This seems like serious addictive behavior where you found the necessity to gain imaginary points irresistible. Is that correct?

Yup. Stupid virtual currency awarded for stupid daily tasks. Utterly neaningless. They wanted 7 day login habits and used reward schedules to form that habit. I still remember that timer counting down to the next reward and feeling the need to be there at that exact time because it's a waste if it's not counting down to the next one. Not just me either, entire groups of people waking up at 3 AM because that's when the timer resets.

It's gotten to the point I find the presence of timers unacceptable in almost any context. Almost all other forms of rate limiting too.

I clash with my SO over this. I don't want our kids playing these games all the time, and she doesn't see the harm [at all]. It's mind-boggling.

I agree with you and support your decision. I won't expose my kids to this stuff either. The possibility of harm absolutely exists. Gambling addiction is a recognized medical diagnosis: ICD-10 F63.0. More recently, video game addiction was accepted as a diagnosis as well:

https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-ask...

Adults are vulnerable to this, there's no reason to believe children aren't. It's often difficult to spot the signs, designers disguise them very well behind pretty visuals and indirection. Their livelihoods depend on it.

I'll post here what I know from my own experience just in case it helps anyone:

If you see a timer anywhere, it's a red flag. A common form of timer are the rate limiting resources found in many games, especially freemium ones. There'll be some kind of resource that gets used up as you play and it refreshes periodically. For example, there's games where playing costs "energy" which you get for free every day. These are periodic rewards which create a schedule for players, forming habits. There might be a literal timer counting down to the refresh right there on the user interface. You can pay to reset the timer, of course.

Timers include even seemingly innocent stuff like "this building will take X hours to complete". The mere existence of explicit timers betrays the fact there's no actual game in there and they're just simulating the work as an abstract task that takes some arbitrary amount time to complete. Extremely common in mobile games which don't have good controls or much room for complexity. The strategy is to rate limit player progression and let players pay to skip ahead. In multiplayer games, this implies the game is actually a spending competition in disguise: whoever spends the most money on the game progresses faster, gets ahead and wins.

Timers also take the form of "daily tasks". You get rewarded if you login every day and maintain some baseline activity. This is straight up designed to form habits, the whole point is to get players logging in 7 days a week. You can even find this in non-game apps. Duolingo for example has this obnoxious design. Streaks, daily tasks, monthly badges, you name it.

In more traditional games, the timers are more indirect. Progression in pretty much every RPG is a function of time. You can calculate values such as experience per hour, levels and skills per hour. There's a timer hidden in there. More benign since it's not literally designed to hijack people's brains for profit but it's still addictive. "Grinding" just means doing meaningless tasks over and over until some reward is obtained. There are people out there who spend truly pathological amounts of time doing this.

Gambling is also prevalent in video games. Lootboxes, gachas, collectibles, card games. Anything involving the chance to gain something. Plenty of documentation on the addictiveness of gambling and its effects on the brain.