If you game to decompress after work, the choice of game matters more than you think. Not all games decompress you. Some just swap one compulsive loop for another. After going through the research on internet gaming disorder and behavioral addiction, the real dividing line turned out to be simpler than expected, and different from what I assumed.
The common framing is action vs calm. Avoid high-arousal games before bed, pick puzzle games instead. That's not wrong, but it's downstream of the variable that actually matters.
Where the simple answer breaks down
The obvious framework is fixed vs variable reward: games where you know what completion looks like versus games that randomize rewards. That split is accurate for gacha and loot boxes. Those are genuine slot machine mechanics with variable reward schedules, and the research is unambiguous on this. But the same framework misclassifies an important category in the other direction: single-player action games.
Ninja Gaiden. Metroid Prime 4. Dark Souls. These are not calm games. They're demanding, high-arousal, sometimes punishing. By the fixed/variable lens, they look fine. You know what completion looks like. By the action/calm lens, the sleep research would flag them.
