It's a big topic, too big for boards.
But yeah, any extreme addiction can have horrible outcomes. I still think kids playing Mario != kids betting on the gee-gees.
Back in the day, the arcades near my house used to fill to the brim on the weekends with children pumping their allowance into arcade machines, quarter by quarter.
We could easily spend $10 a day on games like Willow, The Simpsons, TMNT, X-Men... not because we'd never played them before, but because that's about how much it took sometimes to finish the game and get some satisfaction out of it. Some of those old games were rigged to be unfairly difficult at times, so no matter how good we were, eventually we would get the dreaded Game Over / Insert Coin screen. Then we would put in another quarter and keep going, hoping for the best.
I implore you to explain to us how that kind of mentality is so different than someone sitting in front of a slot machine for hours upon hours, endlessly pouring their money in for a chance to win the jackpot.