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Comment by dna113 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who spent much their teens logged into World of Warcraft, I wish people would be a bit more open minded about this.

Someone like Prince Harry saying that Fortnite is a waste of time, is seriously damaging to the image someone might have of themselves playing it. I doubt Prince Harry has got the first clue, and his opinion of it being a waste of time is totally subjective.

It took me probably a decade until I realized that the large chunk of my teens I spent logged in to World of Warcraft were not a blemish on my life. The game had so much depth, it was incredibly challenging, and the social aspect was a huge part of it. My family and our societies negative view of the game encouraged a negative view of myself, seeing as I enjoyed it so much.

Of course you should encourage variety, but let your kid play the fuckin game!

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Having spent a ton of my teens playing online games, I agree with you to a point.

It’s also a little dismissive to assume that this is just like every other game. There are so many psychological tricks going on to add a “feeder pellet” aspect to some games today that they are truly designed to be addictive. Games with in app purchases or ads, are usually built for it. Games that have timed reward systems to incentivize you to keep coming back at that same time every day are also part of it. You see these systems with most of the “free” games on touch screens and as a parent I can tell you that my children are significantly different playing them vs playing any other game with their friends (even online). It’s a noticeable enough and shocking enough behavioral change that you have to remove it.

When not having access to a game for a certain period of time creates anger or tears, it’s no longer just a game.

Does Fortnite implement any of these dark patterns? I think the only paid purchases in it are cosmetic in nature, no? And the game itself is mostly skill based.

It doesn't even have the MMORPG hook where if you don't play, your character is weaker then of people that play more then you.

You can only buy cosmetics, that’s correct. If you buy a battle pass you get extra challenges but you get no in-game advantage for spending money.

Kids love the cosmetics though and it becomes as important to some of then as having real gameplay advantages would be. So it's good for the gameplay but I am not sure it is any less nefarious.

Absolutely; I don’t think this absolves Fortnite or anything, just trying to make the details more clear.

Fortnite used to have loot boxes and they've changed how they worked to make them less like gambling.

You’re talking about Fortnite Save the World which as far as I know still has loot boxes. Fortnite Battle Royale (i.e. the successful one that actually matters) never had loot boxes.

I haven't played fortnite, but Folding Idea's analysis of Fortnite [0] suggests that it does. As a specific example, it presents only a small subset of the items available to purchase any given day. This allows them to obscure the relative prices in a way that would not be possible with many more viewable for comparison. A microphone hammer is 800v today. How does that price compare to a gold hammer, or what was its price two seasons ago ?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

If I recall correctly, items are priced based on their rarity, which doesn’t change. So an uncommon thing is 800 vbucks (~$8) up to 2000 for a legendary item/skin.

Imo the shop isn’t as much of a dark pattern. The game is just constructed in such a way that it’s constantly engaging and fun from beginning to end, and very good at playing with friends.

> It doesn't even have the MMORPG hook where if you don't play, your character is weaker then of people that play more then you.

You're character isn't weaker, but it will have fewer cosmetics. I'm not sure that that's a less harsh incentive, personally.

"If you play less, you are less likely to win." is obviously harsher than "If you play less, your character won't look as cool."

Apex Legends has re-introduced me to gaming (after being AFK since the Halo 3 days), and I very much appreciate that the only 'perks' of grinding are cosmetic. As an adult with less free time, if I knew that a game would punish me stat-wise for not playing as often as my competition, I probably wouldn't play at all since I wouldn't stand a chance. But cosmetics don't affect gameplay.

y, has anyone seen kids playing Roblox? It actually has a slot machine looking mechanic? I'm a fan of Minecraft, Fortnite and PUBG but Roblox just looks like gambling for kids. Any thoughts?

I've played Roblox with my kid. It's actually a bunch of different games, some of which are entertaining and complex.

Try experiencing what your kids experience and judge for yourself.

Yeah I've seen kids at the local library playing Roblox nonstop for hours. I think the library made a special table of computers for them. Didn't know it was addictive, but it would not come as a surprise.

