> Gambling tends to spur much greater ethical concern and regulatory scrutiny, yet overlap – in practice and even game design – is becoming increasingly evident.
This seems like the understatement of all understatements. These games are almost exactly like casino games in all ways, visually, game mechanics, incentives, except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling and therefore not regulated by gambling laws? Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
> except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling
Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
I think this comment oversimplifies gambling addiction. Yes, chasing losses is a behaviour common to many gamblers, and yes, winning money provides an incentive to gamble in the first place, but many (most?) gambling addicts have different motivations.
Here are some quotes from _Addiction by Design_, by Natasha Dow Shüll -- a book I highly recommend if you're interested in this subject:
> Julie explains: "If it's a moderate day - win, lose, win, lose - you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone." [...] "You're not playing for money," says Julie, "you're playing for credit -- credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It's not about winning, it's about continuing to play."
> [Pete says:] After sitting at the machine for fourteen hours, so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, no money in my pocket, no gas in my car, and no groceries at home, I still can't leave because I have four hundred credits in the machine. So I sit there for another hour until it's all gone, praying for me to lose: "Please God take this money so I can get up and go home." You might ask, "Why didn't you hit the cash out button?" That never occurred to me -- that was not an option.
I don't think the importance of the monetary payout is particularly clear-cut. The payin is what does the financial damage, by moving money out of the player's control. The incentives and reinforcement are what get the player hooked -- but perhaps those don't have to be financial? I won't discount the importance of the payout entirely; maybe it's critical to get hooked in the first place? But I also wouldn't be surprised if gambling addiction can arise in games which don't provide to ability to cash out.
If you reject the necessity of a monetary payout then near to all modern tech becomes gambling. Maximizing "engagement" has always been little more than a euphemism for addiction after all. And social media "engagement" is certainly destroying far more lives than gambling, not only in raw numbers but also as a percent of its users.
So many people claim to be unhappy or at least dissatisfied with social media, yet continue to spend hours per day on it, chasing those highly exploitative little dopamine rushes that drive addiction to it. And of course it regularly gets much darker than just wasting vast amounts of time. Even in a casino the overwhelming majority of people will at least tell you they're having fun. And in video games the overwhelming majority of people will not only be having fun with what they're playing, but also spending next to nothing on it.
I really do think software development can be at least somewhat similar to video game addiction. So many personal projects are just useless obsessions. I'm not sure why people don't treat them more like video games and only spend the amount of time you would be comfortable spending in counter strike.
I guess pursuit of simplicity, and supposed educational benefits (which are real, but these personal projects are different enough from commercial software, and often don't really push the boundaries of anyone's skill or involve any new technologies likely to be used outside of a hobby) make it seems worth the 10+ hours a day people can spend?
To be fair, the people quoted in the book don't seem to be having that much fun. But yes, most of modern tech seems to be exploiting the same mechanism, generating addiction.
"credit -- credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It's not about winning, it's about continuing to play.""
My emotions are muted and it's horrible. Because of this I felt the most excitement in my life when I was gambling. When I lost it was disappointing, when I won I was happy, but when I was waiting to find out I had a visceral reaction similar to being a child waking up on Christmas morning. They were the most intense feelings I've ever experienced and when you go through life feeling very little it's wonderful.
I wonder now if that kind of excitement other people experience elsewhere in life, like when meeting a friend or riding a rollar coaster. If that's true I'm just fucked.
I used to play poker pretty seriously (not necessarily super well, but let's say break-even on the game itself over about 2 years going to a casino at least once a week)
The moments between going all-in and before the showdown (where the pot is decided) were pretty exciting, but not nearly as exciting as outdoor rock climbing
Physical activity doesn't make me feel good. At best running on a treadmill for around 30mins gives me energy that feels good physically but doesn't really translate to mentally.
I've tried intense hikes and other activities but it really doesn't do much. I have ADHD and on and off depression. Maybe borderline personality disorder as well. I did try anti depressants once but it only removed whatever little emotions I experienced, not worth it.
Rock climbing is great for people with ADHD (speaking from personal experience) because you're mentally engaged, all-brain-cells-on-deck, gears turning at full capacity in what can feel in the moment like a life or death situation.
But it's actually a clever brain hack; if you're following best practices regarding safety, and choosing routes which are also safe, there's very little danger
Out of curiosity, have you tried "extreme" sports like skydiving or downhill biking? I have a theory that people into extreme sports have often muted emotions compared to ordinary folks.
> Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The actual bug is that some humans get a tremendously powerful positive reinforcement for success in their brain, no matter what form the "success" takes and they're addicted to that feeling. You're thinking it's about money, but money is just one possible form of success. Winning at a video game is also success.
These people were very useful two thousand years ago, because you can set "Find out what's on the other side of that dangerous mountain pass" as the success criteria. They were somewhat useful a hundred years ago, though there were fewer opportunities, in 1923 nobody had gone to space, but they had gone to the South Pole (although only fairly recently, and one group all died on the way back because their strategy was bad and they got unlucky). Such people are not needed in anywhere near the volume they're available today. So they're going to get addicted to things with success - e.g. video games, and we should try to ensure that the game publishers don't exploit them too much, just as we prevent gambling firms from exploiting this same defect.
Although I do agree with what you're saying, it's worth noting that even though there are no orthodox ways to turn virtual currency/winnings in video games most of the time, there are plenty of under the table ways to sell virtual assets for real money.
A cynical part of me wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers was actually that it could run around this problem and provide a more direct way to allow monetary payouts without running into issues with regulations on gambling.
Yeah, pretty much. I don't even think it was that big a secret. any studio running a Games as a Service would love to be a middleman taking in money from their biggest players. Crypto not being bound by any one country's monetary laws helps a lot as well.
It's not necessarily so they can get around gambling laws, but that could be one other side effect. Hell, for an NFT game like this you don't even need lootboxes to financnce the game. Just your 90's MMO style grinding and maybe some community functions.
>there are plenty of under the table ways to sell virtual assets for real money.
But are there any games where you can plausibly put real money in and generate excess gains in virtual assets in a short time? You can double your money in a casino in seconds, but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming.
I agree with your take on NFTs. They would have been used that way if the NFT games hadn't basically all been Ponzi schemes. Like the pachinko gambling loophole.
I don't know that this has actually been done for these kind of games, but selling an account in it's entirety would be one way of making an asset somewhat transferable.
> ...but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming.
I don't know what to call it, but there were examples like Anshe Chung; those might re-emerge with the upcoming vr-scape/metaverse/whatever-itll-be-called.
> wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers
As a gamedev actively relatively socially involved with other gamedevs, those with any hopes from NFTs were a pretty small minority, and most of the shillers were non-gamedev members of the greater NFT grifting community.
That's not cynical at all, there is basically no other reason to do it. There were probably some devs who were naive and did it because they thought people wanted it, but it was always about monetizing digital assets.
> In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone
This isn't really true for any games that I'm aware of. Some games allow you to sell the skins for money (CS:GO), and for the rest you can sell the account. It's likely against ToS, but unlikely to be enforced. People selling WoW accounts with high-level characters and top-end equipment has existed since I can remember.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more.
That's just someone rationalizing an addiction. It's probably a better rationalization than the people making in-game purchases they can't afford have, but both groups would almost have to be addicted first to even tell themselves something like that.
I don't believe a rational person without an addiction would gamble with their rent money. I definitely don't believe that they could then be convinced the best way to get out of the hole is to keep doing the thing that got them into the hole in the first place.
Once someone has gotten to that point, the money doesn't matter. They'll gamble with money they don't have, and they won't stop if they somehow manage to win enough to break even. It doesn't matter whether they're up or down, the answer is always gambling.
Anyone who has passed a middle school math class knows that gambling is as much of a money pit as in-game purchases, there's just more steps involved. The house always wins, after all.
Which is why gambling has traditionally been heavily regulated. Where gaming gets too close to gambling and causes similar harms, it's worth seriously considering limiting that harm through regulation.
No, you fundamentally do not understand the problem. You are willing to abstract everything from the equation apart from the outcome, and that is so wrong.
Money is a specific representation of the 'want' that drives gambling. That the outcome is getting more money or more some other representation does not matter. All that matters to the human brain is that the 'want' is satisfied.
Gambling becomes a problem when a person is willing to spend a harmful amount of 'input': usually time and/or money. This is either due to a personality flaw or due to manipulation of people into believing that the odds are in their favor, making them increase their input.
There is only not a problem when either of the following conditions is met:
- The 'input' is not at risk of damaging anyone.
- The chance of obtaining the 'want' does not modify the 'input' to become harmful.
>You are willing to abstract everything from the equation apart from the outcome, and that is so wrong.
So are governments, apparently. They don't care about the psychological impact of gambling. They still allow alcohol, subsidize corn syrup, and permit a number of otherwise harmful personal life choices. They care that it becomes insidious enough to cause crime rings. Or simply that it becomes a channel of funding that the govt. cannot easily tax.
none of that matters for a video game as of now, so I'm not surprised most countries are still arguing about it. They are talking past each other.
even under your definitions, you can argue that "the want isn't interesting" is still a valid defense for these lawmakers. Even the internet community has its share of people bashing others for playing video games or watching various TV shows. If these assumed millennials can't take games seriously, how will the boomer governments?
There's the argument that usage of drugs like alcohol increase government costs with health and law enforcement. Gaming may make your life more miserable and more sedentary but as you stay at home it generally is a win for government.
That definition covers collecting model trains or old bottle caps, if the expense is harmful to the collector. And few people would call that gambling.
There is still a payout in those games - it’s just not money. Sunk cost fallacy still plays a role.
Frankly, the addictive part is in the randomness of the payout. What the payout is isn’t particularly important. The fact that games don’t payout money could be seen as worse - you have zero chance of recovering your expenditure.
It's not gambling because there is no randomness directly between an input and output (and subsequential outputs). Unless you want to argue that the lack of clear resolution of an item as chance (be it either due to lack of knowledge or testability).
For all intents and purposes it will be considered a direct purchase, and is also why microtransactions are an entirely different 'problem' from online gambling.
Yes, I think we first saw this with cigarette cards. And people did feel compelled to buy the cigarettes for a chance at completing a set. With todays understanding of gambling and addiction, I think the only thing stopping us calling it gambling is that it is not a big enough problem to investigate and legislate.
Anyone here get in trouble for digging through a box of cereal for the toy at the bottom?
It might be worth noting that GPs premise that money isn't being moved is not necessarily true. Counter Strike, for example, has a massive market for items that are dealt with real currency. A particularly lucky unbox could win you over ten grand. The money element absolutely does come into play with some games (not all, of course).
> The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
I think this point is missing the evolution of virtual clout. As a thirty year old I can agree with your point that these rewards are valueless - but I can also see the younger generation that measures social value through virtual presence where skins and appearance can be vital to self esteem. I don't think it's correct to downplay the value that some people see in the reward of these loot boxes and other chance games.
If you align your identity with your virtual presence then failing to keep up appearances can be extremely dire - that's incredibly unhealthy, but it's the way a fair number of folks operate.
This does not align with what I've heard from people who work on mobile games: they're driven by whales who are either independently wealthy or destroying their lives. You can even use your credit card to play!
People also get addicted to things that cost no money and still ruin their lives.
But the argument here is that game devs are clearly exploiting behaviors of addiction for their monetary gain, at the expense of the addicts bank account. I think the takeaway is that it doesn't even require potential monetary gain to trap people with addictive behaviors.
I do see what you're saying, I just think you are misunderstanding addiction, it isn't logical in the first place. Gamblers do know the house wins, they still gamble. People know they shouldn't spend all their money online shopping but they do etc.
In games like CS:GO or DotA there are lootboxes that you need to spend real money to open with the chance of getting a super rare skin that you can sell for real money on certain platforms. And to make things worse most of those platforms are online casinos that allow players to bet their skins to win skins in even more perverse ways. Those platforms offer small rewards for players that advertise them in their game nicks, e.g.: `Player Name | csgobettingsite.net`. And is common to find those kind of players in matches.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
Plenty of retirees flock to casinos as soon as their Social Security check clears, then spend it all and go home without selling their grandchildren into sex trafficking. There is a difference between poor people and gambling addicts. A subset of all gamblers (addicts) struggle with rationality and will reach for someone else's wallet when theirs is empty-- and eventually find themselves encased in concrete at the bottom of what's left of Lake Mead. They would do this to obtain more heroin or meth just the same.
You're describing a worst-case scenario. Most gamblers are just poor people, who are poor because they make poor choices with money (like spending it at casinos). The type who trade in functional cars and finance a new truck every time they get a raise, or buy new appliances that cost exactly as much as their tax refund check. Money burns a hole in their pocket, but they don't become the neighborhood firebug. Ironically winning the lottery usually ruins the lives of them and everyone connected to them, since their spending scales linearly with available resources. They're just cows that consume until nothing is left, then they switch from pleasure-seeking to subsistence. They're not intelligent, but they are rational.
Kids don't have vaults full of money, and they have no equity worth loan-sharking for. Their rationality is up for debate, but there's no money to be made in kneecapping or drowning child debtors. What they do have is a surplus of attention. So you keep them engaged through all means available and milk them for quarters as long as you can. Dopamine derived from playing the game is the payout children get. Casino "games" are fucking lame beyond all comprehension, so casinos have to give adults some incentive to play the push-this-button-and-leave-nothing-to-your-children game.
