40 pages • 1 hour read
Adam AlterIrresistible
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Adam Alter
Alter is an author and a professor at New York University Stern School of Business. His specialties include marketing and psychology. Alter narrates Irresistible in the first person, drawing from a wide range of case studies, academic articles, psychological experiments, historical research, and interviews to support his assertions regarding the rise of behavioral addictions in the age of the internet and smartphones. Alter occasionally uses personal anecdotes, noting his own experiences with behavioral addictions and online games. At one point, Alter reflects on his newborn son and imagines the world of screens his son will inherit. For the most part, however, Alter remains absent from the narrative. Instead, he frames Irresistible as a series of claims and arguments that he supports with evidence drawn from beyond his personal experience.
Isaac Vaisberg
One figure Alter refers to several times throughout the book is Vaisberg, a young man who battled an addiction to the online game World of Warcraft. Vaisberg first appears in Chapter 2, “The Addict in All of Us,” to serve as a reminder that almost anyone can fall victim to addiction. Vaisberg was a talented student before succumbing to long World of Warcraft binges that ultimately drove him to the reSTART treatment center near Seattle, Washington. Vaisberg eventually beat his addiction.
Stanton Peele
In the 1970s, psychologist Peele demonstrated that attachments toward the people or objects one loves can turn destructive. He classified addiction as a kind of misdirected attachment toward an object that is more harmful than beneficial, a definition that Alter subsequently employs.
Bennett Foddy
Foddy is a game designer who teaches at New York University’s Game Center. Though his games have achieved a significant level of fame, they do not represent a significant source of income for Foddy. Alter cites Foddy as an expert on the ethics of game design.
Shigeru Miyamoto
Miyamoto is the creator of many of the most popular video games ever made, such as Super Mario Bros. and Pokémon. Like Foddy, Miyamoto creates games out of a sense of love for craft and design, rather than to manipulate or hook players.
Alexey Pajitnov
Pajitnov is the Russian creator of Tetris, a video game released by Nintendo in 1991 that grows in difficulty in proportion to a player’s progress. This concept of escalation is central to Chapter 7.
Michael Larson
Larson is a figure who won more than $100,000 on a live gameshow in the 1980s, only to squander much of his prize on a subsequent scheme. Alter employs Larson as an example of what can happen when one becomes fixated on endless goal-setting.
Cosette Rae
Rae is a founder of reSTART, the internet treatment facility that figures prominently throughout the book.
