This has me thinking all games with loot box mechanic should be labeled 18+
Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
291–300 of 319 posts
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not as fatalistic as you suggest: that randomly offered rewards always lead to complete zombie slave status in 100% of subjects, there's no way out, and the situation is hopeless. Studies have found propensities not absolutes across all subjects and species. For example, river otters are notoriously difficult to train using operant conditioning because they are extremely curious, but also bore easily. Getting th…
> Addictions can be hard to overcome for many. I don't think this is "addiction". Its clearly operant conditioning. You aren't going to suffer physical ailments like an Alcoholic or Heroin-abuser (or heck: even a coffee-drinker) would if you "stop pushing the button" I'm pretty sure that our concepts of "addiction" (including "willpower") are mostly pseudo-science. While psychologists are carefully studying the issue…
I suggest reading "Glow Kids" [1], and then telling how different is digital addiction from any other form of physical/chemical addiction.
While there are many healthy kids and highly functioning adults who grew up with electronics and playing games (myself included), the fact is that these last 10 years have been a landmine for kids and adults alike in terms of dark patterns and psychological manipulation at scale.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Glow-Kids-Screen-Addiction-Hijacking/...
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can play without Ronaldo, though? Who pays the 10k? Is it unsuspecting kids, or rich people who don't care?
Addicted normal folks, usually. It’s really hard to tell how much you’ve spent, with all the auto purchases and currency redirects.
But don't people eventually learn their lesson? They could use prepaid credit cards, for example?
I think the market will react, for example by preferring phones and providers that prevent dirty tricks for ripping of customers.
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#294If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? As it's written in the article, problems arise for a minority of children. From the article, we know little about the background of these children and about their parents. It is possible that those children would have developed an addiction to something else if it wasn't video games loot boxes. Yes,…
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
We really should.
Generally, buying and opening a $4 magic booster pack gives you a shot at a card worth $30+ (sometimes 10x more) on the secondary market, but it's a lot more likely you get card worth $1.
This is clearly gambling.
AFAIK, Wizards only gets away with this by pleading ignorance to the secondary market value of the cards and claiming the contents of each pack is worth the same amount. To this end, they can't discuss prices internally, even though they definitely know if a card is very powerful, it is likely to be sought after and expensive.
Now a lot of you will say, "No one opens packs for cards, people just buy the cards they need." Well, that is easy to say when you have $500 dollars of disposable income to put towards a single Magic deck (which will be obsolete within the year due to rotating sets). As a child, I couldn't afford all the cards I needed for my decks, so I bought packs and cracked them. Specifically, I would buy a box of booster packs and hope to get lucky. This is what all my friends did, and AFAIK continues to be extremely common among kids.
Moreover, despite feigned ignorance, they do know the relative desirability of each card in a given set. They test very heavily internally. Therefore, they can know how many copies the market will demand, and adjust the rarities accordingly to boost sales of booster packs to the secondary market (the card sellers are also buying bulk booster packs and cracking them to get their stock).
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#295I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. Either they understand the issue but it's their profits at stake, so they'll ignore the potential problems. Or have these stealth gambling mechanisms entered the games gradually and without the industry realising that what it's doing is actually gambling and there repercussions to that.
I'll clarify a little: I know basically nothing about the games industry, so my thinking was along the lines of...
Many years ago, when social media was just starting, maybe somebody thought "Wouldn't it be cool if we could share photos so that we knew what our friends were doing." At the time they might not have forseen all the negative outcomes, the social anxiety, addiction, body dysmorphia, bullying, etc... caused by our buggy psychological processes.
In a similar way I was wondering if the first developer that thought about adapting the normal random item drop in a game and instead making it a purchasable mystery box, actually realised that this fits the definition of gambling and the myriad legal and moral problems that introduced.
In the present day I'm sure there are plenty who know exactly what they're doing or are willfully ignoring the moral issues around loot boxes. But quite often how something is today doesn't fully explain how it started.
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that for a lot of games you can't just directly purchase the cosmetic items, you have to open many loot boxes in order to try and "win" the cosmetic item that you desire.
That's a problem for the business people to figure out. Items which make it easier to play are a massive red flag to avoid a game and they're always right.
Yeah, and all it takes for the business people to figure it out is for everyone to stop buying those games and those items within the game. Unfortunately these sorts of things are put into games because they work and because the games are already popular. I mean why is EA still making yearly sports games?
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him. I have the same situation with my six-year old son and Rocket League loot boxes. He wants to spend all his limited money on them, I think he's wasting it, especially since I see the disappointment when he doesn't get the things he want, but that's a learning experience. It's worse when he once in a while gets a cool skin, becau…
"No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him." What's your model for what this is though? The GP mentions a pub fruit machine. I suppose you could make the case for it being like football stickers. As I'm writing this though, I'm not entirely sure what makes fruit machine bad , football stickers good . I would guess trading stickers is a social activity, and theres an in…
> I'm not entirely sure what makes fruit machine bad, football stickers good. I would guess trading stickers is a social activity, and theres an in build limit to how many stickers you need? Where do loot boxes come out on these measures?