To me, I don't see the situation being any different than traditional arcade machines (some games had owner-adjustable difficulty settings, and I swear some games outright cheated), and yet the current state of things feels more exploitative. Maybe it's the RNG-dependence and not skill...at least you could earn extended time and rewards if you were good at the game. Everything is gacha-crap these days.
I've always been amused that the Spice channel and the like were 100% scrambled by default. Seems like they could have done way better showing the non-explicit parts of movies/shows as a "free sample," then only scrambling the signal with a quick-activation hotline overlay the second the sexy parts start.
I've wondered many times how close videogame companies are to accidentally repeating the Pinball Prohibition. There was a period of time when all pinball machines were forbidden, because lawmakers throughout the US couldn't easily enough tell the difference between which ones were gambling and which ones weren't. (That was an extinction level event that bankrupted a bunch of pinball manufacturers and nearly ended several industries.)
On the one hand, a lot of the specific loopholes that games claim come directly out of the results of the Pinball Prohibition and contest laws (can't win cash back, must have winning odds posted but it can be in the fine print, things like that) so it is unlikely to repeat exactly like it happened before. But on the other hand, some of what is going on with current whales is so blatant that some have been famously referred to gambling addiction counseling and we do seem close to that political brink that "somebody must do something" and if it happens as the wrong sort of mob mentality panic, politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
(I sometimes worry, too, about the role that Steam's Trading Cards and Inventory items play into their Auctions might impact any sort of "videogames are gambling panic". Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes, though you can't actually cash it out and it is more of a gift card. [Though gift card-based gambling/embezzling is another potential panic of its own.] It's hard not to imagine politicians preferring a sledgehammer when even the largest, most trusted videogame store on personal computers wasn't immune to adding gambling-like elements and making extra money from whales.)
> Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes
Uh... it's actually very, very common to cash back from Steam. There is a subreddit for CSGO's real money trading[1]. It has 230k subscribers. And it's just a single game, not the whole steam.
> politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
This is unlikely simply due to the size of the market. Video games are played by >60% of the population and generate more revenue than movies with hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake.
The point of any crackdown on gambling is to reduce revenue for what are considered to be bad actors. The size of the market might be a factor for politicians when considering how much revenue to try to reduce the industry by, but law makers continue to prove over and over again they aren't necessarily that smart once they believe their constituents are panicking about "think of the children!"
Admittedly yes, destroying an entire industry that large would be an absolute worst-case scenario you would hope politicians are smart enough to avoid, I don't think it "likely" but I do find it useful to consider how far it could go, because it happened once (to Pinball), and we shouldn't forget that.
(ETA: Keep in mind that gambling laws in the US are extremely local with sometimes even cities in the same state disagreeing, and if a panic happens you just need a few localities with dumbest politicians to pass the harshest bills, and others to copy cat it at "public demand". That's how it happened to Pinball. That's how it happens for all sorts of terrible laws in the last few years we could point to. Bad laws in a panic are viral in the worst ways.)
Honestly I don't think pinball is a similar example, light reading indicates the market for pinball was in the 10s of millions. Inflation adjusted it sounds like the pinball industry was 1% of what modern video games are and, IMO, that kind of difference in size is a difference in kind.
A better analogy might actually be liquor and prohibition, but we're not seeing anger anywhere near that level
For those who had never heard of the Pinball Prohibition, here is an article about it[0]. Features a great photo of the authorities smashing machines like it was the 1930s and eliminating a speak easy.
People wasting thousands without realizing it through gambling mechanisms? Absolutely.
But millions? I really doubt it. It's probably a buy / trade / sell money-laundering type of operation, and that player was pissed they lost some of their assets.
I guess you're not familar with streaming culture, nor you live in an Asian country. Bragging on how much you spend on games and streaming the process is a thing. There was a Taiwan streamer who spent about 100k in hours on stream.
Of course it can be all staged. But the culture is there, and it's not that hard to imagine some people who has more money than they can spend in a lifetime doing this just to show that they can outspend the streamers.
Westerners are into that too now, I won't name names but they're happy to do it because they consider it a business expense (a tax deduction so not free, but after you add the views and subs and donations, and sometimes sponsorships, worth it). I think the influence they wield in normalising their spending habits is a problem - some say to not do what they do, but it's all a very exciting process for people and I'm sure plenty of viewers say something like "yeah spending $20,000 is stupid, I'll only spend $500".
Reminds me of how I heard Vietnam is one of the biggest consumers of black market rhinoceros horn. Lots of people are making money there, but there are only so many legitimate ways to flaunt your wealth in that system.
I think Hoyoverse (formerly Mihoyo) has the formula down. You don't have to spend money on their games. They play just fine without. But you think "wouldn't it be nice to have Ganyu or Hu Tao". I think the drop rates are better than FGO at least.
The only "You don't have to spend money"-games are like Dota2. In Dota2 you literally can't get any gameplay advantage by spending money. You get different visual effects or audio effects and that's all.
All the other freemium models are just tricking you into thinking you don't have to spend money.
And even that is still quite gambling-like, if you think about it.
I was plating DotA 2 recently. And while I didn't care for skins I was shocked that I was catching myself expending a lot of time exploring skins and managing inventory and the game rewards system. What was supposed to be a joyful and challenging activity became an excuse to addict and milk players.
The game is definitely fun enough on its own. But it went from "a fun game that gave me coins via lootbox duplicates that I could save up for some great dance emotes" to "a fun game that no longer has free cosmetics or dances, and therefore is now a fun game that is less fun that it used to be."
Plus I paid $20 or whatever for OW1. That game no longer exists. I would have happily paid $20 for OW2, even $50-60. But since I don't subscribe to the pay for cosmetics model, now blizz gets $0 from me, and I just accept I won't get cool new dances.
A lot of the time, even if the game /is/ rewarding enough on its own, the game you're really playing is still "lootboxes". Las Vegas casinos have roller coasters, live music, theatre, quality restaurants and various other attractions inside them. Some of them would even be worthwhile attractions on their own, but they're ultimately still adverts for the casinos. Gambling is just so profitable that they can afford to make their advertisements entire other fully-functionig businesses.
The market seemed to agree that OW1 was a good game. It had a good player count and looked like it made decent money. Until the end of 2019, when Activision/Blizzard decided to basically halt all work on OW1 in favor of work on OW2. It didn't help that Blizzard also moved all esports content (which they consolidated under their hat) from Twitch to Youtube at about the same time.
Which is the main reason I stopped playing. I can understand why they were removed but the lootboxes in OW1 could be farmed at a quite reasonable pace and beside cosmetics they also dropped a currency used to unlock specific items. Meanwhile I don't even know what that battle pass in Overwatch 2 does, the only thing Blizzard's marketing managed to tell me is that they want my money.
> I think Hoyoverse (formerly Mihoyo) has the formula down. You don't have to spend money on their games. They play just fine without
That only makes it more tempting to start playing. You can't get hooked on these games if you never play them in the first place, so making it 'easier' to start playing is a big part of the problem.
That was the realization that turned me off video games.
What is any modern, non-boxed sales model videogame selling?
Artificial scarcity.
And who is in absolute control of that scarcity?
The developer.
Why addict yourself to something your counterparty has every incentive to abuse you over?
Or as I asked in terms of my EVE Online experience, "Am I actually enjoying every moment of playing, or am I doing work I don't enjoy just so that I can get something?"
>Why addict yourself to something your counterparty has every incentive to abuse you over?
sorry if this answer sounds dismissive, but well: "because it's fun". I don't think myself as that strong an addict, though. So if it starts feeling not fun I simply quit spending, and likely quit altogether.
>Or as I asked in terms of my EVE Online experience, "Am I actually enjoying every moment of playing, or am I doing work I don't enjoy just so that I can get something?"
that's honestly an interesting question in and of itself. Because real life can have that analog too. Especially for an MMO like Eve. There may not always be times where I want to go out with friends, but I want to keep good relations, so I can put up with it until/unless I really can't make that plan.
I imagine guilds in MMOs have similar incentive. At some point you make genuine friends and you're there for them more than the daily grind itself. It's a means to gather friends together.
Cigarettes are fun too. But if you start smoking knowing that they're addictive...
The thing that really rubs me wrong is that you're playing a rigged game (literatively and figuratively) when you invest effort into grind games.
Essentially everything about the game world is under the developer's control, and they can use anything they want to get you to do what they want (spend more money).
Which to me feels like a card game where the dealer says "I'm going to cheat and redefine the rules whenever I want" and customers respond "Deal me in!"
Granted, there are good and bad developers and publishers. I play a ton of Paradox games, and I'm generally happy with the balance.
Cigarettes are a great example. Because while there are more restrictions on how to advertise them, limits on where you can smoke, and age restrictions on who to sell to, they are still perfectly legal to own and overall legal to sell to the right people.
I don't personally care if they set more restrictions, but I'm not really a fan of outright banning something that an able adult chooses to partake in. Which seems to be how so much of the conversation goes on the topic.
In any case, I still don't believe that games are so addicting as to be compared to Cigarette's nicotine. I a dealer changes the rules too drastically and maliciously against my ability to have fun... I leave. And that's why many mobile games outside of the absolute top money makers tend to be short lived. They aren't just a casino holding players hostage, they compete with other games and even medium, and like any game it can be hard to hold attention. Some may not even go in with the intent to hold the player attention for more than a few months.
>Granted, there are good and bad developers and publishers. I play a ton of Paradox games, and I'm generally happy with the balance.
of course. It's the same even with old school PS1/N64 titles. But I suppose many people aren't knowledgable enough in those games to know which are good/bad, and assume all are bad.
Most modern Asian mobage ("gacha" as they call it. Short for "gachapon/gashapon" inspired by the gumball machine esque toy of the same name) are like that these days. They are well past the days where they focus on selling solutions to hard levels.
They can "simply" create an entire culture around a game or even individual characters and use that parasocial relationship to grip players. Within the game with stories and bond mechanics and whatnot, and outside the game with animation, merch, Youtube personalities (as it's called today, Virtual Youtubers, or "VTubers"), and even concerts. And I didn't even get into the fanart side of this.
It makes for better game design at least. but what they are doing is much larger thinking than those old school arcade grift strategies.
For example, I have a friend who is into ウマ娘 (Uma Musume - Horse Girls) by Cygames. It's a "horse racing" game with anime girls with horse ears. There's a whole ecosystem around it with several anime series, concerts with music from the game with the voice actors singing and dancing on stage, variety shows with the voice actors, YouTube channels, lots of limited edition merch you can win at convenience stores.
My friend (who only has a part time job and lives with her parents at age 25) has spent over $700 upgrading just one of her characters. "But she's so cute!"
If your friend can afford that, it's honestly none of your nor our business to tell her how to spend her money.
If your friend can't afford that, why is the problem Uma Musume and not your friend? We could regulate gacha games into extinction, but that only means your friend will just find another avenue to spend $700 dollars of unaffordable money in.
If anything, I would at least take solace in the fact your friend isn't spending her money on things that would matter of factly cause tangible harm like drugs and alcohol instead.
Seems a lot like victim blaming. "Just have more willpower than teams of full-time psychologists and billion-dollar marketing budgets can erode" is basically "Worried about being mugged? Just be stronger than all the muggers, lol."
In case you weren't aware, the vast majority of people have "more willpower than teams of full-time psychologists and billion-dollar marketing budgets can erode". There are a few who unfortunately do not, but the world shouldn't have to bend over backwards to save them from themselves.
Who’s “bending over backwards” here? When gambling is regulated, nothing of value is lost. Also, when a ‘few’ people are capable of propping up an industry worth hundreds of billions, your definition of ‘few’ is pretty suspect.
I'm definitely not judging, I also spend too much money on stupid things and we're friends - we commiserate about it.
I just meant it as a concrete example of how the parasocial marketing tactics GP mentioned in these games get people to spend way more than they had planned to (or that you even could spend in "classic" games)
I agree spending beyond one's means is bad, but why is that blamed on what the money is being spent on rather than who is spending that money in the first place?
We never seem to blame the source of the problem in any of these discussions, blaming one scapegoat after another in a frantic and futile attempt to blame anything but the actual problem. It prevents any meaningful answer from coming to bear.
Not much you can do. This is stuff pretty much what every form of modern advertising wants to do, especially these days with social media like Twitter/Tiktok/Instagram/etc. It's no different than how modern musician artists aren't selling you music anymore but a "brand" and "personality". Because music doesn't make the money (not for the artist at least), it just drives fans into buying merch/concerts/etc.
It's not exactly new either. Toy lines were doing this as early as the 70's by leveraging colorful mascots in commercials and commisioning thinly veiled ads they called cartoons to keep the brand awareness. We simply have better tools to do this today.
At what point are you going to stop or finish eliminating those "manipulative business models"? The guy who keeps wasting his money is just going to move onto the next one.
No, the source of the problem are people who can't responsibly manage their finances. Whether that stems from something within their control or not is irrelevant.
It's worth mentioning that gachapon is enjoyed by people of all ages young and old, including kids. Yes, kids. It's "gambling", spending money for a chance at obtaining something, but gachapon is just a part of ordinary life in Japan.
Combined with more serious forms of gambling like horse racing (keiba) and pinball (pachinko), there simply isn't a stigma against gambling like there is in the west.
