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Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

positech.co.uk

111–120 of 245 posts

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#111
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it OK for bars or clubs to offer a happy hour early in the evening to get patrons going, then turn up the heat and make it hard to find water so those patrons keep ordering more drinks and getting more and more drunk throughout the evening? You honestly believe we need a law against this? God forbid a restaurant owner offer any promotion whatsoever.

(Note that I am not the person you replied to.) I do honestly feel that there should be a law against that in the society which I live in, since I find such actions taken by the restaurant owner to be manipulative and purposefully deceptive (excuse me for not coming up with better terms, I am not a native English speaker), knowing that many people -- not all of them, but many -- thus end up drinking far more than the…

I am not arguing for giving up the notion of personal responsibility, but

But you are.

When you get to micromanaging such trivialities, there's no limit what a planner's mentality will settle on next. A ban on restaurants that offer salty free lunches with every purchase of beer because they're relying on the customer to make up for it by ordering drinks.

It is absolutely not fraud. A happy hour was advertised, and the contract was heeded.

The property owner may deliberately arrange the environment so as to maximize an expected consumer end. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Supermarkets are architected to encourage higher shopping. Clothing retailers will arrange their luxurious brands to have a higher aesthetic appeal inside their stores.

Taking your logic of needing to regulate any "misleading action" to its conclusion will only entail the abolition of the market economy. There's no way around this. Anything and everything can be shoehorned under such flimsy logic.

(Moreover, expecting that consumers are morons who cannot regulate their own behavior will generally lead to policymakers drafting proposals that assume as such and end up fulfilling the prophecy on their own, since the resulting bureaucracy will be internalized by consumers in their expectations.)

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at someone who spent $30k on ships in Star Citizen. http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on-sta... He seems like a reasonable person to me. He's not in financial ruin. He doesn't seem to regret his purchase. He's just putting money into his hobby, the same way a different 40 year old would buy an "unproductive" boat or an "unproductive" Rolex.

He is not putting money into his hobby. If you buy $30k worth of golf clubs, you have $30k worth of golf clubs. If you put $30k into a kickstarter project for some digital assets exclusively in a piece of software that isn't even written yet, you don't own that. That's not putting $30k into a hobby, but giving $30k to someone without even a contractual obligation for delivery. It's exactly why the SEC won't let non-a…

There is at least an implied contract on Kickstarter. They say as much in their TOS:

https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#113
That this person is putatively in the games industry does not bolster the point of the article, so I have to assume that used as a manipulative aid to help sell the idea therein. Mildly ironic, I suppose, but it's okay to manipulate when you are doing "the right thing" in some minds.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#114

> "We need to reign this stuff in. Its not just psychological warfare, but warfare where you, the customer, are woefully outgunned, and losing. Some people are losing catastrophically." I strongly disagree with this statement. I am very aware of the psychology behind marketing and advertising, and anyone with half an interest in it has probably read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders , which was released, oh, 58 y…

> how would one even decide where the line between manipulative consumption and social signaling is?

The mean amount of money spent and time played per week per user would be a good place to start. If any user is spending more than $40 USD/week on a game or more than 20 hours/week playing a game, it's a problem.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#115
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. When HD advertises to you, you buy a bike and you're done. And you have an actual, existent bike. And you could sell it later should you feel like you made a mistake. With whales, they spend and spend and spend - way more than a Harley costs them. And what do they end up with? Sweet FA.

Does that mean the fundamental problem is the inability to resell in-game purchases?

That, and if the game closes up for whatever reason (no longer making money, whatever), all of your investment into it can quickly vanish into literally nothing.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#116
I'm glad someone called out this "addicting" as a positive adjective nonsense. First of all, the word is "addictive". Second, how is this a positive for the user?

I got addicted to Clash of Clans after starting to play for market research. I spent $400. It didn't hurt me financially, but it was very interesting to observe myself engaging in classic addict behaviour.

"I can buy another gem pack because I'll just come in by transit tomorrow, so I won't have to pay for parking."

"If I bring my lunch tomorrow, then that will cancel this other item."

... of course, knowing that I wouldn't do any of these things...

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#117

> "We need to reign this stuff in. Its not just psychological warfare, but warfare where you, the customer, are woefully outgunned, and losing. Some people are losing catastrophically." I strongly disagree with this statement. I am very aware of the psychology behind marketing and advertising, and anyone with half an interest in it has probably read Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders , which was released, oh, 58 y…

>Some people have better impulse control than others; it's not the state's job to regulate the impulses of their populaces, or regulate systems that know how to manipulate them. Individual freedom part of me would agree but in reality governments do this all the time and I can't say it's all bad either. A good example is drug control - while it's currently taken to the extreme there's no doubt in my mind that fully l…

I'm amazed you're the first (or highest rated) one to mention addictive drug control. It's a pretty clear analogy.

And I think the point is more directly made by the effect on the individual themselves. The reason unreasonably addictive drugs should be illegal isn't to save me the safety issues of addicts: it's the respect the addict's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - qualities which are substantially helped by not having your behavior driven by feeding your addiction.

Ironically, side note I researched before this comment: we've apparently only recently (mid-70s) returned to the early 1900s/pre-Prohibition levels of ethanol consumption per capita. https://prohibition.osu.edu/brewing/consumption

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#119

As someone who worked in the customer-facing ends of the gambling industry (hell, I haven't been able to totally let go, I just ordered a true casino machine for my home... for reverse engineering and pentesting)... that online shit is far worse than "offline" gambling. With gambling offline, well you have to leave your house, gonna dress up, and people will notice if you fuck up your life by gambling every day. Also…

Yes, and it's amazing how blind freemium game developers are to this. I'm a game developer, and I've done well off of freemium games, but no one wants to have this conversation.

Re: Hi, I’m from the games industry. Governments, please stop us

#120

This post is a bit rambly and doesn't make its case particularly well. I think the case is better made implicitly by reviews of games like Game of War: Fire Age. They are designed to be addictive and get players to spend literally thousands of pounds (or dollars) on microtransactions. They have ruined lives. Particular attention should be paid to games which advertise microtransactions to children.

I agree. It starts with Star Citizen but then moves to "Free-to-Play" games and does a drive-by on sexism in advertising.

I think all of those are different things.

I don't see how people spending tons of money on a game that hasn't been released yet has anything to do with using sex to sell or with trying to get people to spend more money than they should. And it is very light on evidence. It mentions studies and a story that mentions something but doesn't give any evidence that this is a big problem.

Maybe I'm just cranky from grading too many papers but when I read something that makes lots of claims with no citations, I find it hard to believe.

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