Well, you can sue someone for anything, you just can’t win for anything. For instance, those developers could countersue because the negligence and bad parenting of those parents materially damaged the reputation of those companies.
Unfortunately the more I read the less this seems like a long overdue accounting of the video game industry’s hubris and the more it seems like someone with looking for someone to blame for their failson. These companies have literally hired psychologists to come up with ways to more effectively manipulate their players into buying their digital bullshit, and surprise surprise many of the things those psychologists have come up with are basically unregulated gambling.
This is a pretty complicated topic that touches video games, gambling sites, social media algorithms, and marketing in general. It also touches fundamental philosophical questions like the existence of free will.
We have lots of established law on which sort of “mind tricks” are fair play and which aren’t, but we have not advanced those laws to keep pace with the science. Currently, lying is really the only thing off limits and is covered by fraud statutes. We also have some limits on marketing to children. But one could argue that there are several “persuasion” tactics that can be just as effective as outright lies in manipulating the behavior of others. In fact, licensed therapists are ethically barred from using these tactics, yet we allow salesmen, marketers, etc to use them at will.
I don’t really have an opinion on this lawsuit, nor do I feel qualified to offer a solution. But let me give you an example of how the human mind works which underpins addiction to gambling.
Dopamine is a signaling molecule that regulates a lot of our reward responses. If I find honey in a honeycomb, dopamine gets released and now I am more likely to seek out honeycombs in the future. You can see how this is evolutionarily beneficial. Dopamine release reinforces behavior that increases survival. But let’s say that only about 1/3 of all honeycombs have honey. Now I have a lower chance at a reward, so does that mean the dopamine release is likewise diminished? No, the opposite is true. Dopamine release skyrockets. Evolutionarily this makes sense, we do not want to miss out on a reward simply because the probability is diminished, so the high dopamine release counterbalances the diminished probability such that reward seeking behavior is reinforced so long as the probability of reward is reasonable (it peaks at about 1/4). In fact, dopamine is released even when the honeycomb has no honey. You can draw a direct line between this physical phenomenon and gambling addiction. What people don’t appreciate is that this physiological response is very similar to addictive drugs in effectiveness. It can be hard to acknowledge that one of the reasons you are not a gambling addict is simply that you didn’t start gambling to begin with, not that you are somehow superior to those that are addicted.
We have lots of behavioral quirks like this that can be exploited. At what point does this manipulation cross the line? That is a hard question. For me, gacha games cross that line. But if we want to enact meaningful regulations we need to acknowledge that these mind exploits exist and confront the fact that free will may not be as free as we hope.
Dopamine is a signal substance that is present in several places in the brain, and animals, doing different things in different places. It is not as simple as an exploitable chemical that is enabling this or even involved in the behavioral studies targeted and implemented by gambling companies.
Many things in life is exploitative. The plastic in almost all your utility is designed to break so you have to buy new products. The insurers are purposefully hiding clauses to steal from actual people in distress, at the moment where they lost everything. Oil companies astroturf and lobby to keep the transportation and air quality at this unsustainable level just to make even more money when they already have most of the money in the world, enough to buy whole continents, just lying around in Panama.
Music, film, and other forms of art are the few places where the consumer is more actively engaged and sensitive to being exploited, yet it is also the space where that just doesn’t fly. The gambling area is the most interesting place to view these moral questions in. Why is it okay that their entire business model is to work around regulation as much as possible to reach those most vulnerable in society to take their money?
Games with exploitative practices are going hard out of fashion. The people that engage with those systems unhealthily is the same people that are gambling addicts.
To me it’s just very easy and obviously best to use policy involving support networks and social safety nets to protect people rather than using prohibitive regulation and hope that soulless corporations will ever grow artificial moral spines. These psychopathic global machines will never be human or act human ever
I have obviously simplified the role of dopamine in the brain to make it more digestible, but you are dead wrong about dopamine’s role in intermittent reward and the link to gambling addiction. It has a very strong influence on behavior. Like many aspects of human behavior, the effect is not an on-off switch to enable gambling addiction. We have lots of things going on in our head that are, at times, working against each other as far as behavior is concerned. It is more like an analog adjustment that “pushes” toward a specific behavior much harder than it otherwise would. And this effect is just as powerful as addictive chemicals in potency.