I think it's worse than that. Miyoho gives you the impression you can play their games without spending money, but in practice the gap between one copy of a character and four copies of a character can be enormous. By the time you realize this, you've been on the game for a while and are more likely to spend.
A lot of gacha games use this. Right when players think they've got something top tier, no no, the real top tier version is that .0001% drop x 4 to merge into some super version.
It's gross when you hear a young kid talk about how much some youtuber or twitch streamer "whaled" on stream like it's a flex to be admired.
While that is true, in Genshin Impact at least, the main game is so easy it's not really an issue unless you choose to be a min-maxer, and there's no PvP competitive aspect. You can beat the abyss full f2p, but it will take a bit longer to get there (as someone who has been a denegerate min-maxer in other games, I have no interest in pushing for it myself). The worst whales I've seen are those who get emotionally attached to a character.
The other thing is that there's no meaningful leaderboard or PVP situations. Some gamers will whale to acquire or preserve a position as #1-on-the-charts, so hyperoptimizing for single player doesn't scratch that itch, unless you're doing some Rube Goldberg setup like self-promoting video streams demonstrating your overpowered build.
I've tossed a little money (probably about USD40 over three years) on Genshin, but I'd rather express my attachment to characters by buying an Arataki Itto oppai mousepad off of Aliexpress. TBH, I found my interest waning when I realized I had a sufficiently capable team of characters I liked, so there wasn't really any reason to go chasing characters I didn't want.
That's why I pay for Genshin impact despite I generally don't like such monetize system. There's no anxiety for the game, so I can just pay for my satisfaction.
It depends on how you play the game. One copy or 4 copies, even 5 star characters or 4 star characters don't really matter in killing all monsters in the open world. As long as you do not play Abyss, it doesn't matter. (e.g., me, 3 years into the game and abyss only cleared at 10-2) I spent a few hundred dollars on chars though, but they were mostly about aesthetics (you just like them).
I've spent irresponsibly in FGO in the past. I still play, but for the last three years I only spend $15 twice a year. Gambling is seductive, and it's clear that the lack of a monetary payout doesn't make it any less dangerous.
I was a big fan of Fate/Extra, Fate/Extella, Fate/Stay Night and I've gotten exposed to FGO because I follow danbooru but avoided FGO if only because I don't own a high-end smartphone and FGO has usually been difficult to run on any unusual environment like the NVIDIA Shield or emulation on a PC probably because they want to stop "cheating".
Then one day I was riding the bus and found that the obnoxious fellow rider (let's see, sometimes he drinks hard alcohol from a flask...) that I call "Francis" (not his real name, but he looks just like "Francis" from Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure) knew all about FGO characters and was the first person I met in person who knew about Nero, Tamamo, etc.
As hobbies go, I've come to find that gacha game spendings aren't that out of line. Most hobbies are expensive, it's just that gacha games are one of the more obvious examples of our time and our world view.
If you're doubting me, take a look at hobbies like ham radio or cars or golf or whatever really strikes your fancy. The vast majority of hobbies are expensive, they will make your eyes water if you aren't used to throwing wads of money around for fun. Even a gaming computer can run you a few thousand dollars, not to mention the games themselves, and I think gaming is a hobby most of us can relate to.
Another thing I've come to find, from keeping a journal of my own spendings, is that while the total sum might seem ridiculous it's actually nothing unusual when considering the length of time that money was spent over.
To use myself as an example, I've spent somewhere around $12,000 on FGO over a span of about 7 years now. Is $12,000 a huge sum of money? Yes, absolutely. But according to my Excel spreadsheet it's also about $1,700 a year or $140 a month or just under $5 a day averaged out. I spend more than that per month on just costs of living, even just eating out a couple times will cost as much per month. And remember, that's averaged out: I can go for weeks and months without spending anything if the game doesn't interest me.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a lot of the anti-video game and anti-gambling crowd have started to sound more like a certain segment of people demanding others shouldn't have fun. It almost sounds like a new spin on "Video games are making violent children!" because that topic has gotten stale.
Is gambling addiction a thing? Yes, and it is unfortunate; some people really do need help from themselves. Irresponsible parents and children who don't know better also inevitably exist, and they too need some safety wheels so they don't trip over too hard.
But responsible adults spending significant sums of money for fun is not and should not be a problem by itself.
>I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a lot of the anti-video game and anti-gambling crowd have started to sound more like a certain segment of people demanding others shouldn't have fun. It almost sounds like a new spin on "Video games are making violent children!" because that topic has gotten stale.
There's some merit here, but a lot of the push back comes from gamers as well.
I think it's as simple as any inevitable result when costs rise. This crowd of gamers are used to seeing games as cheap as $5 on sale and they are already up in arms about AAA titles charging $70 at launch. So there will always be some tension and push back against that. Even threats of piracy over what for a middle class first world citizen may at worst be a dinner date (not even a fancy dinner date these days, sadly). Hearing of someone paying double that for a single game on a reocurring basis sounds borderline insane.
Some may be because the gamers are young, so they literally have no income to buy games with and are impatient to wait for sales. Others may be compelled by that rising tension against "capitalism" as a whole and see these services as yet another example of big coporations invading their hobby.
I've long stopped trying to really express my POV in those spaces, so c'est la vie.
I think it's even more nefarious to have games that /don't/ resemble gambling but utilize the same psychological tricks.
I got taken by legend Richard Garriott on a slippery slide of feeling like I was supporting a historic studio, making digital investments, holding onto key digital real estate, and being part of an exclusive gaming club, all while being coerced into 5 payments per month and incessantly repeating the same in game activities for hours per day. It took 8k for me to never trust game developers ever again. I can't even buy battle passes without feeling like a sucker now.
100% agree. My youngest son got hooked into a game called Mech Arena. By the time I realized he had spent 200 dollars (my fault 100%). Games like this should be forbidden or made forbidden for people under 18 years old.
Lost about $100 a while back because my 8-year-old didn't realize he was spending real money in some F2P game on an at-the-time unlocked PS5 (though I didn't realize it was so unlocked that you didn't need a password to make purchases—I do most on my phone, for all consoles, because it's much smoother than wrestling with on-console game stores).
Shame on me for not locking it sooner. Shame on every goddamn company that knows for a fact this is happening—probably a lot—and prefers to keep robbing people rather than do something about it (say, something ethical—like shut down their company). $100 doesn't mean much to me (like, I'm not well-off enough that I don't think a thing of spending $100, but unexpectedly losing that much every now and then has basically zero effect on my life) fortunately, but that could really screw over a lot of people, in a ruin-their-whole-month kind of way ("why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!" PS4s are pretty cheap, used, or may have been handed-down for free or very cheap from a better-off relative or friend, and have basically the same store and most of the same games—besides, a planned expense is very different from an unplanned one)
> "why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!"
People want something to take their mind off of things. I am glad to hear your life is good and something you want to experience. Not everyone has that privilege.
Hey not sure why you felt it was important to reply to this line out of that entire paragraph when the next line is more than clear. just kind of seems like concern trolling.
Shame on the company? Sir this is America where Capitalism is king. Profits come before all else. Doesn’t matter if you deceive children or exploit your workers those profits must rise!
My (at the time) 9 year old daughter once bought $7,200 worth of dragon in game content on her Kindle Fire (before amazon had parental controls to stop this). The good new is that Amazon INSTANTLY refunded all of it as soon as I explained 9 year old daughter to their support team. I'm sure there's a game publisher that is still disappointed that their whale was more of a guppy.
I'm not a parent myself so maybe I'm talking out of my ass here.
but how is this even possible? my parents never gave me direct access to a credit card as a child. eventually I got a debit card to spend my own allowance chore money, but if I blew it all in something dumb that was my own problem. no pizza/movies with friends until I built it back up
I'm trying to find something which explains it clearly (so I could be wrong), but I don't think you can give a person the ability to hail Uber rides without also giving them the ability to do microtransactions in a mobile game.
The former is highly useful for parents and from what I can tell very common, not just for independence, but also safety reasons.
Yes, you can. Uber doesn’t go through in app purchases (Apple gets a 30% cut). You have to set up a separate account with payment information.
On iOS devices, you can use Apple Pay for Uber (standard credit card charges). But I doubt many parents are putting a credit card on their child’s phone where they can just tap to pay at any store.
When you were a kid your N64 wasn't hooked up to the internet with an app-store to which a credit card was already provided to pay for your monthly multiplayer-access subscription.
no but my cable was. My parents sure made sure I couldn't enter a password and buy those totally educational biology documentary channels I was curious about.
Even then, any and all payment options on my phone are bound to a password, I make sure I have to enter that password or fingerprint every single time.I do find it a bit strange that others, especially with young kids, wouldn't have similar securities. I'd probably be even more secure if I did.
For a long time, there were not parental controls on purchases, and some platforms would force you to lie about age, and give access to the family card to allow children to play games (that were clearly not adult content). Some may still have that antipattern. Parent friendliness by app store: Amazon(best), Apple(meh), Google(beware yer wallet)
Set up store on device before kids, or when they're very young and not gaming. Do not set require-password because putting it in with a controller for every single should-be-locked-to-kids action is very slow and annoying. Forget to change that when the kids start messing with the device.
I would have to beg my dad to use his credit card to make an online purchase, even if I had the cash equivalent in my hand to give to him right then!
If I new kids would be using any device I would make sure it had no payment information accessible. Which may mean the inconvenience of adding and removing payment information before and after making purchases. I can't imagine letting a child have access to a device which can spend your money, it's essentially like letting them hold your wallet, and we probably wouldn't trust them to do that if they were in an arcade, or theatre, or shopping mall, etc.
I remember buying my Runescape memberships and eventually Minecraft that way. Not having the freedom to spend my own money on the things that I actually wanted was weird.
If you're not careful about in app payment settings, your kid can rack big bills with just a few taps. I know parents in Silicon Valley who have had this happen.
Sometimes it is simply parents game console or parents stream account. For years. Then, one they they borrow it to kiddo and just don't realize the risk, because they have been buying last time months ago.
My sister-in-law who is an elementary school teacher and a good parent in many respects would let her preverbal toddlers play with her phone which is problematic in many respects.
> My youngest son got hooked into a game called Mech Arena. By the time I realized he had spent 200 dollars (my fault 100%). Games like this should be forbidden or made forbidden for people under 18 years old.
I actually think the opposite. Spending $200 as a kid and having nothing to show for it is a lesson you won't forget in a hurry, but not life altering. We should let kids experience the risks and consequences of gambling while they still have a safety net, rather than setting them loose at 18 when it's for real.
Virtual slot machines are not fun games, and Apple and Google could ban them with a stroke of a pen. They certainly should. Apple, Meta and Google could also prevent developers from advertising them, again with the stroke of a pen. You don't have a right to make them, and they are doing little for the gaming and app ecosystems by having them around.
Slot machine victims and politics are poorly aligned. Something like 1/11 of the top grossing apps on the App Store are virtual slot machines. Nonetheless the number of active users total across all virtual slot machines globally may number as low as the hundreds of thousands. This is from my experience as a game developer and publisher.
What to do in this scenario: extremely high revenue but few users? As other commenters have said, Apple's deep seeded indifference to gaming has created this beast. Apple Arcade, while generally publishing good games, is a financial and ecosystem failure: there are no breakout hits, and everyone who publishes into Apple Arcade had finished their game before showing it to Apple or had previously successful games, so they didn't help anything come to be that would have come to be already.
There are dozens of commenters here complaining about their kids buying IAP. Personally, I find the assignment of blame for something that pisses you off kind of a moot point. You wouldn't give a fuck if there weren't real money involved, indeed there are maybe even a billion people on this planet playing some kind of free game and having fun. The worst that they are doing is wasting time. But Apple could give you a refund - it is, after all, imaginary, there's no scarcity - but they don't. It's their store. Steam gives refunds. So how about write some angry e-mails to Tim Cook, or run for office.
As a game developer, I would love for virtual slot machines to go away. The law can do that, if not Apple. But nobody can force Apple to take real risks with Apple Arcade, or force users to pay for my game. There is the problem.
It's not helping that Apple - of all companies - is making banks off softcore porn lootbox games. They had war on gaming, and got lootbox gaming eat out the platform. Congratulations, Mr. Jobs.
> 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
I suspect that if the "emotional feelings" being stimulated are Apple's cut of hundreds of millions in revenue, they'll decide that it's not porn. Those regulations are notoriously inconsistently applied.
I don't understand how monetary pay-in's without payouts is less scrutinized than with payouts, as at least in the latter the consumer could (with a low likelihood, but still) get something out of the transaction. In contrast, just pay-in means that only the company makes money and the consumer gets nothing, besides some virtual garbage.
I fear it might be the other way around. The ingame rewards are real while the payout pretty much doesn't happen. It's a carrot on a stick, the donkey gets nothing. It seems to me that one can have a much greater sense of progress if there is actual progress.
The ingame rewards are real only until the game goes dark, your device is no longer supported, or their servers shut down and suddenly you're left with nothing. At least real life gambling can leave you with something tangible.
I think another aspect that my friends and I talk about, seeing the evolution of micro transactions over the past decade or two, is the fact that gambling or making transactions for what is essentially an artificially scarce thing that can be duplicated ad infinitum without much cost.
Rewards are also frequently devalued to push you into getting new rewards. Either by power creep in released rewards or active nerfing of existing rewards.
