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Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

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Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#171

Post by barnabee »

hx8 wrote: post #164
hofrogs wrote: post #98

"Lootboxes", "cases", "packs" and other chance-based systems that involve spending real money or an in-game currency that could be obtained by spending real money should be banned completely, all of those systems exploit brain vulnerabilities for profit. Also, prediction markets, sports betting, online casinos, shitcoin exchanges.

It's interesting that your list skews entirely digital, and that more physical games of chance like lotteries and blackjack are not on the list. Do you see them as fundamentally different?

Not OP but I would certainly ban adding gambling "features" to other products or services. Either you can be a gambling or betting shop/platform (regulated and restricted to adults) or something else, but not both.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#172

Post by nephihaha »

NeutralForest wrote: post #165
nephihaha wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll just end up creating a black market (high tax has resulted in 1/3 of cigarettes being illegal in the UK) and home production (since anyone can make their own alcohol easily)

Tax rates have been going up on alcohol at least, just boil the frog.

And what does that achieve? It makes the poor poorer. The alcoholics will still drink but their families will have less.

What you do do is create a black market, because people will want to buy it cheaper elsewhere. That puts money into the hands of criminals.

Anyone can make alcohol unlike most drugs. It's remarkably easy to make. You just need patience, and raw materials: potatoes, fruit or whatever. You can make it in your back room. The problem is that it is not high quality, and can contain chemicals which can make you drunk.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#173

Post by tialaramex »

sjoedev wrote: post #166
hx8 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that your list skews entirely digital, and that more physical games of chance like lotteries and blackjack are not on the list. Do you see them as fundamentally different?

I think online/digital gambling is worse because it follows you everywhere. I don’t like any form of gambling, but at least with casinos there’s some escape in not physically being there. It’s also harder to enforce age requirements online.

They all have apps these days, and just like a local bookmaker might "accidentally" remove your name from their legally required self-ban list it's very common that a "bug" in your phone app means you can keep gambling after saying you want to stop.

"Mistakes" in the controlling party's favour are extremely common in such industries. Fluke 100-1 sport betting win? Oops we forget to fill out that mandatory anti-fraud paperwork, bet is off. Lost that 3-2 bet that the favourite would place in a horse race but actually you didn't show proper ID? Sorry that's your problem, we're keeping the money

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#174

Post by watwut »

erxam wrote: post #13

Okay? How will this actually change anything? I don't think I have ever paid attention to a single age rating in my entire life. Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways? Very spiritually European move. What regulators should do is focus on easily applicable percentage-based fines. Make sure it's not just another line item.

Yes parents I know use them. Including me. I check labels, apply my own opinions on what matters and what does not and decide what I allow.

I am not interested in playing hours of videogames to be able to decide. Not in googling through ai-slop and idiotic gamer videos to find out what is in.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#175

Post by duskdozer »

technothrasher wrote: post #125
hofrogs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thrill rides? Probably not, I don't think there are many people having their life ruined by their addiction to amusement parks. Alcoholic drinks? History of bans like that suggests that it's not a good idea. However that doesn't mean that nothing can be done. Addictions to alcohol, drugs, smoking, gambling damage both the person suffering from them and the friends/loved ones around that person. It is most likely impo…

Hmm, so why do your perfectly reasonable thoughts on how to reduce alcohol abuse in light of not being able to simply ban it not apply to loot boxes as well? How is it different such that "completely banning", as you suggested, is a good idea there where it isn't for alcohol, drugs, smoking, and gambling (of which loot boxes are clearly a subcategory)?

A difference is that Prohibition was also criminalizing individual production and personal use, while banning lootboxes and the like is just limiting corporate use as a sales and marketing tactic. Similar to how cigarette ads were banned on TV in the US in 1970, but you can still buy and smoke cigarettes today.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#177

Post by amiga386 »

xg15 wrote: post #140
amiga386 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it does. Only Sith deal in absolutes. You can say the same about, let's say alcohol. For most it's an entertaining social lubricant. For a much smaller number, it leads them to wreck and ruin. Is it therefore a wicked evil sin that no God-fearing person should engage in, and I'm going to ban it to protect the morality of society? The USA tried that out with Prohibition, and only after years of misery and gangste…

That's all well and good, but then why introduce gambling-like mechanisms (with real money) in new areas where people have not been looking for them, like lootboxes in games or randomized trading cards? It's a bit as if ice cream shops suddenly decided "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put alcohol into most of our sorts? It's just tiny amounts and alcohol-laced sweets have a long history already, so what's the harm?"

