Ban kids from loot box gambling in games
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
He came into some cash recently courtesy of the tooth fairy and asked if we could buy a skin for his favorite character. I said ok. However after id purchased some in game coins we realised that we couldn't actually buy the skin he wanted, instead we had to buy 10 boxes with random contents that could potentially contain a skin similar to the one he wanted.
Watching his excitement opening up the boxes and his eventual disappointment at not receiving the one he wanted - plus subsequent enthusiasm to buy more coins courtesy of some lesser items granted, I realised Id made a horrible mistake. Id basically introduced a virtual pub gambling machine to a young kid. This sort of stuff is horrible.
but i also think there's a generational divide: while i would gladly pay games for a leg up (better weapons, higher jumps, that sort of thing), i would never ever buy a "skin" for my character, or anything superficial for that matter. but I see kids getting completely hooked on this. and i don't really get it. i mean, from a young age i would hack the game and add whatever i wanted (including skins), so maybe that's why asking me to pay for something as useless as a "skin" will never fly with me.
And you can’t hack this because these are multiplayer games.
i do get what you're saying thou...
Their online persona is part of their identity. For some people, buying an expensive in game item makes them feel rich/successful/whatever, and some people will complement/judge them on their taste/expenditure etc.
It’s no different to buying a Rolex, a fast car or Louis vuitton hand bag. All of them are functionally the same but convey something about the owner
I mean I play FFXIV casually, but there's a huge subculture in that game for making looks, combinations and colorings of its huge library of clothing items.
All I'm saying is, withhold your judgment a bit on things you're not into yourself.
I grew up in lower middle class area and i saw it A LOT. To me it seems less like classism and more tribal or human nature.
Unless by certain tax bracket you mean poverty in which case yeah _maybe_ fashion stops mattering then, but I don't have any experience with that.
How do you know they are in certain tax bracket though? Do you ask everyone on the street about their taxes? Or maybe you're assuming their tax bracket on how they dress? :)
That's because that's pretty much exactly what it is. It's a signaling mechanism.
Except when I buy a shirt or jacket or shoes, I don't buy a ticket and get something random with a minor chance to get what I actually want.
Then immediately I can sell it back (WOW!) for less than I have bought it and try again and again, yeah.
Your analogy is totally off.
Historically, there was a way for people to make successful, interesting, exciting and fun games that didn't require horrific financial exploitation of vulnerable players.
To quote the Dude: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
I can kind of identify with it though. I remember going to a lot of bother to update the player DB in Sensible World of Soccer to reflect the most recent season. I also patched it and didn't pay (not even sure if there was a paid update). But it's not a stretch to imagine that if I didn't understand how to do it myself and someone offered me a pound for the floppy disk I may have bought it!
for the generation that admits to buying these things without qualm, think about the social benefits as much as having the right console/toy/action figure had
I've known teachers who specifically have had to have words with kids who are bullying their classmate for not having a skin in fortnite. I'm sure that's rare but the point is that these kids are not yet equipped to deal with the kind of manipulation companies throw at you to try to get you to buy into this economy. "Hacking" skins into the game is pointless, because it's not about looking good to yourself, it's about showing off your shiny trinket to your peers.
In Australia they had these stupid figurines they were giving to parents that were inside packets, with varying rarity. Kids were going mental for them, and were begging parents to buy more groceries to get more packs.
It's definitely gambling by another name, and kids are susceptible to it massively.
Why?? What is the point of a game, if you can buy advantages? It reduces the competitive aspect to who can spend more money.
I wonder if there's mileage in a multiplayer version of the "I'm rich" app.
There is a dual aspect to that psychology: e.g. the person who succeeds despite having less expensive equipment. I remember reading a fishing forum where a guy was bragging about all the fish he caught with budget gear and how all the guys with premium setups were jealous of him. And sport fishing is really just a type of game (as is hunting).
Another point to consider is people who pay money for hacks. e.g. see through walls, highlight opposing team characters, or auto-follow (like a when your sights stay sticky on a player). I've seen high-level competitors get banned from Twitch for using these exploits. Yet I have no trouble understanding why they would do so any more than I have trouble understanding why a lot of athletes use doping.