Roblox is hot garbage and it's stuffed full of really weird IAPs.

Yes, my son keeps asking me Lua programming questions. I don't know Lua, yet.

My girlfriend's sister (was ~10 at the time) is now banned from Roblox because she kept getting sucked into ERP with people in game. Safe to say, the mother wasn't happy when she saw some of those chat logs...

Minecraft is the replacement - no IAPs (as far as I know), online community is pretty varied but pretty decent for the most part, and the game is lots of fun even completely offline.

Modded servers actually have a lot of IAPs and they can be pretty bad. These are really popular with kids.

Roblox has a nice parental control system, and is totally playable with chat disabled (and the preference password-locked with a special parent-held password).

> My girlfriend's sister (was ~10 at the time) is now banned from Roblox because she kept getting sucked into ERP with people in game.

You don't mean Enterprise Resource Planning, do you?

Stupid sexy Tally talk...

Unfortunately, no. ERP as in erotic role play.

Yeah it can be fun. I play it with my daughter, she loves it. And we've started building in it.

I don't think there's any core slot machine functionality in Roblox.

But Roblox is essentially a game development platform. Anyone can build a game on top of Roblox, and that player-created game could have slot machines in it.

I'm not quite sure how different that is from before. I used to have this Pokemon-themed Tamagotchi ripoff [1] which featured a literal slot machine. I don't think I turned out any worse for it. (Disclaimer: I've never heard of Roblox.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Pikachu

I've seen player bases (or at least parts of them) beg for these systems to be introduced. Battlefield being the most recent example I can think of. They built Battlefield 1 which didn't really have any "feeder pellet" mechanisms then at some point they asked what the community wanted in the game and the response came back "We need daily challenges/rewards to keep us playing." It wasn't enough to just play the game, some particularly large subset of the game needed something to be constantly working towards to keep them playing, they needed a short term goal/reward.

So they introduced timed challenges (get so many headshots in one life, get a skin as reward) into BF1 as an update and then expanded that in BFV.

That's why I prefer free open source games. Not only the gameplay is not tainted by grey/dark patterns, but also if it is an online game you don't depend on one company running the servers.

Am I the only one who feels like this is another echo of moral panic of the great Dungeons & Dragons scare of the mid eighties, which then morphed into the WoW scare of the early 2000's, which has now morphed into the Fortnite scare of 2019? It seems like every 20ish years there is a new and terrible game for parents, media and establishment to find and reach perfect harmony about that coalesces into a cry of "What about the children?!" all the way t Capital Hill and beyond. Ugh.

Compared to the D&D scare, this is less of a moral panic of fear of the unknown and more of a panic of lost productivity. D&D's panic, or at least how I understand it, was more like the panic around Harry Potter. Fortnite is more similar to getting mad at your kids for watching too much television or WoW.

The D&D scare seems to at least have benefited from a lot of common misunderstandings and that most people were unwilling to give it a shot. Harry Potter exploded in popularity for the blowback to ever be taken too seriously. Its pretty easy to open up a book and read it vs gathering some people together to try out a somewhat complex and open-ended game.

That's fair. Additionally with D&D, it is what you make of it. The themes and context can very with the group playing, whereas Harry Potter is exactly what it is.

It's not every 20 years, it's pretty much a constant. Some games or trends just happen to get more mainstream attention than others.

I don't think we're ever going to truly get rid of this sense of "this thing is bad for my kid, we need to get rid of it!" Since ultimately some bad thing happens to a kid/parent and they feel more validated amongst others who feel the same way about that thing. That's an incredibly powerful emotion.

We probably just need to be better at getting people to be generally more open minded and to see the world in less black and white terms.

|We probably just need to be better at getting people to be generally more open minded and to see the world in less black and white terms.|

Statement for the ages right there.+1

If you play fortnite backwards there are satanic images.

Mass necromancy, too!

