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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

> There are people who will spend well over $10,000 a year to fulfill their compulsion for their "chosen" game

Undoubtedly the free marketeers will downvote, but to my mind it's simply not ethical to make money feeding off someone's addiction in that manner. At least drinking, gambling and other compulsions have heavy (but inadequate) regulation. Freemium needs some regulation too.

Buying a monthly sub, at $15 to compare with WoW, or buying the game outright is at least a fair trade. You still get addicted but your business no longer depends on bleeding people dry.

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Abusing mental illness is not taking advantage of voluntary exchange, so any reasonable free market / libertarian advocate would also not say "tough luck you have mental disease compelling you to behave irrationally".

It really is no different than how transactions done under compulsion are not fair or voluntary. If you are mentally compelled to participate through psychological manipulation, that is no different than someone pointing a gun at your head and telling you to give them your money, or using socioeconomic influential factors and market capture to force participation in unfair transactions (ie, monopolies).

I would argue very few, if any, purchases are purely rational, non-addictive, and non-manipulative.

Most products play off of our own varying degrees of "mental illness" and addiction -- be that video games, coffee, high-calorie content food, cars, clothes, big houses, and so on.

Still, I'd rather be ill with my stuff than healthy without.

So what about alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, weed, sugar, or fat? And isn't the goal of all ads psychological manipulation?

There is a difference between allowing the temptation, and exploiting psychological conditioning.

I'd definitely consider arguments that western culture has in many ways developed the advertising industry as a means of systemic psychological manipulation. There are a lot of people who make irrational purchasing decisions based on what is on the TV, and there is some degree of exploitation in that behavior.

Practically speaking we want to think that anyone over the age of 18 is a competent rational capable human adult with acceptable brain chemistry, but in practice I'd imagine very few people are perfectly healthy mentally, it is just the degree to which mental illness is apparent. Look at how common depression is, or how diagnostic rates for Autism and ADHD have risen dramatically in the last three decades. That is not to say we have more mentally ill people today, we are just paying more attention to individual psychological profile to deduce that there is much more nuance to mental health than just being insane or not.

I'm pretty disgusted with the bulk of the industry and their attitude. The company I was associated with, I felt, was doing more harm than good to the world by promoting a false set of idealistic beauty standards, promoting obsessive behavior, promoting competition based on physical attraction, etc.

I'm all for free markets but I'm not dogmatic in my support, the people that pay money for freemium games are going to be at a net worse position in life. There is an argument about free choice, whether the person would engage in another 'destructive' behavior, etc. but in the end I just felt the industry was focusing on being hyper-exploitive.

Thats the point, people choose what to do.

You, for example, have choosen not to work for people anymore who exploit others. Others maybe don't have your morale standards, and others choose to get exploited. Thats their way of life, not yours. You don't have to be part of things you don't want.

Thats what I think of free markets.

Interesting how you value money over time. WoW has bleed millions of gamer of their time, making them compulsively addicted, such as using incentives to make them log in every day (for "dallies" and other rewards). These gamers felt compelled/required to devote time to the game. Blizzard knew that they had to get as many subscribers as possible and keep them for as long as possible.

The problem with that sentiment is where do you draw the line between someone who really loves to play certain types of games and someone who has some sort of mental problem?

Your "being bled dry" is the other person's "fun game I throw a few bucks at every now and then". What gives you (collective, not anexprogrammer) the moral authority to determine who should be playing what in what way?

And then advocating for government intervention on top of it?

This seems like legislating personal preference to me. Most of the moralistic arguments about game design tropes were already tried in the 80s-90s when the arcade was still a thing, and IMO, they're just as busted now because we're not talking about gambling.

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