit (yes, I know that Reddit has a surfacing algorithm, and it's irrelevant to the New page), many other video games that don't have free-to-play models or any other optimization, reading comics, and many other things.

The fact that something is addictive for some set of the population does not imply that it was designed that way.

"One more turn syndrome" was a thing for turn-based strategy games since basically forever; it's definitely not just Civ. I remember a semi-legendary story of a couple of teens living for 3 days on bread and kefir and no sleep because they couldn't stop playing X-COM (the original one, back in 1990s).

Thing is, good games are by definition interesting. If they are more interesting than anything else you can do at that moment, that's sufficient.