Dopamine levels can measure that effect, it is neither the cause or effect. It is like saying the salt in sea water is the active ingredient making fish live. Only certain fish, only one of the things required, and so on. “it” does not have influence on behaviour, “it” is a chemical used in many different parts of our brain, for instance used to keep us breathing among many other things also in animals and even plants, not affecting their behavior in any way.
At first I thought it had to do with lootbox mechanics and scheduling and reward system gaming, but nope, this one was straight up just “he played vidja too much and I’m afraid of him when I take away his games”
One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.
Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …
Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?
I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like.
This is the part of any online game I absolutely hate. The feeling of being even slightly beholden to someone else, like now I have to think about them having a good time too.
Games that forbid direct communication, and allow you to drop in and out of a match without hurting others feel a bit better in this respect imho
Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?
Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What you said is all true, but what I’m saying is precisely the opposite of this. I don’t like playing certain games with others because I empathise with others and want them to have a good time.
So I usually avoid games (video and otherwise) that are designed so that my continued enthusiastic participation are required for the enjoyment of others. To me, that doesn’t feel like play; it feels like work.
I’ll do it, but it’s exhausting. Maybe it’s an introvert thing, because I’ll come away from those games feeling completely drained.
Note I’m not saying those games are bad, just that i hate them. At least, if my social battery is already used up for the week (which it usually is just from regular life).
In the case of Minecraft the issues you listed are pretty much present in almost anything entertaining, video games or not, including in-person events and social functions.
As with anything moderation is key and people just need to learn not to let it control them. Some people are incapable of that though.
There are definitely certain things that game companies need to avoid doing but multiple goals, a little bit of luck, and online cooperative play is not it.
This is the same as Trump saying he was just challenging the results of the election.
Namely, nobody is trying to prosecute him for his legal challenges…and nobody is complaining that games are too entertaining. They are bold strawman arguments that most people see through immediately. “Complete bullshit” is now a common argumentative tactic.
For a long time I’ve argued that there needs to be stronger language differences between physiological addiction and psychological addiction, especially in non-academic discourse. Academic papers usually define their terms pretty well, and often use terms like “habit forming” or “dependency” instead of addiction.
A lot of work has been done to remove the stigma of addiction to shift the blame from the individual to the product, and I have no objections at all to that for physiological addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.
The problem is that zealots have co-opted that model to try to ban anything they don’t want other people to be able to enjoy. Comic books, television, videogames, marijuana, pornography- all of these have had the word “addiction” attached in news media without solid scientific evidence of physiological addiction. At the same time, you can find case studies of individuals with mental health disorders who get addicted to literally anything… I’m not saying there are not individuals who don’t have problems with these things, but a lot of the effort into stigmatizing and restricting these seems to have ulterior motives. It’s parents who don’t want to teach their children about responsibility and discipline. It’s religious zealots trying to push their worldviews on others. It’s large corporations trying to gain market share by attacking competing industries. In some cases like “sex addiction” it’s used to try to excuse or justify criminal behavior and portray abusers as victims. It’s notable that efforts usually go to just banning and shaming these things rather than helping the alleged “victims”. At the same time, efforts at harm reduction for physiological addiction seems to be constantly undermined.
With all of that being said, there is a separate issue that applies to this case- consumer protection. History has clearly demonstrated that without regulation and enforcement, corporations will engage in all manner of activity to screw over every stakeholder (consumers, vendors, employees, lenders, etc) in order to enrich ownership.
Looking at videogames in particular, there are definitely marketing practices and pricing structures that need to be banned. I just hate this idea that “videogames = bad” when the real issue is corporate greed, and a lot of these issues apply to other industries too.
In counseling, we call those process addictions. Internet gaming, sexual addictions, gambling, shopping etc. are all process addictions. Psychological addiction isn’t precise enough as any chemical addiction could have a strong psychological component as well, and almost always does because addictions create habits of use and habits are difficult to break. Also, for instance, we might have to ditch our drinking buddies when we have alcoholism because being around them triggers our urge to drink psychologically.
Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).
Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.
Yes yes yes, I’m very on board with this. I think we all know what we’re doing is wrong and manipulative on some level, but the general consciousness hasn’t caught up to recognising the tort.
It may be just be association, but I’m not a huge fan of the term “entertainment” either. It strikes the same hollow note for me as “content.”
Yes it’s an apt description for a part of an experience, but it comes so laden with its own associations and preconceptions, that it doesn’t feel useful in most contexts in which it’s deployed.
That said I have no objections to how you’ve used it in your comment.
The World Health Organization recognizes videogame addiction as a disorder, and the American Psychiatric Association says that the question of whether or not videogames can be addictive is “still being debated,” but that "early evidence suggests that videogames are one of the most addicting technologies around
Its clear that games can be addictive and the concept of „whale fishing“ is openly discussed in terms of game design. Obviously, the weakest of us in terms of addiction make the standard because its those who are harmed.
Obviously, cash shops should be banned in games immediately.
I think that there are better responses and more nuanced opinions to be considered, certainly teaching awareness and response to such stimulus is better than playing wack-a-mole with whatever people get addicted to.
The drug war demonstrated this very clearly, it’s basically impossible to ban things people want and this is even harder with internet services or downloaded software - focus on harm reduction and education for best results.
That said we should regulate against psychologically manipulative game mechanics being linked to real or purchased currencies, though education and offering alternatives must come first.
The drug war in the US - same as any other war - imo was profit seeking of the military industrial complex, incarceration industry and power shifting away from the people, nothing else.
It is not the drugs you need to outlaw, it is the living conditions. The reason nobody gets a handle on drugs is because there is homelessness and injustice galore. Countries around the world have very different approaches to this and they mostly work better than the US solution of mass incarceration.
Corporations designing things for user retention instead of fun is hard to see for people without professional background in marketing sometimes. These things are giving you a way of influencing the subconcious, avoiding the concious in the process. This manipulation is why gambling is outlawed for kids, not the money aspect.
Sure but the point it is didn’t help, likewise gambling is illegal in a lot of places and those places tend to have more of a problem with it because addicts can’t get help.
Treating game addiction generally involves people learning to recognize and respond to behavior cycles, just like with other addictions. We should take these things seriously and teach kids how to recognize and escape manipulative cycles, a lesson which would be useful their whole life in every walk of life.
I agree that it is important that addicts need help. But having unrestricted gambling is not that. Its why even in countries that allow gambling, it is highly restricted. Were moving in a circle now. Maybe we need to agree to disagree here.
That is a good point, I guess I might accept there should be carefully considered regulation in certain well defined situations - I already agree money or brought currencies shouldn’t be allowed which will limit real world damage but I don’t really see where it is needed beyond this.
You’re intentionally dumbing down the topic to make your point sound better. You’re simply describing the binary, whether addiction could be present or not. There are so many more obvious factors to consider. Addiction rate of users, personal and social impacts of that addiction, intensity of addictive behaviors, frequency of use in addicts, target demographic, marketing etc.
There’s a reason gambling has a minimum age requirement, and loot boxes are a way around that to make money by letting children gamble.
You do have a valid point there tbh, certain mechanics should be forbidden from being linked to real or purchasable money but I don’t really think they should be forbidden in general.
My argument for this is it’s too wide ranging and will limit positive elements in game design. I think it’s also important for people to be able to practice emotional response and regulation to such stimulus, if we don’t then advertisers and manipulators will walk all over us.
I agree with this, but we give them till the age of 21 to practice and develop those skills. The entire argument is not letting gaming companies introduce gambling to kids before their brains have fully developed.
They try to make balantro a 18+ game because it resembles a card game. Meanwhile fifa is for 3+ year old and it's just a card oprning game where they fish money from some sad football fans and children. I have no faith in anyone in charge of that
I have to think part of this is just all the ancient representatives we have. They’ve lived long enough to know what gambling looks like, and what good ol’ sports ball looks like, and by golly nobody can tell 'em any different!
