If Videogames and Apps Are Addictive, Should Designers Worry about Liability?

All things that feel good and releases dopamine ≠ equally addictive.

Video games have reached levels of immersion higher than other forms of entertainment, add real $ loot boxes to that and it's clear publishers should worry about this, smart ones already are - Valve tracks Anti_Addiction_Rating for users to notify/suggest they play within healthy limits: https://www.pcgamesn.com/dota-2/dota-2-anti-addiction.

Anything that gives you positive feedback can be addictive.

People get addicted to exercising to the point it can harm them. Yet Nike shouldn't be liable if someone runs themselves into the ground.

So I have an honest naive question. Simply put, why are people playing Pay to Win games to begin with?

I genuinely don’t understand where the dopamine release is? That’s what keeps people coming back, right? And is the dopamine release for some reason stronger than non-Pay to Win? Because if it’s not stronger, why do they play that rather than a flat cost game? Sunk costs? Trying to keep up with friends?

I game a ton, but have never given such a game more than a couple hours, and far more rarely money because I simply wasn’t having fun...

I’m not being judgmental, I’m trying to understand because I don’t. I’m assuredly the weird one.

Today, no.

Once health insurance companies start paying for video game addiction treatment, yes.

I don't understand what makes people disdain freedom so much that they'll deem this sort of state overreach as reasonable.

Holding Tobacco producers liable is paternalist & wrong, this is almost totalitarian.

I don't see much discussion of the actual contents of the article on this thread, but in case anyone else read it, this passage stuck out to me:

> Gambling is a highly regulated industry. For example, in Indiana, regulatory agencies have set up voluntary exclusion programs whereby “any person may make a request to have his or her name placed on a voluntary exclusion list,” and casinos “must have procedures by which excluded individuals are not allowed to gamble.” Courts in Indiana and other states agree where such exclusionary programs are in place, casinos are only obliged to exclude compulsive gamblers who self-identify through the programs. Casinos are not obliged to “refuse service to pathological gamblers who [do] not self-identify.”

I generally fall pretty heavily on the "let people make their own choices" side of the spectrum[1], but I'm always open to the argument that the individual isn't the most effective lever with which to minimize harm. The above is the kind of regulatory step that seems like it could do a lot of good while avoiding a lot of the pitfalls of the approaches on both extremes.

There are some important finicky details though: how is removal from the list handled, if allowed at all? Who bears the liability if the exclusion list is violated, the provider or the user (in the form of criminal penalties, as with voluntary gambling exclusion in some states)? If the latter, is this likely to be run into the same pitfalls as criminalizing drug addiction? In the case of videogames, is it a reasonable burden to make the user provide ID (privacy implications and all), and if not, how do you prevent them from setting up a new email address to circumvent their voluntary exclusion?

This is just one of the potential solutions, which IMO illustrates that there's a lot more nuance to the discussion than many here are approaching it with, and a lot more potential for out-of-the-box solutions, instead of simply having to resort to pitting the values of personal responsibility and paternalism directly against each other.

[1] For example, responsible use of certain illegal or formerly-illegal drugs is as much (or more) an enriching part of my life as the regular consumption of the legal drug known as alcohol is for most people. Thank god I live somewhere that's civilized enough to avoid a heavily-enforced punitive approach to drug use and generally fosters a treatment-oriented approach to addictions.

I was an alcoholic for over a decade before I found my recovery.

But I couldn't turn around and tell a distilleryman that he has to brew his liquor a certain way.

Maybe the world would be a better place without booze. I would've had an easier childhood, maybe. I don't think addiction is necessarily the fault of production.

There are certain exceptions and scenarios, like cigarette marketing to minors, marketing in lower income neighborhoods on purpose, stuff like that.

Regulation is and always will be a very slippery slope. Even a small step down the slope can eventually compose into cataclysmic effects. It also makes it easier for regulatory bodies to make their case fallaciously once the first steps are taken. "You trust us with your credit card number, why not give us your location info now?"

I'm rambling, but the video game industry could be irrevocably injured by trying to regulate addictive content. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but we should aim for fairness when possible, I think.

Maybe awareness for individuals that are already more vulnerable to addictive behaviors? Like a surgeon general warning or something.

Of course.

People can get addicted to anything. But when a company makes a product that they know is not only addictive but harmful. When they go out of their way to make the product more addictive without any regard for the harm being done. When they go out of their way to specifically target those who are the most addicted. Well, then you run into some very clear-cut ethics problems.

And that's the state we are in right now with a sizeable number of games. Certainly far from all, but those who are right now being the most exploitative are probably going to face a lot of scrutiny in the next several years.

It's too bad our society has moved away from the person who chose to do something bad being liable, towards blaming people around them:

1. bartenders are at fault for the drunken actions performed by people who bought the booze

2. Seattle just passed an ordinance where gun owners are liable for gun crimes committed by people who steal those guns

3. Employers are liable for crimes committed by employees

4. Homeowners are liable if people do stupid things and hurt themselves on the homeowner's property

5. Drug makers are liable for drug users' actions

etc.

Should we start holding food chemists accountable for weight gain and obesity?

Rhetorical question aside, there's a lot of stimuli competing for our attention in any given day. Since we've created this brave new world, I think it makes sense to educate people growing in this society to combat that. If you're into that sort of thing. I'd liken measures against this to soda taxes and cancer photos on cigarettes.