Every GTA release is aimed to chock more than the previous one. I watched store clerks with a long line of kids wanting to buy GTA V, they asked for phone number to parents to ask for permission to sell and informed what type of game it was. Great hype for the game :)

I'm not sure it's constantly going up. I mean, GTA 2 had flamethrower fire truck and picking up people in the bus to drop them off for grinding into hamburgers. The latest releases are pretty chill in comparison.

hot dogs, not hamburgers, to be correct :)

It's all the fault of that devil music those kids are listening to these days.

>Am I the only one who feels like this is another echo of moral panic of the great Dungeons & Dragons scare of the mid eighties, which then morphed into the WoW scare of the early 2000's

Don't forget the late 90s Doom scare, the sole cause of Columbine.

Folks are being really blase about online gaming addiction.

It's real. It's happening.

Aww, but mommmm!

Not only are you not the only one to notice this, it's addressed in TFA.

"I get that these concerns are sometimes misguided and overblown, but I also think that it's bad practice to assume that present fears are wholly illegitimate simply because you can think of analogous concerns in the past that in retrospect appear 'ridiculous' to you."

I couldn't disagree more. The problem with spending literally thousands of hours in a game is most of what you experience and learn is not transferable to real life.

You are playing in someone else's sandbox and I have no doubt that it stunts developement in the real world.

-someone who spent far too much time playing these games.

Once the game is gone you will have nothing to show for it. It's worse than any hobby because it demands so much time with so little return.

I largely disagree with this. In WoW I spent a ton of time reading and writing with other people, organizing and recruiting for a bunch of guilds, and making a lot of great long term friends.

That's not to deny that you can avoid doing those things, or that many games don't provide those same opportunities, but rather that it's not a fundamental property of games that you gain nothing beyond the game. I gained a lot from my time in WoW.

I think this also ignores that the alternative for a lot of people would be watching TV or using social media.

It's possible there is a problem with games like Fortnite in that you're communicating almost solely by voice and there's a very limited complexity, but it might just be that there's something about it that I don't get.

That's all good. I lead a guild to a server first, but you know what means today? Nothing. I wish I had gone outside.

By the way, the cost of doing a server first kill is tens of thousands of hours of a person's life. For what? A virtual high score?

Video games are more addictive than TV. It is the evolution of technology to be so.

I learned English through video games. When I played Golden Eye on the N64, I was using a dictionary!

I remember being so confused with the term rendezvous with 006, ha!

I played a lot of Warcraft 3. It sets you up for strategic thinking, understanding the difference between micro and macro management, creating training schedules to become better.

Like most hobbies: meta skills are transferable.

As for the specifics: games made me realize that computers are amazing machines and gave me good hand eye coordination. When I program something easy, I program like a gamer playing Warcraft 3 because typing and mouse speed are the biggest bottlenecks.

It wasn’t the best use of my time but I can think of worse things.

The mental fortitude Dota 2 gives...

You chose (your game) poorly. There are vastly better experiences to be had, and useful lessons to learn. For example, one of the games I play has thought me a lot about feudal times, politics, geography and history.

Judging gaming by WOW is like judging literature by 50 shades of gray.

edit: and I want to say more. WOW is hardly a game, it is more of a reward delivery mechanism to keep you paying that monthly subscription. Nothing with a monthly subscription should be called a game, because it just doesn't match the incentives.

Yes, everything in life should be measured by how much applicable it is to the real world.

What point are you trying to make?

Because that's not what I said and any honest reading of my post would back that up.

I just can't imagine what kind of background you have to think this is an insightful or clever addition to the conversation.

> The problem with spending literally thousands of hours in a game is most of what you experience and learn is not transferable to real life.

Prince Harry? The advice of a Royal who will never need to work at anything about what is or isn't a waste of time is about as useful as a codfish's advice about mountain biking.

hear hear ..

The fact that we care as much about the life and opinions of celebs or nobles is one of the weirdest human traits.

We are not that far from tribal cavemen yet.

The same activity can be "numbing" (used to escape real problems and responsibilities) for one person, and energizing and truly comforting to someone else. World of Warcraft absolutely had (and has) people who fall on both sides of that divide, and I'm sure the same is true for Fortnite. It can also start as constructive/energizing and become numbing/escapism if you make someone feel ashamed of it, as you say.