I'd like to see some numbers about how many people struggling with gambling addictions compared to how many people struggle with in-game-purchase addictions. Both share the negative reinforcement of spending money. In exchange one gives you the positive reinforcement of playing a game. Another gives you the positive reinforcement of money. I have the feeling money is a 10x more potent reward.
This is to say, the gaming industry makes games that are a problem for some people but I'd like to see some hard numbers comparing it to gambling before I would say the product is as dangerous as gambling on a population level.
It's not just the winning that is addicting to gamblers. More often, it's the losing. Losing recapitulates the feelings of deep shame that they feel, but don't feel are necessarily justified. So in order to re-justify those feelings, they gamble away money and "act shamefully" so to speak.
This same pattern is behind a lot (if not all) addictions. It's not just a physical addiction or a dopamine rush, and it's not generally the upside that addicts are addicted to.
You should read more about addiction. You're right about the mechanism employed, but that mechanism does not addict most people. There are genetic and social profiles that make one more vulnerable to addiction, and trauma from the past that results in deep, internalized shame increases those odds dramatically.
Sure. What I'm really saying is that I bet cash payment triggers more dopamine than whatever gotcha/powerup/etc mechanic a mobile game can use. That cash payment is so much more of a potent reward that it makes sense to regulate gambling much more strictly. Of course, I'm speaking on aggregate and across the entire population, it's clear some individuals overspend on mobile games.
China banned under-18s from playing online games more than an hour a day, and only on Fri/Sat/Sun and holidays. Online games are far more addicting in my experience, but it's always easy to waste hours offline as my 90s childhood shows.
That's from a recent article - not sure if it changed since.
> Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
Lawmakers are actively pandering to the gambling companies, as the likes of Epic successfully push to make it illegal to have controls on gaming devices under the rubric of "breaking walled gardens" and such.
Video games have been gambling adjacent since the arcade era. A lot of casinos even used to have a casino floor for adults and an arcade floor for the kids
Reading the article about the addicted woman, she's perfectly aware of what she's doing and she's perfectly aware she's blowing money away on nothing. There's nothing to be regulated. Conscious adults can make their own decisions.
How ridiculous is it for her to ask Zynga to close her account and then still try to log into it later? This isn't a regulatory issue, it's a willpower issue. Might as well regulate how much/what food you can buy so people don't get fat.
But it IS all willpower. The other take is baffling to me - the notion that "we"(the smart people/ the regulators/ the ones above the masses) need to protect weak people because they are too weak to do something about it.
It's a ridiculous proposition in my opinion. First, it's intractable - Zynga closes the woman's account, she'll find other ways to blow her money away.
But the biggest problem is not even that - the proposed solution of regulation, which nowadays is a universal hammer for absolutely every problem, takes freedom away from me and you in order to protect her. Even though as I've said it doesn't really protect her.
Regulation is a terrible solution to any problem, almost all of the time.
Ah, I though I was talking to a political zealot, thanks for confirming.
You clearly have no reference for the experience of a severe addiction and how reduced access and affordances can reduce the chances or severity of relapse.
I hope you enjoy eating your heavily regulated dinner tonight before you sleep in your building-regulated abode atop your fire-safety-regulated mattress.
> Gambling tends to spur much greater ethical concern and regulatory scrutiny, yet overlap – in practice and even game design – is becoming increasingly evident.
The government hates competition. They want to be the only ones that can swindle money out of whales via state lotteries.
State lotteries were actually specifically designed to discourage whales and big spending. That is why tickets are relatively low priced and there are no high priced super tickets. It is very difficult to impulse buy a mass amount of tickets.
They were also designed to replace numbers -- a similar game run by mobsters that took money from the poor. The rates of return of lotteries are much better than the old numbers games.
Of course some states have gotten greedy and have changed the rules to encourage more impulse spending.
It's insane that we are permitting tactics that are already sketchy when applied to gambling addicts to be used to target teenagers and other young individuals who are still developing. We are enabling behaviours in video games that will shape lifelong addictions and other huge problems all because we are unwilling to call loot boxes gambling because of half-baked analogies to opening a pack of baseball cards.
Simply put: technology is one step ahead of the law. All of these ‘tricks’ should be regulated as gambling for the same reasons gambling is regulated: they’re addictive, they disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, they extract large sums of money from these groups and enrich some large companies in the process.
When viewed in that light, perhaps even existing gambling regulations don’t go far enough because there are plenty of people who suffer from gambling addiction and even ruin their lives in the process.
As for the people who oppose all of this regulation on the basis of individual freedom (and perhaps don’t care about gambling addicts), here is the issue: externalities. People with severe gambling addiction can do tremendous damage to society as well as enable and enrich organized crime groups. It’s well documented that people with gambling addiction can and do commit thefts and even murders to fuel their addiction.
Now you might also argue that regulation does not prevent gambling addiction but that is only evidence against the current set of regulations, not proof that all regulation is ineffective. Trying to determine the right regulations to minimize the harms of gambling addiction while balancing personal freedoms is the hard part of policy debates.
The war on drugs has very little to do with drugs so this is a bad analogy. So long as you are white and don't look poor you can do whatever drugs you want and the law won't get in your way. I have literally done a bump of K with an on duty cop at a music festival.
The push for legalization isn't about people making their own choices, it's because it's not possible for the government to have this power and not abuse it and harm reduction via regulated production (taking away choices, clearly) and medical supervision.
This argument doesn't apply to video game gambling. Nobody is getting their hit of digital lootboxes from their dealer and the government isn't arresting players for Fortnite possession. You can have all the thrill of random drops without it being tied to your credit card, there are still recovering WoW addicts.
If people en masse suddenly started spending ruinous amounts of money on Yu-Gi-Oh that's a pretty strong case against them. Regulation follows the harm not the principles.
>So long as you are white and don't look poor you can do whatever drugs you want and the law won't get in your way. I have literally done a bump of K with an on duty cop at a music festival.
I hope you know that US drug policy has basically been pushed onto the entirety of the rest of the world. Eg the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. This means that when you talk about drug policy it's not about US racial politics, it's about the entire world. So when you say "as long as you're white" it's meaningless.
>This argument doesn't apply to video game gambling. Nobody is getting their hit of digital lootboxes from their dealer and the government isn't arresting players for Fortnite possession. You can have all the thrill of random drops without it being tied to your credit card, there are still recovering WoW addicts.
And you can have all of this without the government intervening either. That's the whole point - government intervention is what screwed all of it up. It's not intentional, but it's just a side effect that seems to always pop up whenever the government throws around bans that are intended to impact regular people.
No, they're not. For all intents and purposes the industry has moved on from loot boxes. The top grossing mobile games aren't using them, and AAA/F2P games have for the most part moved on from them. There's a few holdouts (notably Fifa Ultimate Team), but everyone else has moved on. The article does a really good job of explaining what the _actual_ model is now.
My very general response to that very general statement is: choices and decisions can be made collectively as well.
At their best, regulations ARE exactly that - bunch of us getting together and saying "well THAT sure sucked; let's not make THAT mistake again; let's do better choices in the future". It's us saying that we are capable of learning and we don't have to make every.stupid.mistake.over.and.over.again individually.
We will probably also agree very quickly on what regulations are at their very worst, or even at their median / mediocre! :). And then it becomes an intelligent discussion on where we each draw the line and what are good ratios and compromises.
But I have limited respect for drawing the line at either plus or minus infinity and pretending it's a meaningful statement or a good principle to live by :-/
[if your post was sarcasm, apologies/nm; easy to miss those online]
Maybe, but there has to be a limit to how far we expect humans to override their programming. With technology and the full force of the market behind probing our weaknesses, there's a good chance we will reach that limit soon.
Now that's some hyperbole, government regulations are some of the best tools we have in creating a reasonable society that is desirable to live in.
For example, your nanny state comment could easily be modified to describe chemical waste dumping.
"What's insane is that some want to replace the irresponsible CEO's and C-suite execs of those workers with a nanny state."
Well fucking hell yes I do, I want the government to have to power to ruin companies if they negligently damaged or destroyed the environment we all share, for profit, stupidity or laziness.
Government regulations are the only reason we the workers have it as good as we do today. 5 day work week, EPA restrictions, etc.
Sure but when teenagers shouldn't be actually gambling we have age restrictions in casinos and levy fines/revoke licenses if they violate those restrictions. Meanwhile, we allow this thing that pretty much everyone agrees is gambling, right down to being able to cash out winnings at a profit and we want to say "only your parents can stop you". How about putting loot boxes behind an 18+ restriction, and requiring id checks like casinos do? Is that not nanny state for actually gambling but is nanny state for thing almost identical to gambling?
Far less damaging to the lungs/liver, especially as the article says much of the increase is via "edible products". Far less addictive than alcohol/tobacco. Far less impairing than alcohol for driving. etc.
Smoking and drinking have been illegal for minors that entire time; this data does not show that prohibition itself has been effective (or ineffective).
Not as well as it could be but certainly better than doing nothing at all. It does create a barrier that otherwise doesn't exist and that barrier does reduce underage drinking and smoking compared to what it otherwise would be even if it doesn't zero it the way we'd ideally hope it would.
I can’t say how easy it is for an underage person to get cigarettes. But I do know how easy it is for them to get weed. I can’t imagine any teenager who wants to smoke or drink being stymied by the law
Do you also think governments forcing schools to teach abstinence is diminishing kids from having sex?
Teaching abstinence doesn't create an actual barrier/obstacle to sex so it's not a fair comparison. I think abstinence only education is stupid and we should teach what's needed to prevent pregnancy rather than doing some sort of moral grandstanding that ruins lives.
Ironically, it would probably be harder for minors to get weed if weed were legal. The fact that it's already illegal leads to people not caring if they sell to minors. They don't give drug dealers additional time in jail for selling to minors for example. If weed were legal for 18+ and you had a strong ID requirement for sale it would be harder for minors to get weed. You have a far smaller illegal market when you have a regulated legal market.
Children don't have the luxury of choosing their parents. Having guardrails to increase the odds of success for a child with imperfect parents? I'd say that's a good idea.
But the guardrails disallow everyone else from engaging in voluntary transactions with no third party harm. That's the real issue. Reduce everyone's freedoms to save a few from themselves.
There is definitely third party harm here. Why do casinos put slot machines in groups and make big wins flashy events? To make big wins appear more likely than they are. The whales are walking adverts for the games, and so are enticing other people to whale themselves to keep up.
But everyone that plays those games is voluntarily doing so. Every single person can do the same research you and I have about the psycologocial impacts of their design. Not a single person other than me is harmed by my decision to gamble.
I'll break it down even further since apparently I wasn't explicit enough: If you gamble, either you win or you lose. You will most likely lose. If you win however, the casino will promote said win, therefore creating the impression that winning is more likely than it actually is, meaning that you're promoting gambling, which is harming people. If you lose, you generate profits for the casino, who will funnel some of said profits into advertising and lobbying, which will promote gambling, which is harming people.
You can't claim you're not harming people while giving money to people who will use it to cause harm.
The exception I take with your assertion is that every single person that engages in gambling does so voluntarily. The casino isn't forcing them in. The casino isn't stealing money from them. All these folks are playing a game with odds easily researched.
A casino advertising, highlighting wins, etc. doesn't change the rational's prior on the odds of winning. I am fully against regulating people's freedom to engage in commerce when that commerce isn't harming anyone else, and I don't consider advertising a third party externality.
No one is "free" to move anywhere. Moving is not free in any sense or term. There are enormous costs to moving anywhere. There is no cost to "not" gambling however. This is a poor analogy regardless
If you're not willing to pay the transaction costs of moving to a different place with clean water, then you clearly don't actually value it very much. Why should the government get involved?
You're probably not speaking for anybody else than yourself here, none of us are.
When people start moving away from the nanny state in sufficient numbers, the nanny state will also hinder people from escaping. Look at the Soviet Union, China, etc.
Australia did that during the covid pandemic, they literally banned citizens from leaving the country.
That's a pandemic, not comparable to a dictatorship. If you don't understand this, I hope you don't ever get some place where accountability is required.
Because if you tought like that in a company and putting in practice your careless behaviour and lack of maturity, the boss would fire you in the spot.
The pandemic showed that in a lot of countries government could just suspend basic human rights handing out house arrest to innocent people and get away with it.
Didn't murder or rob nobody and was serving a a bigger "prison sentence" for free.
The pandemic wasn't prevented and the goverement didn't get guillotined for locking up people and failing to achieve a justifiable goal.
The pandemic showed that the countries with harsh restrictions on travelling such as Spain and Italy had a percentual death count far lower than the so-called "advanced" Northern European countries.
Or, well, on regulations, look what happened to these "smart guys" trying to outsmart deep water physics by saving money on proper security policies as if they were that money-grabbing grampa duck from Donald Duck series.
I think you mostly managed to insult yourself when trying to insult me. The boss would fire me? Well, I have no doubt that you are a reliable worker that no boss would fire, and I'm happy to leave it at that.
Everything said about this stuff applies to doing drugs way more. And society did something about it - drugs were made illegal and it's getting enforced. But are we actually better off now as a result of the war on drugs or prohibition?
Chemical waste dumping is a much different matter, because that's polluting a common resource. What resource are games like this polluting?
I think there is a huge difference between making something illegal for business (here: gambling in games) so that huge companies can't profit off of that legally, and making something illegal for people (war on drugs).
Like many people, I think the war on drugs was a terrible idea. But preventing huge pharmaceuticals companies from selling drugs isn't.
