What do you learn from obsessive video game playing?

There are a wide variety of games, and I believe some are social and others are solitary. I don’t know what proportion of games played are solitary. I want to know what people get out of playing video games. Is it mindless entertainment, or is there something more? If we get different things from different kinds of games or from different individual games, please break it out by game or kind of game.

I’d also like to compare this to obsessive fluthering. What do we get from that? Mindless entertainment, or more? If more, then what is that more? How does that compare to the more you can get from video games?

Please mention whether you are a video game player or not.