I think education is fine, but anything that impedes on personal agency is annoying. I understand addiction ruins lives. But imposing blanket measures, like soda taxes or whatever, seems like punishing others because of someone else.

There are two newer, disheartening trends in game development that feed on people’s enjoyment of games: pay-to-win and forever-early-access. Both are marketed as a way to support the game’s development, and in some cases that may be true. If it’s just cosmetics that are on sale (no loot boxes) or the developer is genuinely taking community feedback then both are bearable evils, but so often players are taken for a ride with the cost being their money, time and mental well-being. Companies should absolutely be held accountable for these practises, particularly because it’s often children and adolescents who are the victims.

Good timing!

I would not say that apps are addictive. Some of them are be but not all.

Yesterday I was running a thought exercises around what makes Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so popular and why people keep flocking there despite their negatives - I certainly don't understand it. I reached to several conclusion but the most important one was that just like cigarettes there must be an addictive element that makes it into a rewarding experience for many people. Think of the likes count, sharing count, comments and even scrolling the news feed - you get a small doze of dopamine by just doing things and I would imagine, eventually it gets so addictive that you loose perception of time and you just get stuck in.

I would not say that the Web is addictive in general. There are some places which could turn into an addiction but I highly doubt anyone would get addicted to checking the forecast or searching with Google. These are very popular utility services. The same applies with many apps and games which provide utility: spotify, iTunes, notes recording, etc. But some apps are specifically exploiting our addictive nature. Social networks which rank the top lists are good example. Even this forum can be addictive in a sense that although it provides a function it also has the concept of ratings through the karma scores. It is gamified and that is what makes it addictive.

The sad fact is that many people in this forum are in fact in the business of making people addicted. We measure success in terms of how well and for how long we capture the customer's attention and if that has something to do with emotional responses I would say it is nothing but machine for making people addicted. Why would anyone spend 2-3 hours a day on Facebook or Instagram? What function these platforms provide that is useful in day-to-day life? Yes they are useful to connect with friends but this is not what they are used for mostly. You will put effort into making great posts and shares and the reward is the likes which I am sure is as addictive experience as it gets.

So worrying about getting customers addicted to your app or game is counter to the goal of making the same app or game very popular and I will say that it is also business prohibitive. You could however concentrate on ideas that are utilities (all of SaaS) but you should also be aware that you will probably have much tougher time ahead to make your idea into a successful venture.

I'd be worried if I thought video games were substantively more addictive than TV is, for example, I dont think it is.

Everything is addictive, they should look into junk food / sugar for once.

I think a similar system to what the article mentioned in Indiana where you can opt out, or more ideally set a time limit will become the norm sometime in the 20s

I mean, if they did, think about how much greater the risk would be for people like PornHub.

That depends on how much the industry can spend on lobbying.

There are way too many video games out there that are essentially casinos. In fact, I'd say some of those games are even worse than casinos. At least in casinos you have the chance to actually win some money. Some mobile games I've played were literal spending competitions between players, and we got essentially nothing for it. After a while it's not even fun anymore but it's pretty hard to quit because my friends and me invested so much time and money into it.

The mechanics were well disguised and hidden behind several levels of indirection. There's a game component which gives you resources and generally improves your standing in the game's community. You can't just play the actual game though; you need "stamina" to play, which is just a fancy way to describe a timer. If you run out of stamina, you can't play again until it regenerates. One of the reasons this timer exists is to rate limit the game. Your progression in the game can only happen at the fixed rate dictated by the timer. The timer resets every 8 hours or so and this acts as negative reinforcement, creating a log-in habit: people feel like they're losing progress and falling behind if they don't log in 3 times a day. The timer should always be running to ensure maximum gains; every second it sits at 0 is a second wasted. Lots of people wake up at 2 AM just to do some game tasks that became available because the timer reset. It's insane.

What makes it a spending competition is the fact you can pay to reset the timer. This means non-paying customers are stuck with a fixed progress rate while the whales pay to amass ridiculous amounts of resources quickly. The casual players who don't pay money only have a chance in the beginning. They simply can't compete over the long term so they quit the game. This leads to a constantly decreasing player base.

The game operators usually create hundreds of different servers. They stabilize over the long term, with small groups of powerful players dominating it. Eventually, they merge stable servers in order to make players compete with each other for dominance once more. The more merges a server's been subjected to, the harder it is to compete with the other top players and the more money you must spend just to keep up. You might have been a top player in the original server, but you fall by hundreds of positions after a merge, and you're pretty much forgotten after two merges. Unless you start spending increasingly ridiculous amounts of money, of course.

If they just merged old servers, eventually there'd be only one remaining. That's why they create at least two new servers at the same time. It forms a beautiful cycle. It would be perfect if every server started off with the same amount of players every time, but games lose popularity over time. Eventually, it will die.

I once thought the traditional PC/console video games industry would never design money traps like these. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is slowly becoming the norm in online games. They're not as extreme as the mobile game I described above, but these ideas do seem to be slowly creeping into modern online games. If this is what the future of video games looks like, I won't shed any tears when governments regulate it.

Yes.

Anyone who does anything sufficiently valuable to society should worry about liability. Addictive or not, tons of value = tons of $$ = tons of envy = tons of political points to be had by taking you down a peg.