Mihoyo started as a 3-man company a decade ago. It's not exactly a huge business. Ultimately any bans are going to come down to making it illegal for the player, because they're the ones impacted the most by it.
Even stringent requirements to access these types of games are going to impact the player the most.
This is an important question, because the kid doesn't own a credit card to pay for their gacha game purchases. It's the parent's card that authorizes the purchases.
What kind of controls would you like on these applications? Should everyone have to provide photoid and a running camera feed to prove that they're 18+ and it's actually them playing and not their kid? Pretty much every scenario to stop kids from playing, that isn't extremely invasive, is going to be weaker than a credit card requirement. And apparently a credit card requirement isn't a barrier.
A parent who permits their young kid to get regularly drunk may get a visit from CPS.
If you make tobacco products in child-friendly forms, you get in trouble. Gacha games are gambling targeted directly at children; in any other context they’d be clearly and obviously forbidden.
We regulate these things a lot, and fairly effectively.
>Gacha games are gambling targeted directly at children
And how do you prove this? Just think logically about this - who's going to have more money to whale: an adult or somebody that has to beg money from an adult?
>If you make tobacco products in child-friendly forms, you get in trouble
Yes, but you also get in trouble when you make any tobacco products as evidenced by the numerous bans of tobacco. You can't even have flavored smokes anymore despite them having been available for decades. Governments can basically propose any policy regarding tobacco and people would happily agree with it due to decades of public marketing campaigns (on kids btw).
>We regulate these things a lot, and fairly effectively.
No we don't. That CPS comment shows exactly the point - it's the parent that gets in trouble. That's not what people against gacha games are trying to do, they're trying to get the company in trouble and not the person actually doing the poor parenting.
Anything that requires a credit card to purchase needs authorization from a parent.
I'm not ignorant of the life-long effects you have from anything that happens in your childhood. We could take the same perspective on abuse from the state and so on. The government does not always have the child's best in mind.
Just something as schooling in general, which I consider to be a very negative thing for the majority of children, but then for many children it is a safe haven from an abusive home situation. Nobody is unaware of these issues, so I really fail to see what your comment was trying to achieve.
I don't care if you blow your money on casinos and crack, I just want the Google Play games section to not be 99%+ casinowares with the aesthetics of children's games.
And I'd like for there to be a gender neutral singular pronoun. But alas, reality is disappointing.
TBH, I can't help but partially blame consumers here. Piracy in the early 10's were rampant, especially on Android. So no surprise that for these always online cell phones that they adapt and keep the valuable data server side. And make sure there's no barrier to entry, because mobile users have also shown they don't like paying an upfront cost for their apps.
Money is not the only problem. Allthough my mom mostly plays "f2p", she is still a farmville (and candy crush to a degree) addict. She spends a big part of her daily life on those two games. And that is what I observe when she is with me, she probably spends even more when she is at her house.
The worst part I see is "water rush" or whatever that is called on farmville. The water is basically the premium currency you only slowly gain if you are playing free. But on that rush time you gain a lot more and it is 6 hours or so. My mom pretty much plays that game for 6 straight hours when that rush is available
I tried hooking her to other hobbies but it doesn't really work. Farmville's claws are hooked too deep on her
I wonder if a really good clone of farmville that slowly detoxes players would work.
Slowly remove the dopamine hits or mistime them to be less effective. Push the player to play and check in less to gain more ("Kittens" has this mechanic - you gain resources faster by being offline).
>Zynga’s vice-president of player succcess, Gemma Doyle, referred unabashedly to internal models that identify people who are on course to spend high sums. Should they reduce their outlay, she told GamesIndustry.biz, the company would “reach out and call them to find out what’s wrong”
That is just so actively evil, it should be criminal.
Oh yea that’s been super common in the gambling industry for a while. For casino games, losers will get comped a night, maybe a weekend even to encourage them back. In betting, losers get incentivized back into the habit by receiving “free play” or “free bets.” It’s all based on their internal LTV calculations and shit it’s nuts.
It’s already beyond fucked up but imagine how infuriating it is for anyone with a clue that does this. If u show the slightest indication that u possess >= 1 functioning brain cell ur done. Eg my max bet at Pointsbet was limited to a couple bucks fairly quickly (my account was literally negative too lol! Altho there were some pretty obvious tells: brand new American account immediately starts exclusively betting obscure stuff like Bulgarian basketball) and similarly at draftkings (tho they were more lenient).
It’s pretty trivial to churn out a 7-12% ROI as side income until it isn’t! I get it but that obviously doesn’t make it any better. It’s so predatory and coupled with how conservative they r about anyone that might win it’s just disgusting
I guess it'd offer you some little free game coins or something? Just like when you unsubscribe from Adobe CC it offers you a month of free subscription?
Casino Hosts, aka Casino Marketing Executives, do this too. Probably where they got the idea. Although my hosts have never been pushy. But by Vegas standards I'm a guppy, so I don't think they care to waste too much time on me. I bet things are different for the guys whose trips can make or break a quarter.
I worked in a small casino. The cockiest players were the Hold Em poker players. Most were in their 20s. They saw it as a skill not gambling and certainly not an addiction at least any I spoke to didnt.
The slots players were never satified. They were excited to spend $100 and win $10. Or win many small wins and play it all away since it wasn't real money to them. It was staggering at times to see people in one evening spend $100K casually and could no problems. Others not so much but the majority just dabbled.
I gave up computer gaming before the loot box trend. But I could see its popularity. I went back to school and many 18 - 25 year old guys talked about it constantly. It was very obvious in its popularity.
With slots just like US military training is stimulus response reward. I've been caught up in simple games from their hold a past time a dopamine rush. It's that 3% of people who can't turn it off that get hit the worst.
Poker is a skill. It's one of the only casino games where you can consistently make money. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other people. There's no such thing as a professional lottery player, or a professional slot machine player.
If you're really good at poker, it can be a source of income. You have to be really, really good though.
Why would someone would spend $100K at a small casino vs. somewhere like Caesars Palace or Bellagio? At least you will get some nice comps. Was it better odds?
People just like playing slots. We had a crowd who just liked to spend lots and they won lots too since higher denominations had a higher payback compared to lower denomination. Usually 88% for penny slots but $1, $5, $10 (per line played mind you!!) are 96% to 98%.
I recall we had a few good looking people regulars who were in movies or TV or models not sure. One woman had on jeans that cost more than I made in a year. Actual diamonds for the decoration on them. They spent piles of money and on drinks.
It was amazing to see especially in small town Canada with a population of no more than 70,000.
And yes our comps sucked mainly due to laws on free booze or encouraging gambling. The odds/payback are industry standard it's all highly regulated here as other casinos. PAR sheets only allow so much adjustment.
Especially since 2015 when public nash solvers became available that calculate equilibrium strategies across the whole game tree (previously they only did preflop)
I have a blog dedicated to the topic
www.livepokertheory.com
I would stop short of saying it’s more math or more complex than chess though . The math to code a solver is hard but using one to improve at the game is easy. Most top poker pros are not mathematicians nor do they need to be. Poker is also many mixed strategies so often it doesn’t even matter what you do as long as you don’t always do the same thing
But yes it’s both a skill game and a gambling game and currently my primary source of income
I dont think hold em is equivalent to gambling. It is definitely a skill/game. It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling
The players see it as a skill I don't. It's gambling and I saw the result daily of people who spent too much or were in bad state from addiction. We had counsellors walking the floor there monitoring people, and the casino (Security) would ban people, or they can self-exclude themselves.
I'm not surprised by the comments here I know the type I was around them every day. Even the dealers are like that, it's like a cult. Yes I know a person can make money if they are good at playing but as others commented it's because others are so bad. So to me that means not so much skill as it is being the one who sucks least.
>I'm not surprised by the comments here I know the type I was around them every day.
I think most of the comments here are acknowledging it as a skill, but that 99.99% of gamblers for those poker type card games aren't skilled. It's not mutually exclusive.
I'm sure it's like how Blackjack can be a skilled game (or used to be) but I doubt most clients are going in 21-style with a plan to count cards and find the hot tables.
Blackjack is also the most profitable table game in the house (ignoring slots for overall profit). For Texas Hold Em profit is basically just the rake (depends on the pot) and how fast a dealer deals and how fast players will play.
Those card shuffle shoes at the table? Cost $20K each and have be rented I forget the daily rate. The small plastic prism the dealer pushes his cards against to they can see their suit? Leased as well at something like $10/day. If you want to make piles of money invent something a casino needs and lease it to them never sell it!
Just consider the money involved. The table has at least two dealers per shift one on break one dealing. Another reason staff hate card tables high tips to dealers (ignoring all other staff help) and more breaks than any other hourly job. At least one supervisor there at all times. A pit boss who manages overall. The manager of tables or slots (could be both). Security office plus supervisor to deliver chips and take cash boxes away when full and to keep people from getting too crazy which is 99% of the time with table games. Surveillance usually two trained on table games the watch up there overhead via cameras ($20K to $50K each) for one area plus their supervisor and manager. Facilities to clean the area of any food or mess. Servers who server food and drinks.
So it is probably costs $200 - $300/hour to run that blackjack table just on wages alone. Blackjack would make far more per hour in profit.
Hold’em (assuming the bets are money, obviously friendly games are possible) is 100% gambling.
> It is definitely a skill/game.
While some regulatory regimes either treat gambling different or not-gambling where a particular criterion for skill involvement is met, that’s not really material outside of consideration of the application of those regulatory regimes.
> It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling
Betting money on board games (whether or not you are also playing and betting on yourself), even those with no random element in the game itself (or nothing beyond side/turn-order selection), is gambling, too.
Where there is randomness, even if the game is largely skill-based on its face, playing for real stakes and the selection process it creates will result in games tending to be more dominated by chance than the game structure itself would suggest unless participation is mandatory and matching is random. (Even when there is not randomness in the game on ita face, as random and out-of-game events that effect player performance can’t be eliminated.)
If I recall correctly, randomness is a great way to get people addicted and engaged more.
In Pocker there is a clear correlation between your actions and your results. The other people are clearly better than you are and most get the hint after a while. It's also slow enough so you get some time to think
Engineered randomness (like slot machines or loot boxes) use the means of technology and presentation to dangle that bit price juuust outside your reach. They also use flashy lights and fast paced games to get you in the "zone" of gambling more and longer.
> In Pocker there is a clear correlation between your actions and your results
Years ago I was okay-ish with Poker (positive net outcome after about 20k hands on pokerstars) and I'm not so sure about this.
I mean it's statistically true, and calling Poker a pure-luck game is like calling golf a pure-luck game because of wind. But to me the addictiveness of Poker is pretty "Skinner Box like" -- you can literally do nothing wrong, do the theoratically best moves, and still lose hard.
Of course if you did the same move every time in the same situation, it would eventually pay off. But if people are so reasonable addiction wouldn't be a problem in the first place?
I'm not sure why you put the pure-luck-or-not aspect on par with the addictiveness. People can get addicted to winning, regardless of if it's due to their skills or just luck.
The problem with e.g. slot machines is that anyone can win, with the same odds, so it's easy to get addicted to it. You can't get addicted to winning at golf unless you're already putting the work to get good at it. With slot machines you can win, without doing any work. That's the catch.
> With slot machines you can win, without doing any work
Uh, this is the exact my point. With Poker you can win, without doing any work, for one hand or even one night. You can't win forever, but gamblers are not famous for their long-term thinking ability.
And I didn't put the pure-luck-or-not aspect on par with the addictiveness. Actually I opened this conversation with this:
> Is gambling's issue its addictiveness, or its luck-based nature?
It's the luck based nature. The addiction is because you have inconsistent results despite consistent inputs. Humans like to learn, problem solve and pattern seek. Luck based reward systems subvert that but random games tease that part of our brains that it is possible to figure out the pattern if we just do a few more experiments with inputs.
I dont know if it's an issue, but what characterizes gambling for me is indeed the randomness. Otherwise we would literally call any game "gambling". I'm not even sure I would put sports betting in the same bucket as gambling.
I love poker, and it is definitely a skill game. It's also definitely gambling though. It just doesn't have the same addictive feedback loop that slots do.
It has become more difficult, at least for me, to find games without gambling components as a main design elwment in recent years.
On the one hand this lead me down a quite enjoyable route of (re)discovering single player indie games and retro tutles but on the other hand it also made me avoid most modern, AAA-level games.
My current recommandation would be, if anyone is also looking for tutles like this, Cloudpunk, an athmospheric, indie, simple driving game in a cyberpunk-ish dystopia. The game runs great on Linux w/ Steam.
> Cloudpunk, an athmospheric, indie, simple driving game in a cyberpunk-ish dystopia.
I liked the game and was looking for exactly that as something to replace post-endgame Death Stranding (I just want to get high, drive around and deliver packages), but did not find Cloudpunk simple-- while it was fun, it was confusing, depressing and unrewarding.
This sounds negative but I can't articulate the "feel" of it any other way-- it's a beautiful-yet-sterile corporate dystopia so soulless (Harry Canyon's cyberpunk future, with none of the edginess and grit), in-game suicide would have been a reward worth grinding for...not because "this game sucks," but because "this character's life sucks." Like living inside Reddit rendered in VRML. As much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't bring myself to care to progress her in that world anymore. Not even Dark Souls made me feel this much despair.
