Interesting article. I like the re-framing of questioning gaming (and other uses of technology) from the basis of what it adds rather than what it subtracts.

I believe there is value in gaming. There's value in storytelling, in mastering small skills, and in the positive feedback of progression. There's value in shared experiences and in the communities that spring up within and around games.

My own struggle is with the diminishing returns. The "danger" of games to me, such as they are, is not in the value-per-unit-of-time ratio, but rather in the total amount of time that they can suck up. It's not hard at all to spend hundreds of hours in games. For me, if I take any given hour of gaming and compare it to an hour of something else I could have been doing, I'm quite happy to have spent it gaming. But when I take the sum of that time over a year, or a lifetime, and compare it to other pursuits, that's when I start to question it in my own life.

tl;dr: the "danger" of gaming to me is not in the content of games, or in gaming not having anything to add to someone's life, but rather in the fact that, for many people, gaming seems uniquely able to suck up so much time -- much more so than what it ultimately adds.