While it is not typically mentioned, entertainment is a need for human beings and ranks not that much below food, clothing and shelter in importance. Inevitably, some of this entertainment will be a meaningless waste of time (and/or money) regardless of whether it is reading trashy books, watching mindless television/movies, going out drinking, or playing a video game; and in all these cases, as long as it doesn't prevent you from living a meaningful life there is nothing wrong with it.
When it comes to video games I have noticed that with each successive video game you become addicted to and that addiction is broken the more difficult it is to become addicted to a similar game and the more rapidly that addiction will break. The games where this pattern is best observed are (probably) MMO games because the players who played an early MMO (Everquest, Dark age of Camelot, etc.) and realized how much of a pointless treadmill it was tended to get "burnt out" on World of Warcraft far earlier than those that didn't; and the individuals who never (really) broke their addiction to an early MMO generally just replaced their Everquest addiction with WoW.