Is it not simply that the fruit machines are more addictive than the sticker packs?
The reason for this I think is probably the blinking lights and sounds, live control of the interaction (transaction) and environment, versus an inert packet of cards / stickers, that can at best be extremely shiny.
Of course, games are in a position to completely control the transaction and environment for maximum addictiveness, and given the lack of regulation (vs regular gambling) and technology, they can actually go beyond what fruit machines can do (or are allowed to do) to people.
They could, in theory, also make a more "boring" loot box that doesn't quite exploit our psychology as mercilessly, just a transaction. And then it would be more like sticker albums. Provided that the game allows free trading of any items in the loot box. Because that means you actually get something in return that isn't just a consumable.
But games will inevitably choose for the exploitative option, therefore yeah, regulate the hell out of it. It's not really a huge loss to culture or anything, nor is there IMO any fundamental reason why it is okay for people to make money that way.
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him. I have the same situation with my six-year old son and Rocket League loot boxes. He wants to spend all his limited money on them, I think he's wasting it, especially since I see the disappointment when he doesn't get the things he want, but that's a learning experience. It's worse when he once in a while gets a cool skin, becau…
I think there is no fire-proof way of handling this that will work with all, or even a majority of children. (And parents.) Teach your kids to handle it, do it wisely, but if the best way is a puritan approach or a market value approach as above, I think it depends which is best. Edit: to elaborate, I think it depends on many things. One that comes to mind is, how strong is the "dopamine" effect vs vs the "oh, sudden…
> we know it's harmful when parents try to teach children to drink responsibly and "let them try in controlled conditions". It works much better to not let children drink at all.
Uhhh no we don't know that. Because it's not true at all.
When I was 16, this was the legal age to drink beer. I always thought it was a good idea to first learn what alcohol does, before you learn to drive (which is 18, where I live).
Aaanyway, at some point we did raise the legal drinking age to 18 (afaik, this was for no other particular reason than the Christian Democrats being in power).
I'm still awaiting the reports that binge drinking among kids and young adults has decreased. Because it hasn't.
Except now some kids will wait 2 years before they learn to not abuse alcohol the hard way. But they would anyway (by which I mean, some of them. I know enough people who are perfectly responsible or not drinking at all). Maybe it's a slightly tougher lesson because you're not 17 any more.
But all in all, if parents raise their kids, guide them, and can make sure their first experiences with alcohol are in fact responsible, this teaches the kid valuable lessons and it's good for them in the way they learn about alcohol and its dangers and how to deal with it, instead of having to figure it out alone, when adult. Parenting can be an extremely powerful positive force in the upbringing of a child and really I would need to see some strong evidence to the contrary.
You are talking about actual controlled conditions with the parents playing an active role. I really need to see evidence that that could possibly have any negative effect what-so-ever.
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#299Myself and my son play Apex legends. Its an online multiplayer game thats free, but you can optionally pay to unlock cosmetic items like character outfits (skins) etc. He came into some cash recently courtesy of the tooth fairy and asked if we could buy a skin for his favorite character. I said ok. However after id purchased some in game coins we realised that we couldn't actually buy the skin he wanted, instead we h…
My 13yr old son has spent $100s on fortnite, I told him he's going to regret that when he wishes he saved for a car, or something that will matter in 6months. I definitely blew my fair share on video games, but I also believe this is a generational shift. I do not believe charging $$ for "cosmetics" would have been as successful in "my day". But what does it mean?
I always wondered who are these people/kids spending money on useless cosmetics, but the other day a friend of mine told me how his 11 year old, a fine kid, spent his birthday money (about 50€) on his PlayStation. Naturally I thought he bought a new game - it's the first thing we would have done at his age whenever we had some money at hand.
However, he wasn't interested in new games at all - instead he spend that money, all of it, on Fortnite cosmetics, which seems absolutely bizarre and alien to me. Growing up with Quake, Half-Life, Deus Ex and other classics we also loved games and didn't think twice about spending money on it, but I'm sure we would have laughed away any attempt to charge for skins and random items. Of course strong modding communities helped as well.
Anyway, this insight really surprised me - I always thought it's a few whales that participate in this nonsense, but apparently it's everyone, including the otherwise sane and reasonable kid from next-door.
Re: Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most parents would be more worried about alcoholism and/or risky levels of drunkenness than total consumption.
Wouldn't alcoholism be very correlated with total consumption?
> Wouldn't alcoholism be very correlated with total consumption?
Yes, and so is the number of glass bottles they recycle. But it's the alcoholism that is a health problem to address.