My favourite ice-cream is rum and raisin, by the way...

I guess I'd say the thing to do is to measure harms with direct evidence (e.g. this many people get addicted to lootboxes, they spend this much of their money, etc.) rather than seek an imperfect analogy with an existing but different harm. Lootboxes and fake FOMO are both techniques used by video game producers to fatten their bottom lines by psychologically manipulating their playerbase, let's get that regulated and set controls on it (audience, age limits, frequency, openness, etc.) rather than argue where it lies in the games-of-chance spectrum.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#178

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #150
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we outlaw them to disproportionately put minorities in jail… I would rather not give the government more power.

Too much thumos , not enough nous in this conversation... 1. Alcohol may be consumed in moderation for enjoyment with no frustrating effect on our rational faculties. Even the bad effects on health are often overblown. They tend to be chronic and rooted in habitual consumption. Save for people with a predisposition for alcoholism, people generally do not experience compulsive desires for alcohol. 2. Gambling isn't co…

> While alcohol can be used that way, it is not designed for that purpose

Alcohol was not designed. However, marketing campaigns for alcoholic beverages are very much designed. Though I agree that prohibition against drinking won't ever work and would never support it, I do think that prohibition against alcohol advertising and marketing would be a beneficial to society. You are allowed to drink, but you can't try and manipulate people into drinking.

> I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.

The addictive potential of alcohol is higher because it is directly chemically affecting the brain. It also causes physical dependencies as well as mental ones. These two often work together and combined are more powerful then the sum of the parts. What is also true is that people who have a genetic propensity for addiction are both more likely then others to become addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or any other usual suspects. Loot boxes are ultimately causing the most damage to the same population subset as alcohol is.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#179

Post by rincebrain »

saulapremium wrote: post #78
rincebrain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Opinions my own, naturally.) I think they're right, really. Obviously you need to require enough friction that the experiences are comparable (e.g. no letting someone impulse buy 100 times in half a second without having to re-type their "I am an adult" payment info or something analogous, possibly just a hard ceiling for everyone), but I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge, and you c…

>I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge Why not, though? Is this a general stance against banning anything , or do you think loot boxes, video games and/or kids are different?

I do, generally, think that banning (or legalizing) things in their entirety is often ineffective, and if you just make them entirely and equally illegal/legal you no longer have any levers to stop people making them as toxic as possible. (Look at how insanely pinpoint-targeted at addiction exploitation sports betting has become in the US, for example.)

In this specific case, it's because I don't think you can whack-a-mole things that tickle the addictive feedback loops in people's brains everywhere faster than people can engineer their ways around it or find new ways to exploit things that do those same things without being caught in the laws, so I think you need to both:

- raise the cost of making it too painful for people who aren't self-moderating enough and keep the most lethal edges off it (e.g. ceilings on how much you can spend, making you have to take active action that takes more than a few seconds so you can't impulse-click and blow a fortune on One More Hit, no feedback mechanisms that incentivize spending more when you already spent a lot...)

- limit how harmful it can be to people who are too young and haven't yet learned what it does to them and that they need to be careful (e.g. use something like having access to a credit card you can input on request as a proxy for verifying you're an adult, and try to ensure any of the foam padded Kid Slot Machines(tm) can't be traded in a useful fashion for cash or paid for with cash, even with verification)

In some sense, the original video games with this kind of feedback loop were arcade games - you got a variable amount of reward for your input token, and they had to give you enough to convince you to keep doing it. Microtransactions with lootboxes are just that feedback loop taken to the logical limit, but I don't necessarily think people who hate microtransactions would consider games like that as a similar evil, precisely because, like physical blind boxes, the quantization and scale is so much smaller, and it's so much higher friction to blow a fortune on it.

Re: Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe

#180

Post by estimator7292 »

hx8 wrote: post #164
hofrogs wrote: post #98

"Lootboxes", "cases", "packs" and other chance-based systems that involve spending real money or an in-game currency that could be obtained by spending real money should be banned completely, all of those systems exploit brain vulnerabilities for profit. Also, prediction markets, sports betting, online casinos, shitcoin exchanges.

It's interesting that your list skews entirely digital, and that more physical games of chance like lotteries and blackjack are not on the list. Do you see them as fundamentally different?

I think it's interesting that you're refusing to engage with the topic at hand and trying to distract with whataboutism.

You may be shocked and horrified to learn that two things can be bad at the same time, even if we only talk about one.

GP's comments trend digital because we're talking about digital games. GP is on-topic, you are trying to derail and delegetimize the conversation.

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