Atmospheric indeed. The descriptions of it being a desktop wallpaper engine are on point.
Playstation exclusive/Sony published (single player) AAAs are a pretty safe bet. I can't think of any that have bad faith paid content - just mini expansion/story dlc type stuff.
Spiderman, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon are all recent-ish ones that I really liked.
Anything From Software puts out is great too - Elden Ring being the most recent example.
Just avoid anything published by Activision, Ubisoft and EA. (Although you'd be missing out on some titles that are still pretty good amongst the microtransactiony stuff)
You should try Halls of Torment. It’s $5 on Steam. It’s a fantastic example of a neat game with a great gameplay loop that has no gambling or in-game store. There’s many examples but this is the one I’m currently playing.
Your comment made me think of the most recent indie-ish game I've discovered (albeit late to the party) which is Hades.
Looking at it in light of this discussion, it would have been way too easy to include microtransacations. Make it a little harder, make the elements you invest into building your character a little more scarce, sell the weapon aspects... It's an absolute blessing really that it didn't happen that way.
any game which has random loot drops or really any sort of randomness is fundamentally designed around the same things that make gambling fun. its unavoidable
This is a really disgusting phenomenon in modern society.
We all know how ghastly it is when an adult loses their mind with gambling, but when I realized my nephew (12) is already being strung out by these same mechanics through 'games' on his phone, I felt a sort of despair and psychological darkness descend over me and it's like the world is a little bit less bright, permanently.
Instead of thinking about his bright future now it just seems like a matter of time till he can get dragged down further. And I wonder what percent of kids are getting sucked into it too. Is half a percent too pessimistic? A gambling addiction is inculcated in one out of 200 kids before they're even old enough to work?
And as I'm sure you all can imagine, the desperate pleas and arguments of a kid who needs more 'coins' or whatever have a negative impact on the whole family dynamic. All a parent can do is block the kid from installing new apps on their phone and try to weather the storm of withdrawal, knowing that once they can't protect their child anymore, the kid will also be old enough to do real & permanent damage to their own life.
If you step back, it's really sad how much of our society is based even partially on chance and gambling.
1. College admissions: There are not enough seats for everyone who wants to go to school at a top college, so colleges filter via things like merit and race, but also random chance lotteries.
2. Applying for jobs is a form of lottery. You typically apply for many jobs and hope one or two get back to you.
3. Savings: The only place normal people have access to get decent returns is the Stock Market Roulette wheel
4. Business Success: Often boils down to right place, right time, and massively overindexes on luck.
5. Housing: Leverage up and buy a house for perpetual asset growth. But watch out for the once-a-decade collapse that will put you underwater and in foreclosure!
It's like we've permanently decided that rewarding risk is the only way for a society to function.
I can also think of some social functions that I think random chance is appropriate for:
Most Western, democratic countries select jurors for a trial by one’s peers by lottery and I consider this to be an important aspect of having a more “just” justice system – particularly compared to what preceded this system: trial by one’s betters (a magistrate).
6. Shopping: Sales, promotions, and coupons are all designed to induce more frequent and varied consumption. Pricing for the same item can be wildly different depending on the store or the day of the week. Attempting to secure the best price is a gamble even after carefully researching your options and making price comparisons.
Investing in the stock market is hardly a roulette wheel. Unlike gambling, stocks are a positive sum game. If you had purchased a broad based stock index fund at any point since the creation of the modern US financial system in 1971 and held it for 30 years then you would have made a profit.
As for housing, a collapse in residential real estate values doesn't equate to foreclosure. Lenders can't call in mortgage loans and borrowers have the option to continue paying even if they are underwater.
Why should we not reward risk taking in general? The alternative would be militant conservatism (not in the right wing sense, but in the societal stagnation sense)
Don't forget that Google and Apple make a lot of money from this. They could ban these games from their appstores without waiting for legislators to act, but they won't.
It seems like expanding the "national self-exclusion scheme" to online spending is a good idea. Opt-in for the people who need it, and casino taxes pay for the government to maintain the data and API.
>Examples included exploiting a player’s “hot state”, an impulsive mood created by game dynamics, giving them a time-limited opportunity to spend hard currency to progress.
It only takes one whale to offset thousands of regular players. Games are ruined by these predatory tactics. They are literally abusing mentally ill people, it's pretty sick!
Mobile games have been mostly scammy ad-filled trash for ages, but what kills me is how it's polluting PC and console titles. I picked up a copy of Mortal Kombat 10 and while I have no idea what it looked like when it launched, now it looks just like a shitty F2P mobile game complete with full screen ads you have click past, as well as paywalled off characters and moves. I'd be so pissed if I'd paid $60+ for it instead of < $10 for a used PS4 disk.
When I was young in the UK, a TV show got in trouble because their phone in quiz, with a cash prize, was too easy. The verdict was, it's not a quiz it's a lottery, and lotteries are regulated (there can only be one national lottery). That's quite an abstract piece of analysis for a governing body to make. They realised that this ostensible quiz "encoded" a lottery in a sense.
I think a similar analysis applies here: these are not games, they really are casinos, just with the veneer of games over the top.
Until recently, I'd been using games as an escape from responsibilities and emotions for about three decades, much like my father used alcohol up until his death. I finally "got clean" from videogames and it feels so good, so empowering, to be sloughing off that old skin. Becoming a parent helped me grow up and get out of my head more, and videogames got in the way of that growth. They were a holding pattern, a coping mechanism, and it feels great to finally be back down to earth. I now make more time to read some of the books I see recommended here, to get better sleep (quitting all caffeine helps with that, too), and to spend more attentive time with my child, spouse, friends, and neighbors.
Articles like this are encouraging, too, for the awareness they can raise. Not everyone has a general or specific gambling problem (I'm so turned off by casinos, but I did give Blizzard a significant portion of my income in exchange for chances at dopamine hits before I swore off all their games), but for some it can be a life-consuming challenge, and I want there to be help easily available for anyone who gets mired in that illusion.
Apple earned $50 billion from iOS gaming last year. I'm willing to bet most of that is coming from games using dark patterns and gambling tactics. For all their posturing about caring for the customer when it comes to privacy, they sure don't mind trapping them in gambling debt if it gets them billions in return!
Apple has never been a positive influence. This has always been postering. Have you notice they've also been pushing for offsets, due to their horrendous environmental policies, which also netted them billions.
choosing to burn your life savings on lootboxes is orthogonal to making sure your account can't be hacked by outside parties. One is a choice made by the user and the other is an involuntary action taken against them.
Then why do people worry about UI dark patterns and pay-to-win games? You're free to burn your life savings after all. Either Apple is complicit or game companies are totally justified and deserve praise for figuring out how to squeeze billions of dollars from regular people. Both cannot be true.
>Then why do people worry about UI dark patterns and pay-to-win games?
people worry about a lot of stuff. Some inconsequential to the grand scheme of things.
>You're free to burn your life savings after all
You are indeed free to. I don't recommend it, but I'm not your moral guardian nor therapist.
> Either Apple is complicit or game companies are totally justified and deserve praise for figuring out how to squeeze billions of dollars from regular people. Both cannot be true.
I don't see why not. Apple can allow for it and game companies can reap the rewards.
I'm not even sure what the argument is at this point. I just wanted to point out that the ability to buy and spend thousands on a single video game isn't related to privacy concerns/settings. Unless your password was hacked and someone else did it, what connection is there?
Caring for the customer is not limited to privacy. One could argue that protecting them from blatant financial loot is also something to strive for. Since Apple delights in this massive scam, one is led to believe that they don't really care about the customer. The marketing push around "privacy" is simply marketing.
>Caring for the customer is not limited to privacy.
Sure. But Apple (To my knowledge) never said "we care about you". That's very different from "we value your privacy".
>The marketing push around "privacy" is simply marketing.
I don't disagree, but it feels like low hanging capitalism bashing to attack a company over something they never stated. We are well past the 90's age where companies tried to make their customers feel like family. Companies these days very blantatly make it clear that they care about money first, so shaming Apple for caring about money just feels like drowning a fish in water.
I may not really want the government to be involved in such matters, but it's a better attack vector than appealing to a coporation's humanity.
We've had collectable cards for ages. Baseball cards, garbage pail kids, etc. Those you couldn't even play a game with, you just tried to collect and trade. Honestly even MTG and Pokemon cards are so much better than mobile games which are there 24/7 begging for attention and making kids feel like they're missing out if they don't check in every few hours. Plus with the cards in the end, you've got a collection of cards you can play with, sell, or keep for the memories or whatever. With digital stuff you'll be lucky if you can still access in your ingame purchases after a few years
When I was a kid with no money and no game stores nearby, I “collected” Pokémon cards by pasting JPEGs from the web into Corel Wordperfect documents stored on my stack of 3.5″ floppies.
Correction: Were so much better. Now that WotC are selling thousand-dollar booster boxes and concentrate most of a set's value in a few mythic rare premium foil cards, they're basically lottery tickets by another name. There was never a sudden change, the monetisation just got slightly more predatory every year.
CCGs are a pale shadow to these gambling games. Beyond that, I think there are some important differences:
* There's no "free". You must spend money at the outset in order to play. This sets precedent and expectations.
* There's a physical good involved. You always get something, and you've got total freedom with how you use it. You can play it, sell it, trade it, turn it into an origami crane, use it as a proxy for a different card, etc.
* Because people can sell cards, this means you can simply buy the exact cards you want without resorting to randomized packs.
* Buying a randomized pack is a much more involved—both physically and psychologically—process compared to an IAP. At your local game shop, you have to go up to the counter, ask for one or more packs, and hand over your money/card. If you want more, you have to do it all over again. With an IAP, you just tap the "OK" button.
I think the scale is also different. You can’t quite formulate a CCG game that requires 10 copies of charizard to be strong (counterexamples abound for sure). you can’t drip feed 2 new characters every couple of weeks while still doling out the same trash that you’ve been giving since day 1 99% of the time.
>Because people can sell cards, this means you can simply buy the exact cards you want without resorting to randomized packs.
that's actually one reason TCG markets don't get cateforized. They don't have a "market price" for any one card. They let the fans set that. There are plenty of 3rd party market places where you can buy a specific card but you'll never find the company endorsing them. They only sell booster packs for a set value. They can give lists of what's in a booster pack and even categorize them by rarity, but they never actually give the card a price.
Pokemon TCG is the new Tulip in 2023 Japan. Many people buy pack and scalp it. All 7/11 have a poster that indicates "there's no pokemon card stock!". Insane scalped price for a new rare card. Many third party shops sell their original repack. They also buyout cards so that is almost a gambling.
I've known people to spend hundreds of dollars on Clash of Clans. I would always ask, "you know you've spent enough money to by a PS5". The response is 'they pay for the time' being entertained, what's 50 dollars to play for a night?
I spent thousands of dollars on in-game content for some pretty lame city building game back in about 2013. The difference was that I had the money. I guess if you have the money and it makes you happy, then fuck it, spend away. As long as you're not harming anyone.
No, video games do not use dirty tricks from gambling to attract big spenders. Gacha/lootbox does. Two completely different things. Given how majority of people just read the headline, this is just bad reporting.
It's also worth noting that this is a race to the bottom for all multiplayer games. If you don't use psychological tricks like FOMO limited time items, lootboxes, battlepasses, etc., susceptible players will drop your game for the ones that do. When a critical mass of players leave, it gets harder and harder to find a good match.
If the original Counter-Strike or Halo 2 released today the player base would dry up within a month.
I'm a little skeptical that this is driving demand. It seems like something most people just put up with, while a relatively small people find exhilarating and spend.
It's definitely is true that they will lose out on revenue that competitors make, but I just have doubts that so many people would leave. On the other hand losing to the competition could kill a game.
That's a bit different from players leaving in droves because they can't live without these features.
I don't think that it's a selling point, I just think it's effective at getting hooks into players and being habit-forming. I have a few friends who cancel plans or bail on our book club because they need to unlock all the limited time stuff in Overwatch, even if it's for a character they don't play. I've noticed I only really play Dead by Daylight while they're running events and giving stuff away.
Yep! Super sad experience to catch myself or my friends optimizing for stupid in-game rewards after being distracted by a competitive (stressfull) experience.
I'm "guilty" of this too but my problem with this is that the monetisation controls the design.
If they're heavy on cosmetics, there's incentive to make the gameplay-obtained stuff worse. If they have QoL upgrades, the base experience is worse. If the cash shop exists, it's plastered all over the menus and with little annoying notifications, breaking immersion. Not to mention silly joke outfits, which generally proliferate even in serious games.
They designed Diablo 4 at a very high zoom level - my guess is this is so you focus on your character more, making you want to deck them out in cosmetics. This limited FoV makes gameplay worse.
You log in to town in PoE, instead of your hideout, where you want to spend most of your time. The players suspect this is so you see other players in their supporter pack outfits, tempting you to do the same. This is a small annoyance, but it's there, and won't be fixed.
> It means I get to play tons of games now for free, subsidized by others.
The article does mention some tactics that would prevent this, such as a bottleneck in the game where a level is so difficult a user can't reasonably win without having to pay. With such a tactic, you would not get to completely play tons of games, and the game becomes more of a free demo where the later parts of the game are unlocked with money, but that fact is hidden behind a manipulative psychological mechanic.