Skins, on the other hand... so, to start with, I play FF14, which has a cash shop for things like special outfits and emotes. While I wouldn't dump all my disposable income into cosmetic stuff, and I sure as hell don't trawl the cash shop looking for stuff to buy, I'll buy stuff here and there if it really catches my eye or if it could be useful. For example, I went to an in-game wedding over the weekend, and I didn't have anything to wear that was really appropriate, so I hopped on the cash shop, looked at a couple of dresses, asked my friends for advice on which one looks better, and bought exactly one outfit. And then there was when I was first setting up by subscription after my free month ran out, and I stumbled on a set of emotes inspired by one of my favorite television franchises of all time. Those were the only things I bought from the cash shop... though I have to admit I'm tempted to buy the new cat ear hood (which was heavily advertised when it came out) just because cat ears are kind of my thing.
So I'm definitely not in the "buy all the skins" camp, but I'm fine with buying a couple of items here and there that enhance my enjoyment of the game. And, of course, this leads into why lootboxes are evil. In a game that uses lootboxes, you can't just buy one or two cool things. You have to keep buying lootboxes and opening them again and again and again and again until you get the thing you're looking for. It's exploitative, and it trains the mind to derive enjoyment from addictive behaviors.
I got "stung" enough by a trader in London who demonstrated that you shouldn't buy a pig in a poke. I still keep the cheap trinket I got instead as a reminder to always find out what I'm paying for.
A quote from the report[0]:
> At present, the Gambling Commission states that purchasing loot boxes does not meet the regulatory definition of licensable gambling under the Gambling Act 2005 because the in-game items have no real-world monetary value outside the games.
They later reference this written evidence[1] that suggest that such legal framework is too tight and needs to be broadened.
[0] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...
[1] http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence....
I think the gaming community would want loot-boxes completely banned under the guise of "gambling".
The individuals that would spend an unhealthy amount on these loot-boxes are not individuals that will stop their behavior if lootboxes are banned or even regulated.
These individuals have know that you can't get your money back, you can't earn more money and you can blow your life savings on it. With no return promised, monetarily, these individuals know the money they spend can't be gambled back. Thats the crux of gambling and their laws. People truly believes one more bet and they can get it all back.
It's insane if a person on Overwatch or Fortnite truly believes the money they waste if beyond their budget is a good investment at all. That problem lies with the individual not EA and loot boxes.
Those people will have constant issues with their finance until they seek the help they need to stop. That could be learning better budgeting behavior to identifying they have a gambling problem.
That could be a gambling impulse but really we know people that constantly spend their money carelessly regardless of some mental addiction. A lot of people lack of financial control shouldn't create laws to dictate to companies what they should do, especially in a market saturated with competition that don't deploy any of these practices simply because these people refuse to follow a monthly budget thats within their means.
We don't remove things from society just cause others have difficulty with it. Now I have no issue with more regulations especially targeted at kids, but let's be honest here. Most of this should still fall on parents and education. Companies caught pushing to sell these random loot-boxes to kids should be addressed and fined. Especially the ones that use streams that buy these boxes and open them with kids audiences. These companies that sponsored these streamers should receives fines for targeting kids. Also like to see some form of guarantee or odds exposure.
Long rant, but I find the fact you can't get monetary value back makes it extremely different than the current types of gambling and should effect the way we regulate it. End of the day, when no monetary value can be extracted we are regulating random chance and rewards...silly path to go down to call anything random and rewarding essentially gambling.
Also perhaps better than spending the money on sweets.
Teaching kids to gamble is a horrid idea.
>Also perhaps better than spending the money on sweets.
Yeah, the kid must be overweight as well. What about books, toys or cinema? And for instance I don't mind my kid having an ice cream with 6 (outside school) trainings a week
Teaching kids to gamble - I would see it as the opposite, teaching them not to gamble. They will be confronted with gambling opportunities all through their lives, with higher stakes. Better to learn with pocket money.