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.
If you employ psychologists and other specialists to design something for maximum retention, you‘re not making something „entertaining“, you‘re tricking the brain into a loop.
We could discuss this endlessly but suffice it to say that there are techniques for retention that dont make an experience necessarily better but more captivating. Infinite scrolling is a very simple example. i bet some game designers could shine a pretty bright light on this if they stumble across this thread.
I could abstract this to the real world like so: two people can speak exactly the same text but one cares if their audience is getting tired and stops, the other one speaks a little louder and turns on some more lights. I‘m pretty sure you will get a significantly longer retention despite the quality being the exact same.
And this is why methods for retention need to be carefully screened and regulated.
Have to strongly disagree. Having to constantly reload entire pages of content is incredibly annoying. The only reason it makes people want to quit is because it’s annoying.
The fact that you chose that specific example, one that I think is plainly wrong, just goes to show that the discussion is not as simple as you or other people make it out to be, and that any regulation around this will most certainly ensure that future games are shittier.
I dont like you stating things as if they were an objective truth. It is your opinion that infinite scrolling is “good” or whatever you wanted to say. But it is a retention method and not just a QoL feature. There are articles explaining this and some websites have expressly disabled it because it leads to problems for people who are vulnerable.
That’s putting it a bit strongly. But it does induce people to spend money. Personally I don’t spend extra money on games. I can go to Vegas if I want to gamble for money.
It started in “free” mobile trash and is now in $70 single-player games. This shit costs almost nothing to add. The backlash doesn’t outweigh the extra money squeezed out. This is the dominant strategy. It is half the industry’s revenue. What else needs to happen, to tell you everything else is in trouble?
‘Just don’t buy it!’ I’m not, and yet: it keeps getting worse. It’s half the industry by revenue. And growing.
‘You just don’t like it!’ It monetizes human misery… inside entertainment. It makes gaming objectively worse.
‘Don’t legislate content!’ This is about the bus-i-ness mod-el. Sell whatever sex and violence you want. Just sell it.
‘There’s no exploitation here!’ Games make you value arbitrary worthless goals. That’s what makes them games.
One genius argued ‘other studios make several games over the decade these wallet-siphons have been dragged out, so they’d have to cost hundreds of dollars on release!’ Or. And this is just wild speculation about the cutting edge of computer science. Or they could make several games? Over time? And sell them for normal prices, less than a decade apart?
These people act like the just-sell-games model is unproven and hypothetical, in the same breath they insist it’s unaffected by this alternative of tricking people into tolerating endless fees. They’re not arguing. They’re just shuffling cards.
I agree fully. Its disgusting. People literally drinking the cool aid. Can I ask you something weird? I feel like making a counterweight (like political movements, eg the fedipact) would actually help.
Like a movement with a name and a written agenda so we dont have to repeat ourselves all the time. The idea is that we identify games with exploitative mechanics, dont buy them and call out the makers.
Its incredibly easy to put a link in a comment under a post hyping such a game to counter it. The more we push this, the more people will follow. We could then start sending open letters (per email) to game studios where people sign this.
We might he able to change this shit. Would you like to help? I‘d draft up something and we can make posts to gather an initial group of people.
Those are just ideas but it works wonders in other topics so why not try? Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss this.
Some of these are engineered to be addicting especially loot crates and stuff. A lot of them are just genuinely good.
They mention Minecraft, pretty sure that one was addicting since day 1 and completely unintentionally so. It’s just genuinely fun and you can spend hours in it easily. Same with Factorio.
Not exactly a new phenomenon, I’ve seen my own parents up at 4am just because they wanted to sneak a peek at the new level they reached. My mom had hand drawn and annotated the entire Zelda 1 map. For a little bit, that NES basically ran on a UPS to not lose their progress.
For some reason US parents always want to shift the blame to companies for their own failures. It’s her own damn fault she let this get out of control for 10 fucking years. Just like those that park their kids on an iPad all the time and then sues because their kid spends too much time on the iPad and cry out in the news how iPad babies are so bad. Who’s given them the damn iPad?