There are many multiplayer games, especially on mobile, where the more you spend, the more powerful you are. One of the more infamous recent examples was Activision-Blizzard's Diablo: Immortal, where the most powerful items were locked behind either significant monetary investments (think tens to hundreds of dollars) or unfathomable amounts of grinding (literal decades for a >80% chance at some of the top-tier items, or something crazy like that). And these items were very much usable in PvP combat, where any non-paying player has about 0 chance of ever winning.
Companies are actively working to make it harder. Some games now launch without microtranscations of any kind, or with cosmetic-only ones. Then, after they gain popularity (and thus hook you in), they start adding more and more pay-to-win transactions. Sometimes it's also unclear that an item they offer for sale will make it easier to win, by hiding the advantage behind various layers of obfuscation.
Also, if you agree that these types of games are not worth playing, perhaps you also agree that not much would be lost if they were outright banned?
Eh, it depends. A lot of free games are trash from a gameplay perspective, if you spend any amount of time in them it's obvious how they're trying to milk you for money.
Free games with cosmetic mtx are usually better, but I really don't like the direction the industry is taking.
While really great fixed-price games with no mtx are still being made, it certainly feels like a dying model in the AAA world.
Same with cheap shoes - I get to buy new cheap shoes every month, subsidized by child slave labor in some far away place.
Or, perhaps I should feel some moral qualms about riding on the suffering of others. And make no mistake: most F2P games are subsidized not by some million people each spending $2 dollars to get a Candy Crush hammer or some nicer-looking toy, they are subsidized by some hundred people each spending $2000 to fuel their addiction to seeing the numbers go up.
No, we are comparing coerced "entertainment" with coerced labor.
The people who feel compelled to spend every last dollar they own on a game are not doing it for entertainment - they are victims, and something in their psyche has been successfully manipulated by the game designers.
I realized that playing free to play online shooters was detrimental to my health. Fortunately I did not fall victim to monetization and only spent what I thought to be reasonable for the quality of the game. However I would stay up all night playing, hoping for one extra loot box or one more battle pass level. I've had to force quit these types of games multiple times. I'm fortunate in the ways games affect me, but others are not so. Their finances can be ruined, their lives taken over by a psychologically damaging product. I just can't support this. People are getting hurt. It's equivalent to the addictiveness of smoking and alcohol. This can't be the way we have fun
"One more turn/match" is bad enough for sleep & life when it's not supercharged by actual gambling mechanics designed by a team of professionals to keep you playing. Yeesh.
That is important to say. I have definitely stayed up all night playing games with zero extra monetary support. Those nights are infrequent and devoted to games I absolutely enjoy. Once I get my fun from them I go back to sleeping normally. Free to play games override this sense of contentment.
I play multiple free online shooters. But I have never spent a penny on one and never plan to.
They also don't affect my health as I just play a normal and reasonable amount of time and it doesn't seem to interfere with my life or sleep or heath in any other way that I or anyone around me has seen or said.
Maybe it helps that don't care about loot boxes and battle passes and such? The battle pass (if free) levels up, but I rarely even look at what it does for me.
I just play and enjoy these games for what they are like I did 20 years ago (quake, counter strike, call of duty 1/2, bf1942, unreal tournament, etc). No unlocks, no progression, etc.
Your experience is irrelevant, since, as you stated in another comment, you play the most popular f2p games on PC, which are actually reasonably monetized. The games remain fair and monetization focuses on cosmetics and/or faster progression.
The article on the other hand explicitly talks about mobile games, which are monetized vastly differently and significantly more predatory.
Playing games with micro transactions and not paying playing it wrong. The games are specifically designed such that not paying feels bad, but paying just a little gets you to enjoy it significantly more.
If a game includes micro transactions its most important goal is to get you to spend money once, that is the most important psychological barrier to overcome. And that is why many "free to play" games are unpleasant to play without paying money.
There are a few exceptions (Dota2, csgo, path of exile and sone more) but on mobile these are exceedingly rare and drowned out by games designed to get you to spend money.
Path of Exile actually is unpleasant to play toward the endgame without specialized stash tabs, which cost money. PoE has possibly the most irritating item/inventory management of any game I've ever seen, and those purchased stash tabs make it tolerable. But the total cost of the mandatory tabs is still somewhat reasonable compared to what you can get out of the game.
At the point where you reach the stage you need to start worrying about stash space in Path of Exile you are going to be many, many hours into the game. And once you purchase the enhanced storage space it is a permanent addition to your account. Personally I don't mind this form of monetization. As far as predatory strategies goes it is on the low end.
I played Genshin Impact earlier this year I was enjoying the game until it sank in just how predatory the whole thing felt - they had timegates baked into the game to encourage you to spend money - there was a limit to how much of the in-game currency you could earn each day (it was also a very low maximum cap). You needed to spend this currency to level up items and characters etc so it placed a deliberate block on how quickly you could progress and of course you could spend money to bypass this block. Not only that but because of how little of the currency you could carry it created a massive FOMO loop where you needed to be logging in everyday to spend your allotted quota ro you would miss out on making progress on your account.
Although I try to avoid them I do feel bothersome that a large chunk of the market is taken up by games that are made with the goal of getting you to pay instead of being fun. Broken incentives.
There needs to be an investigation into psychological effects of certain mechanics of video games, most notably EOMM from EA, that's designed to get you as addicted as possible. Online/mobile games these are the wild west in psychological manipulation.
The linked youtube video from the Tribeflame guy is very enlightening. I actually appreciate the transparency even if I don't approve of their business model.
It's intriguing how Psychology 101 trivia can be deployed to such devastating effect.
Yes these companies use tricks to get you addicted to using their
low quality products for as long as possible and spending as much as possible.
But people fail to realize that the bigger issue resides in society. These
people are escaping reality to virtual spaces where they feel they have
power or have value.
Just look around you and you'll see what these people are escaping from. Churches
at every corner spewing out lies and hatred. Propaganda spewed out by governments
on the television. etc.
These people are searching for a safe space away from the cancer that is society. Prove me wrong.
When’s the last time you’ve been to a sermon? For every church I’ve been to, there’s an abundance of talk about love, acceptance, and forgiveness.
As for ‘spewing lies’, I suppose you can argue that, but I can assure you the pastor doesn’t believe he is lying. Religion is grounded in faith for a reason
> For every church I’ve been to, there’s an abundance of talk about love, acceptance, and forgiveness.
Denying that there's a problem is one of the reasons that people are being turned off from the church entirely. Yes, plenty of churches have resisted the tide of hatred and embraced inclusivity, and I commend them. But when I accompanied my father to church while visiting him, I was dismayed to find that the new pastor had laced the sermon with anti-gay fearmongering. That's not coming from nowhere, and it is abetted by people who want to believe that there is nothing amiss.
People would turn to games and other forms of escapism even if the governments were stable and honest and the churches preached only love and acceptance. Reality cannot compete with the sense of progress, exoticness, and control that games offer.
Not denial, games are huge and it really depends on the genre and platform of games you play.
e.g. I'm a big fan of JRPGs and platformers. People bemoan these days where all AAA games have microtransactions, but menawhile my current year's playlist of FF16, Tears of the Kingdom, and Hi-Fi Rush, Fire Emblem Engage, and God of War Ragnarok were all one payment, enjoyable experiences. I don't expect much different with Starfield nor Spiderman 2 later on either.
But go into the world of mobile RPGs and you'd be lucky to find a premium game. At best you get ports of older games on mobile but the rest are gacha.
Isn't everything in life gambling? You don't know will you get a job or not heading into that interview. You don't know what will that hot girl at a club say when you ask her out. Not speaking about stock market, which is an example of a rigged gambling machine, with all those insiders and lies.
Interesting observation. It reminds me of when people would point out that people who interact with computers are referred to "users" which is a term that is also used to describe drug addicts
Is this even a "video game" phenomenon? Consider things like Magic: The Gathering. Is anyone in that community spending an excessive amount of money on cards in an attempt to find the most powerful ones? Is it a problem?
Anyway, here's my understanding of the problem and the proposed fix. The F2P + Whales model is popular because games typically need players (for people to play against), and it's hard to get people to spend $60 on your game outright. People have been burned far too many times; F2P is nice because if you don't like the game, you're only out the hours that you played. That's good for the industry because instead of a fixed $60 that was sunk on a game that the player doesn't play, they can go play your game instead. The problem comes from the monetization; it depends on whales, and the whales are probably spending money on the game because of a mental illness. As a society, we want to protect people from themselves where possible. If they spend all their money on Genshin Impact, then our taxes have to pay for their food and housing. A solution would allow video game companies to continue to develop games and be compensated for them, but remove the negative effects on society that comes from unbounded purchases.
My proposed fix is for games to set an upper bound on the expected value per player. This would have be set by regulations (don't forget to adjust for inflation!), but can be above the cost of a standard video game. I'd say something like $1000/game/year. Then, it's up to the video game to track what each player spends per year. When they reach the regulatory maximum, all future unlocks are free for the rest of the year. How many users hit the limits will have to be reported to regulators on a yearly basis, as well as the average spend per user. (That way, the limits can be intelligently adjusted as the industry landscape changes.) This lets the small time players continue to ponder whether or not they want to buy something in-game, but people with a major problem will have their losses limited. Spending $1000 on a computer game is not the greatest, but an upper bound is better than no upper bound.
I also think the numbers are pretty reasonable. Take Overwatch as an example. You used to have to buy loot boxes to get cosmetics (or play a lot; I never needed to buy anything with real money). They switched to a shop + battle pass model. A battle pass is $10 for ~2.5 months, which is like $50/year. And they have weekly cosmetics you can buy for $20. That would be $1040 per year to buy all the cosmetics, if I'm right about getting new stuff every week. So, the maximum amount of money they can get from a single player (on a single account, which they theoretically enforce with SMS) is around $1100/year. (Since coins can be bought in bulk for less than $1/coin, I'm guessing that the $100 that my regulation forces you to lose out on isn't a problem at all.) This doesn't seem to be causing people too much trouble, and is obviously a viable business model because they did it on their own without being required to by regulators. (Incidentally, one of the most common player complaints on Reddit is the removal of loot boxes. But I think people are mad about having to buy everything outright instead of getting a % chance just from playing the game.
I doubt anyone liked buying 100 loot boxes for $100 when a new skin came out, and they still might not get it.)
TL;DR: I think this would be fair to both players and video game companies. Video game companies would have the opportunity to make 17x more per player than a traditional pay-before-you-play model, but no one person could be financially ruined by their desire to have every possible item in the game.
Businesses and the free market are not an inherent good; they exist for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
Gambling companies, drug dealers, and scammers share a business model that is only profitable when preying on the vulnerable (and causing more suffering in the world), yet they hide behind the excuse that it’s up to the individual to self-regulate.
The people that can self-regulate are not their target audience! Their “tactics” are engineered to take advantage of the vulnerable, and not your average person. And they get away with it because of the American self-centered individualist mindset.
Allow me to play devils advocate. If a consenting adult wants to blow their whole paycheck at the casino, who are you to stop them? The casino did not trick or coerce the gambler. The rules are known and unchanging. According to the principles of freedom, you can't interfere with what two consenting parties agree to on their own. Why do you get to insert yourself in this transaction?
First, of course the casino "tricked" them, they literally manipulate their senses (visual, audio, temporal, spatial), they are Skinner boxes controlled by the opertaor.
Second, addiction suggests lack of full consent.
And clearly there are negative externalities to such a choice. That person may have a family, other debts they don't pay, may make poorer life choices as a result of blowing their paycheck , may choose violence or drugs or self-harm ... most of which will cost taxpayers and other third parties.
The argument seems to be whether people should be free to pursue activities they enjoy even if there are inherent risks, or if people feel that they know better and should step in to protect them from their own choices. It seems similar to how people
feel about free speech.
Again, "choices" made while in an addictive state is not "your own choice" (especially as it pertains to the developing brains of minors) and couching it in those terms is not helpful.
It sounds like a person that could spend their money like that because of the right music and lighting effects should probably get help before going to a casino.
Also, just as likely this person is already abusing their body with drugs.
This planet is HARD and not every thing born on it is going to have a good time. Ask the squirrels my neighbors shoot at if life is fair.
Nobody is an island. I would guess that the vast majority of cases of "blow their whole paycheck at the casino" is going to lead to some problem that society is going to have to solve afterwards.
This is not a devils advocate because in your hypothetical you already defined the gambler was a fully consenting, which is in alignment with the persons comment you replied to.
A more accurate devils advocate could be one who suggest that forms of manipulation and coercion should be allowed because its physically possible in reality to do so.
I think it is a devils advocate because there are plenty of people who think the state should disallow gambling by consenting adults.
As for when coercion is used... I don't think it's useful to play devils advocate for coercion. That one is settled, everyone already agrees that coercion is bad.
If one thinks its okay to prey on the weak, okay, sure. But that's how you end up with a totally fucked up society where you find yourself only feeling safe within gated communities and police driving MRAPs.
Protecting the weak is both a noble and selfish endeavour: it fosters a habitat in which you and your children will enjoy living so much more. A lot of people have completely lost sight of this and now they're walled up, gunned up, copped up, screaming about crime and unemployment and bootstraps.
Nowadays an informed choice is an illusion. We are all manipulated beyond belief in all kinds of decisions.
Tell people what design choices were taken to maximize profits, what specialists were consulted, what went on behind closed doors, what is the research and statistics on gambling and addiction and how they used it to waste people's lifes and drain their money.
