I'm a huge gamer myself. I also used to work in the AAA game industry for 7 years. I am very familiar with such concepts on the example given when implementing into the games I've worked on over the years. This is something as a industry, we have noticed because people just don't have the time and if there is a short cut, why wouldn't you just take it? This is because the market is in that Instant Gratification mode right now, especially in games.

If you look at the gaming progression, especially in online games (the area I focused in), you can see a dramatic difference in game designs. It started off with the later games like Ultima Online and Everquest where you had to wait to kill monsters sometimes or get in a queue to clean a dungeon of monsters. There was a lot of downtime and teamwork that had to happen with the players versus a system handling it for you.

Insert World of Warcraft. A system designed to give players their own instance (private session) where they can just get right to playing with no waiting. Need to move across the world fast? Insert fast travel where you can get somewhere fast with little to no wait. As this game blew up, more and more players want things yesterday versus waiting -- instant gratification is the name of the game now.

Unfortunately, the game example you gave is a bad one. You can still get instant gratification and also get delayed gratification too. No one is saying you can't have another cookie if you decide to eat it early in those examples. Once they see you eat it early, you can have more and more. You can also stop and just wait for it too if you run out of steam. I personally will always want it sooner rather than later because I hate downtime in those types of games. 🙂