A nice general-audience summary of the techniques some game developers use to "hook" you

It's interesting cognitive science, and it's written up in a humor magazine, Cracked:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

Yup, I read Playboy Cracked for the articles.

Psychologist used crowdsourced pigeons to guide missiles

http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=353

During World War II, behaviorist psychologist B F Skinner had an idea to to solve a serious problem facing the US military.  At that time, missiles were unguided and accuracy was low.  Since even rudimentary optoelectronic processing didn't exist back then, Skinner came up with the bright idea of training pigeons to peck at images of ships.  Then, he set up a missile nosecone with three televisions (a new technology at the time) showing the view out the front of the missile, one for each of three pigeons.  Apparently the average decision of the pigeons was quite good -- the system worked -- but the project was scrapped before being productized because people in the military found the concept too ridiculous despite its effectiveness. 

I apparently find strange things on Wikipedia.