'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

Gambling requires you to win something of value. Pinball machines only give you free games and are not giving something of value. However some countries like the Netherlands have a definition that includes many of these video games.

I don't understand why people don't learn the rules of the game called "business" at least a little bit. If you have the right to cancel something within 14 days there are rules to how to do this. Don't expect cooperation from the other side of the table. Just follow the rules.

I'm quite sure the rules say something like this, but I'm not a lawyer and have not looked it up again:

1. Find out the business address of that company, preferably one in your country if there are multiple options.

2. Write a letter in Word where you say you want to revert the orders .

3. Print, sign, then photograph that letter with your phone (which adds a date to the photo).

4. Go to your town's post office and tell them you want to send this letter in a way that the receiver needs to sign for that and you want to get back that signature.

5. Wait for the signature.

6. If nothing happens besides the signature, write them an email adding all the details and the photos of the signature and the letter.

7. If still nothing happens on your bank account, and the sum is over 500€ or similar go with all the documents to a court and request they help you get the money back. Not sure if other countries but in my country for 45€ they will send a specially colored letter to the company claiming the payment and threatening a lawsuit.

8. Check the times here, but when they are up and nothing happened go with all these things to a lawyer and he will probably sue for you. In most countries losing such a lawsuit is path that might end up bringing the CEO into jail (not directly, but it certainly is on the table as possibility at this point), so the chances are super high that at this point they will send the money or declare bankruptcy. In case of bankruptcy your lawyer knows how to continue.

There's no need for reminders, warnings, etc. All that might end up you being behind your deadlines. Print a paper letter, sign it, and send it in a way that can prove reception.

A professional company with good intent will also not feel threatened by you doing the right thing according to law. So don't be afraid to be perceived as unfriendly. The only people who will claim unfriendliness here either have no idea what they are doing or are using your shame against you in the hopes that you do mistakes.

Hear hear.

I’m madaxe. I’m an addict.

I wasted 18 months of university on an MMO, 15 years ago. Cost me my social life, my girlfriend, and I found myself on academic probation.

It was absolutely insidious. I only found my way out of it by becoming a GM and then banning my own account, because even though I’d made the decision I wanted to stop, I just kept finding myself downloading and installing the client, yet again. It worked, I completed my degree, rekindled friendships. I did relapse about four years later while working a shitty boring QA job, and decided to treat the root cause, which was the shitty job, and went and started a business - and then didn’t game at all for nearly a decade.

Weirdly, my addiction and my physical running away from the environment that fostered it lead to much of the success that I have enjoyed since. It made things so intolerably bad that a ground change was mandatory.

I game again now, but it’s now on the order of about 5 hours a week on average - I’ll still occasionally spend a sleepless weekend playing something, but then I’ll go a month without. I like finite games - some adventure with an enthralling plot, and when it’s over, it’s over - or grand strategy like civ, where you master the game and move on - and frankly I find a three day deity match gruelling enough that it’ll be three months or more before I get the itch again.

I’ll never touch an MMO again - they are almost perfect and infinite skinner boxes.

Facebook.

I think a much closer and more appropriate analogy is gambling. They're both forms of games and are both engineered to engage the player in similar ways. Their monetisation and marketing strategies are also converging rapidly. Buying gems and coins in a mobile game is largely indistinguishable in my mind from buying tokens for a slot machine.

The problem is games are not regulated in the way that slot machines and fixed odds betting machines are. As a result they are free to implement tactics that would be illegal in a gambling machine. For example the way some mobile games like Candy Crush calibrate the game difficulty to match the playing style of the player and adjust the odds of winning to entice them into buying coins to 'take advantage' of some perceived opportunity that the game then adjusts itself to take away from you.

I'm not sure how to address this though. How can we appropriately regulate Candy Crush, without unintended consequences for Kerbal Space Program fro example? I'm not even necessarily against pay-to-play, after all it's just an extension of the model for coin operated arcade games.

It might be controversial to suggest this, but it seems like some people actively seek out addiction. Maybe they are missing something in their lives and see an addiction as filling it somehow. Maybe we all do that in some from or other, we just call it engagement.