The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it’s sort of fine, because they don’t benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.
It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.
Concerning Minecraft, as I know the game it seems fine, playing Java on a survival server I run for friends.
However, I wonder what the experience is for the other millions of players, on Bedrock, highly popular monetized servers, etc.
What crappy casino-like techniques are used to monetize Minecraft in those contexts? I really don’t know as I’m in my own Minecraft bubble, but I’m sure there are lots of examples as it’s such a monumentally large game.
Hyper monetized minecraft servers can be reeeeeeally bad but i wouldn’t say the offline play is designed to be addicting in the way that most modern AAA games are
Fine tuning a gameplay loop so people keep playing (and maybe spending money) isn’t as far from designing something to be addicting as most people would like to think. Hence why gaming and gambling addiction dovetail so well.
I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.
Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.
Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.
I think there’s a core difference between loot boxes, which is out and out gambling, and gameplay. Both can be addictive, but they have very different consequences.
Gameplay addiction steals your time and maybe your social life, but that’s it.
Gambling addiction also steals your money. And when that’s gone, drives you to extremes trying to find more.
I know a kid that is really into multiplayer Minecraft on Xbox and he is always after his parents for more Xbox cards so he can buy different skins and texture packs. Servers like Cubecraft and The Hive must be making a lot of money.
It would help the prosecution’s case if there first was scientific evidence of there being such a thing as gaming addiction, and not just boomers arguing it because they think kids these days should go outside more.
It’s not a gaming addition that’s the problem, it’s that many of these games basically follow the same playbook that casinos do. They’re gambling disguised as a video game.
Yes, but that’s not what this story is about, and they don’t cause gaming addiction, they cause gambling addiction. You can’t get addicted to gaming itself.
You can get addicted to literally anything, but that has more to do with your personality than the vice. I knew a guy who was addicted to advil. Didn’t have chronic pain or anything, but couldn’t stop taking it.
I mean, there kinda is. Gambling addiction is a fairly well known phenomenon and while the vast majority of games aren’t purely gambling, many of them do share mechanics with gambling games. One could argue that if a game shares too many mechanics normally seen in gambling and are associated with addiction, then gambling addiction could apply.
Another thing to note is that, if I understand correctly, the modern professional definitions of “addiction” aren’t exclusive to substance abuse but include anything that can cause someone to repetitively engage in a particular behavior despite any negative effects it may have. You could argue that if someone is engaging in gaming to the detriment of their own lives, then they’re addicted. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the developers fault though, people can get addicted to just about any system that triggers some kind of reward in the brain.
However, to add onto the previous statement, it is fairly well documented that some games (World of Warcraft is an infamous example) are specifically designed to keep players engaged for as long as possible without any regard for the player’s wellbeing. If a game has a lot of systems that are designed to keep the player hooked for as long as possible then it’s reasonable to argue that the game is designed to be addictive. The catch is that you’d likely have to prove that the developers were being intentionally malicious.
So, what exactly does Minecraft (one of the primary games mentioned in the lawsuit) do to cause this? Because that seems like a major outlier compared to the other listed games.
I was speaking in a general sense. You’re right that it seems like an outlier, but it’s also possible they were playing on custom servers which could implement addictive mechanics like lootboxes. However, at the same time, it’s not the fault of Minecraft’s devs if a custom server has lootboxes. Again though, I was speaking in a general sense because I was replying to someone saying that gaming addiction is unproven boomer shit; and not about this specific case.
That’s gambling addiction, which is researched and does exist.
Gaming addiction, on the other hand, is purely speculative and often pushed by people who do not understand or like games.
While, yes, a game can have login bonuses and season passes to raise player retention, that also doesn’t become addiction, just as having a membership card with bonuses at a grocery store isn’t going to land you with a grocery addiction.
It doesn’t become gaming addiction just because the game utilizes exploitative mechanics, it becomes gambling addiction, or whatever addiction the mechanic was made to exploit. Gaming addiction in itself is as stupid of a concept as soccer addiction or book addiction.
Add comment