I was 33 before I really got over the shame I felt for doing the things I enjoy, like video games. Because of that experience, I hope I will be a better parent in this regard than most. The cries of moral bankruptcy in video games seems to be relegated to a segment of adults that are only getting older, which is as it should be.

There are no adults or children who get younger, so...

But new, younger adults can enter the segment, which I'm not seeing.

Point being it's a generational concern. It isn't something a new generation of parents are concerned about in the same way.

I bet Prince Harry doesn't think all those hours at the clubs [1] was a waste of time (trust me they are definitely a giant waste of time too).

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-harry-takes-quite-a-sh...

I doubt prince harry spent literally thousands of hours at the club as the majority of WoW players do. If not 10s of thousands of hours.

MMORPGs (like EVE Online) inspired more creativity and entrepreneurial thinking in me than almost anything else I did in my life. I'm kind of glad I don't play them anymore as an adult, since they would likely consume a huge chunk of my time, but they were a very formative experience for me and I don't regret dedicating much of my teenage years to them.

The point is that it's not as simple as "games are good" or "games are bad". Not only is each game different, each person is different, and each combination of the two affects a person on many different dimensions, some good and some bad, and the definition of what it truly means to move in a positive direction of personal growth is multifaceted and nuanced, such that blanket statements can't really be made. An individual (or an individual child's parent) needs to look at their particular case and consider all dimensions of effect, together.

If someone like Prince Harry just sharing his opinion that it's a waste of time is seriously damaging, that to me indicates that he may be hitting a nerve there.

As someone who's never played Fortnite or WOW, Prince Harry kind of sounds like he's trying to hit a nerve.

It's hitting a nerve because it's not just Prince Harry, its many people, and often times its parents, and friends. It's the collective "your'e doing it wrong" coming from society.

Its not such a big deal from one person but if it's something that is a significant part of your life and you are constantly bombarded that it is negative then yeah its gonna have a negative effect on you.

So, I share the same opinion as Prince Harry, as a teacher. My students only want to do Fortnite, or Brawlstars, or Apex or whatever the biggest craze is. They're completely addicted to those games, and it's near impossible to get some of the students off their phones. Like, it's definitely impacting these kids at school; I can't imagine what it's doing if they ever get assigned homework (most other teachers I know have just given up because they either don't do it or cheat).

People on HN are not willing to accept that these games are highly tuned psychological products that induce addiction.

I'm 100% willing to accept it. I feel like the people who aren't are the types who get extremely defensive about gaming in general. Imagine feeling so attacked that you have to try to claim that DoTA taught you "entrepreneurial skills".

Everyone has hobbies that are time-wasters to an extent. It isn't the end of the world if someone has the opinion that this one habit might be addictive.

It's hitting a major nerve. Video games are far more dangerous than comic books or movies or TV. Why? Because they're a success surrogate. They take people who may feel disillusioned with the difficulty of making a life and give them an easy fix. It's the number one problem with video games: they hijack the reward mechanisms that are supposed to motivate you to improve your life. This puts them on a level closer to hardcore drugs than to other forms of entertainment.

Vitalik Buterin played it so much that he named his startup after a race of evil elves, the Ethereum. Now Ethereum is one of the most successful online games around, with some “whales” dumping tens of millions of dollars into it.

How productive for society.

It is indeed mean to shame people for their counter-productive lifestyle choices but if it warns off others from going down the same path maybe it’s worth the cost on a societal level.

> Someone like Prince Harry saying that Fortnite is a waste of time, is seriously damaging to the image someone might have of themselves playing it.

I find this hard to believe. I was 12yo when Carmageddon and Postal came out. Both were widely covered in newspapers and cable news as excessively violent, and bad for kids. I still played the hell out of both. Why would I have cared what Prince Harry thought?

Uh good for you. I still think it’s a waste of time, glad you feel better about something you invested so much time into.

For how many hours a day?

I averaged probably 3 hours a day.

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