A Russian video gamer is suing Bethesda Softworks for making Fallout 4 too addictive:

Apparently, after seeing an advertisement for the game, the man decided to download it and spend a few hours playing over the next few days. Those days quickly turned into weeks, and after missing several days of work, he was fired from his job. His friends stopped hearing from him, his sleeping and eating habits deteriorated and his wife left him.

“If I knew that this game could have become so addictive, I would have become a lot more wary of it. I would not have bought it, or I would have left it until I was on holiday or until the New Year holidays,” the man said in a statement.

I find it hard to sympathize with people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, especially as their numbers swell. As a culture, we have certainly encouraged this kind of thinking. After all, addicts and deviants of all kinds get an automatic pass if they appeal to the “born this way” argument. How can I be held responsible if my deviations from the “norm” (whatever that is, mind you) are stitched into my genes?

If addiction is a disease, we can’t rightly blame the person who “caught it” for having it, right? In fact, calling it a disease is probably too discriminatory for our culture. Perhaps we should graduate from calling it a disease to calling it a “productivity orientation.” That seems more fair. Given the productivity orientation this Russian guy has—which is not worse than yours by the way; just different—we can see that Bethesda was obviously targeting him to make a profit. Those greedy bastards.

Just like the cigarette manufacturers, liquor distilleries, drug dealers, pimps, and Grindr bandits, Bethesda clearly targeted this poor guy precisely for his stigmatized nature and then ruined his life—all for the mighty dollar.

Or not. Given the fact that this ruined gamer is suing Bethesda for money, his motives in this are less than pure. Granting this guy a financial settlement would merely take us all a little further down insanity lane. When your actions have negative consequences, you are to blame for your actions. Period. If you’re not willing to change your behavior, don’t try to get someone else to pay for their consequences. That’s just straightforward human decency. Which is apparently becoming the rarest commodity on earth.