Tell them that and see how your "business" is doing.
Yes, we have agency. But it's not absolute. For instance, you don't have the agency not to use the toilet for days on end (or end up going somewhere less sanitary) if you're eating and drinking.
If you're on your third day without food, you don't have complete agency not to eat whatever food is put in front of you, even if there's some negative consequence to it. Yes, technically you can choose not to. But even if you know, without a doubt, that you will have another opportunity to get food before you would literally starve to death, there are biological and neurological processes at work that make it very, very, very hard to choose not to eat the food in front of you.
I have ADHD. In a very real sense, I am "addicted to doing engaging tasks". I don't always have full agency to choose to do a task that I know will be stressful and unrewarding. My brain treats it as if it is painful and dangerous.
Many games create a dopamine loop that is very hard to break out of. Many game companies have done neurological research to understand how to make that even stronger.
Agency is not a binary thing: you aren't either completely free of outside influence, or completely under the control of another. There are influences all around us all the time, some of which are heavy and obvious like near-starvation, others of which are much more subtle like advertising.
However much you may think you are immune to outside influences, you're not. None of us are. That's just an undeniable fact of how human brains work.
Choice either is or isn't an illusion. YOU presented that dichotomy. I simply took the other side of it.
I understand that we do not live in a vacuum. Yes of course we respond to stimuli, that's part of what it means to be alive. What I am advocating for is more agency in your own life.
You are the one in the drivers seat. Act like it and your life will be better. Pretend you don't have agency and your life will get worse. It's really that simple. I think that's why your original comment triggered me so much.
Well, this is the first comment I've made in this discussion, so no points for observation.
Aside from that, people like you make me sick. Acting like everyone who has an addiction, or a mental illness, just has to "act like they're in the driver's seat" and everything will be all better.
It just makes it painfully obvious how privileged you are, and how you take that privilege as proof of your rightness and completeness—and other people's lack of that privilege as proof of their inferiority.
Woah, pump the brakes there. I never passed a moral judgement. I never called anyone inferior. Believe me, I have plenty of vices.
Question. The addict you mentioned. Do you believe they more or less likely to recover if they believe they have agency rather than believing "informed choice is an illusion" as the other commenter so eloquently put it?
The question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious.
Yes, everything in your world is beautifully obvious, starkly black and white.
Choice is either fully in our hands, or fully an illusion.
We either have full agency, or no agency.
I understand full well about the importance of a growth vs entity mindset, but that's not going to stop the very powerful dopamine-seeking urge of the brain. At best it can keep you moving forward toward something that will (eg, rehab, ADHD medications, parental controls that prevent you using gambling apps on your own phone). But unless you've experienced one of these genuine mental disorders, preaching at people who do or have had them about how easy it is to get out of it, you just have to believe you can do it, is nothing but condescending bullshit. However many "vices" you have.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth and I don't believe you're arguing in good faith.
I never said it was easy, and I never even said you can get out of it at all. I simply said you're better off believing one thing over another.
>that's not going to stop the very powerful dopamine-seeking urge of the brain
This is our fundamental disagreement. Plenty of people have their urges under control. Believing you are somehow "different" or your brain is "broken" is the ultimate toxic mindset. You can't fix your life until you fix your mind
You would also need to prove to me that a deterministic universe where individuals do not have the capacity to calculate the future is somehow distinct from a non-deterministic universe from the individual's perspective
Well, an individual might have the perspective of "My life is the consecquences of my actions." or the perspective of "My life is the outcome of all physics coming before me." depending on which is which
I'd love to see that level of transparency. It don't think it would change as much as you'd hope though. Even when we're aware of the manipulation and the vulnerabilities in our brains we're still susceptible to them (some more than others). It's just how we're wired.
People literally buy packs of cigarettes with graphic pictures of bloody lungs full of tumors on them. They are not being fooled about what a cigarette does.
I think this is a sign that the matter half of mind over matter is much more powerful than people realize. For most addictive or maladaptive behaviors I think the solution is rarely additional education or being upfront about the choice that needs to be made.
Or perhaps people just have different values than you? Perhaps they are fully aware of the cancer risk and have full agency over their decisions yet still prefer to indulge themselves?
I think we're looking at the concept of "full agency" differently. In my view each person has their own level of agency, or willpower if you will, that is mostly biologically determined. I do believe that people can exercise restraint and grow their ability to self-regulate, but only to a point. And, it is quite difficult to do.
Quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things for someone to do. Some people can go cold turkey and power their way through it. However most people struggle because of their body's biochemistry. When discussing this topic I've noticed common responses along the lines of, 'that person didn't actually want to quit', or 'that person didn't want to quit strongly enough'. Yet I see it as their limited agency was unable to overcome their body's physical dependency.
At least there's been a massive decline in smokers over the years since we learned the tobacco industry was covering up the risks. Vaping set us back a bit, but plenty of kids these days grow up knowing better than to touch the stuff.
If I play chess against Carlson every move is my own choice, I'm really good at the game but he will manage to dictate the entire course of it. The only way to not lose is to not play. There are so many mind tricks available to game makers and they are so sophisticated at playing their hand they will find ways to win 1 game every 1000.
As for the random thing, it isn't random. You fit a profile to spend 1 time every 3 months and it's been 3 months since your last purchase. "Random" can be stacked against you. The next player who by age and demography shall never spend, he will get favorable "RNG". You are far behind, do you even belong in this clan?
Well, one answer could be: if we as a society look at this and decide that it does more harm than good, why allow it at all? There are many other forms of entertainment available, so what is lost by eliminating this easy-to-abuse choice?
It's similar to the reasons we chose to eliminate certain classes of drugs. They cause significantly more harm than good, so what is lost by limiting the ability to produce and sell them is less important. Of course, there are often problems with the way such bans are enforced (the disastrous effects of the war on drugs, or prohibition before it, are hard to overstate). But that doesn't mean that there aren't workable ways to regulate such things without being so vicious to the victims (as can be seen in the much more successful bans on the sale of many other substances, such as non-addictive prescription medications or weapons-grade chemicals).
Sure, when you pit investments of billions of dollars into researching the psychology of addiction and marketing against an individual's willpower, it's not technically a "forced choice".
But of course the customer's going to lose. They never had a chance to begin with. Regulate these like we do gambling. Because that's what it is under the hood.
Anyone who solves addiction would be regarded as a hero of our times. It's a huge problem across humankind.
But it's not just addiction that needs to be solved for videogames like these, it's highly targeted psychological manipulation they're employing (for example, "don't be a default"). That's not even counting the targeting of various age groups.
I agree. But it shouldn't be illegal; many legitimate businesses also follow very similar dark patterns to acquire and retain customers/users, that's a fact of doing business.
It shouldn't magically be an issue when the company provides gambling games.
Yes, we should outlaw unethical exploitative business practices just like we outlaw snake oil salesmen and ponzi schemes. There's no benefit allowing scammers to take advantage of people, especially when they're targeting children.
Coerced choices are just as insidious as forced ones. All the more so when you consider all of the research and effort into the coercion.
This isn't even getting into "nanny state" policies. It is in the best interest of everyone to not go down a lot of these "free market" directions. Folks like to bitch about regulations, but everyone wants to have safe water. This is not much different. For another very real and recent example, consider the peril of allowing the free market to ignore earthquake building codes.
I hypothesis that this position will be largely debunked as we learn more about how computer algorithms can manipulate people. Hopefully advances in scientific research will allow us to better model and categorize unethical systems.
"could the devs really be held responsible for anything" - Yes.
"It's a free market" - algorithms which can hijack the mind are a form of coercion. A free market is roughly defined as voluntary exchange without coercion. That's why we ban children from gambling.
"playing by the playbook" - society gets to define ethical constraints in which companies must comply. We learn this in business ethics. eg: Labor rights, safety, health, etc.
It seems like some people want to figure out laws for everything - literally every. last. thing. If we have enough laws there won't ever be another problem, or so it seems. Regardless of the impossibility of that outcome or even agreement on what "good" and "bad" is.
Nevertheless, I think many people can agree with you that action should be taken when one party is no longer able to make a choice. Perhaps it's fine for gamers in 1st world countries to choose how they waste their money.
What isn't okay is when people have no other choice but some shady practice like the company that employees them also setting their rent prices.
> It seems like some people want to figure out laws for everything - literally every. last. thing. If we have enough laws there won't ever be another problem, or so it seems.
Something to think about - the number of anti-corruption laws on the books of a given country/state/city is a reliable proxy for how much corruption is there. The reason being, non-corrupt jurisdictions don't need those laws.
There is a very real (but arguably small) problem with phasing out laws which have long outlived their usefulness. These occasionally get used as a sneaky way to either escape prosecution, or prosecute someone who otherwise has done nothing wrong by modern standards.
> It seems like some people want to figure out laws for everything
Mostly the things that are harmful to society. Turning children into gambling addicts seems like an easy target. Kids have no defenses against even unsophisticated manipulation and don't always know what's real money or just part of the game. I've seen adults unclear on that sometimes!
Choice is great, but it has to be a free choice. You can't have that when you're being manipulated and deceived. Forcing games that feature gambling with real money to be transparent about their odds would help.
People think that the laws make the society, not the other way around. They want people to live THEIR way, and they see the force of government as the fastest route to obedience.
I see this ad nauseum in the weekly "f*ck cars" thread. Some young ideologue wants to create their personal utopia by banning cars, parking lots and highways and building trains.
> People like their cars. I don't think they want this
"They would like subways more"
> Are you sure about that? Phoenix is geographically massive. People tow their boats, horses, and trailers to remote places here
I see people get their insecurities exploited by companies that sell Veblen goods. They use psychology tricks to make people feel inferior or part of an out-group.
Makes me sick. Its basically impossible to stop because you have a Trillion dollar corporation with psychologists, marketers, and astroturfers who's job it is to reinforce the brand with persuasive techniques.
Today all of this stuff seems fine under the guise of 'free will'.
In the long term future this will look ignorant as we find out the brain merely responds to impulses.
Classify it as gambling, tell them to apply for a license, fine them heavily every day they are not in compliance, shut them down if they fail to comply for long enough or make obvious attempts at getting around the law.
The point is that Fortnite has already instilled gambling addiction to a generation of children. Anyone interested in perpetuating this addiction (Microsoft, Sony, Sega, Epic, Apple, Google, Meta) will fight back and probably kill any attempt at regulation
The same way we can revoke NetBet's gambling license, right?
The government could easily require a gambling license (or a "random gaming" or a "f2p game" license or whatever form it takes) to be able to distribute a certain type of game which would be legally defined. Then, they could impose requirements like age checking for such games, and companies who failed to respect the requirements would lose the right to distribute these games in that country. International treaties could be used to extend this ban across a wider economic area.
Note that there already exist laws that define precisely what types of games require a gambling license, extending that to a new type of game has to be done carefully, but is definitely achievable. As just a low-effort pass at it, we could require a license for any game that includes a way for the player to pay to have some advantage in-game, where this advantage is obtained via random chance after the payment is made. An advantage could be defined as any change to the player that statistically increases the player's chances of reaching a win state.
Out of curiosity do you oppose the tobacco lawsuits and restrictions on how tobacco companies do business? It's not a forced choice, people buy tobacco of their own will and at this point everyone knows what they are getting into and the odds of bad outcomes. So can the tobacco companies really be held responsible for anything?
As long as it's not a forced choice, the user buys the drugs at their own will, knows exactly what they are getting and the odds of addiction (if the chemist clearly states that, say, there is 1/1000 of "being addicted" some random thing and the does is indeed randomized to produce that outcome 1/1000 of the time fairly), and even the outcome is not real money, could the dealers really be held responsible for anything?
It's a free market and someone did a terrible choice. Condolences to their family, yet... As a for profit company it's perfectly normal for a company to follow tactics that guide the user into spending, it's called, well, business.
So we should sue everybody? Of course not. Purdue Pharma is just playing by the playbook, which is perfectly normal for a company to maximize the profit. As long as they don't outright lie like saying you can get some addicted 1/1000000 of chance but it's actually 1/10, they should be fine.
Companies shouldn't be allowed to prey on people's addictions. I think it is pretty simple to see that certain business practices should not be allowed. Gambling is already regulated and self exclusion exists for a reason.
I see no reasons why games designed to extract wealth from gambling addicts should be freely available to anybody (including children) and why anybody should be allowed to spend any amount of money on them.
Rules against bad tactics also prevent society from learning to cope with them. The internet connects the whole world. How do you balance legislature restricting known problems from exposing people to external and unrelated threats? It's impossible to measure, for instance, Zynga's impact on cons. Perhaps just wishful thinking.
Eh, I think the concept of benefiting from being exposed is on the face not a bad one.
But this issue is, the first exposure these kids are having is gambling on steroids. Which in itself is bad, but their brains aren't fully developed.
Where if you were born in the 80's or 90's you had at least somewhat of a chance to learn while these companies tried things out. Think of it like this, we were given the opportunity to start in the baby pool - get our faces wet/etc, then the shallow end, then in the last decade we started to get to play in the diving well/deep end of the pool. Where kids now are thrust into the deep end without floaties, sink or swim, get a crushing addiction ruining your life and your family dynamic or learn how to cope with the constant pressure to spend money
This seems like the understatement of all understatements. These games are almost exactly like casino games in all ways, visually, game mechanics, incentives, except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling and therefore not regulated by gambling laws? Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.