Here in Germany afaik there is also a law that children are not able to do business transactions. That means if you sell something to a kid, the parents can come back to you and say the transaction is invalid. I wonder how that works out with virtual goods and games?
Teaching your kid it is a waste of money and not to endorse that practice might be a better choice.
I don't think shielding kids from everything bad in the world usually results in them being able to deal well with bad things in the world as adults.
Not saying they should play those games that have gambling elements. But I also don't find it straightforward to say it is unequivocally bad.
With sweets I know stories of kids who weren't allowed any sweets who developed an excessive sweet tooth later on.
how do you teach them? this sort of abstract conversation would have gone in one ear and out the other when I was a kid. I only ever learned stuff was bad if I actually experienced consequences from it.
I have the same situation with my six-year old son and Rocket League loot boxes. He wants to spend all his limited money on them, I think he's wasting it, especially since I see the disappointment when he doesn't get the things he want, but that's a learning experience. It's worse when he once in a while gets a cool skin, because in his eyes it makes it all worth it.
I see the money I give him as teaching opportunities. Kids will get in touch with these mechanics as they grow up, and now you have the chance to talk to him about it. Discuss it over and over, it's not a one-time thing, and you've made no permanent damage. Let him know you think it's not worth it, but I wouldn't put a permanent ban on it, as it may make it even more appealing. If he wants other (real-life) stuff later, remind him that he already spent his money on loot boxes and I think they will lose their appeal a bit.
This is not always the case on apex legends, where some limited offer items are only obtainable from loot boxes.
In apex there have been posts from people who have spent thousands to try to unlock a particular item. Literally opening the same random box 400 times and failing to get the item.
My favorite place to view this is Path of Exile in game economy. They do have random loot boxes for cosmetics, but I'm talking about the actual in game economy around items that power up your character. None of which can be bought for real money and instead require time to farm them (RMT does exist but is against ToS and can get you banned).
There are extremely rare items that cost nothing because they aren't used. There are quite common items that have decent value because of how high the demand it. Technically the game doesn't even have a currency, but players found a small set of common but also highly useful items that have become the defacto currency so much so the developers even admit they now count as currency.
Edit: to elaborate, I think it depends on many things. One that comes to mind is, how strong is the "dopamine" effect vs vs the "oh, sudden insight into how market economies work" in the child. (And parent, as a mirror and role model.)
If the reward response is very strong, I can't help but thinking about the knowledge we have about alcohol and children: we know it's harmful when parents try to teach children to drink responsibly and "let them try in controlled conditions". It works much better to not let children drink at all.
Do we? In French culture it’s not uncommon to let kids as young as 12-13 take a few sips of wine at weddings, family meals, etc; and having attended university in France, the UK, and the US, my experience is that French students are by far the most reasonable in their consumption. Some might get hammered once or twice a week during their first years of university, but there’s not much that approaches the frat party levels of debauchery one witnesses in the US.
What’s your broader point?
Drinking 4+ glasses of wine all at once is quite different from drinking one glass at each meal and one before bed. Extrapolate that to weekly statistics and someone who drinks a lot of wine culturally can look worse than someone who only drinks at parties, and they could even look like an alcoholic.
It may be functional alcoholism, if it doesn't affect your finances/job/relationships, but it's still alcoholism.
Both the things you describe - one person have 4+ glasses of wine on a night out, and another person have one glass of wine at each meal and another before bed - are worrying.
Binge drinking (and 4+ glasses of wine is definitely a binge) significantly increases risks of a number of harms from things like accidents, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, etc. The advice strongly recommends against binging, but if it's only occasionally it's probably not that harmful.
The other situation is a bit more complicated depending on serving size and wine strength.
A small glass of wine is about 150ml. If the wine is 9% ABV that would give us 1.5 UK units per glass. Two of those a day, 6 days a week, is about 19 units. That's more than the recommended limit which is 14 units per week, and it doesn't have more than one drink free day.
A larger glass of wine is about 200 ml. The wine might be stronger at 12.5% ABV. That gives us 2.5 units per glass, and 30 units per week. This is probably problem and harmful drinking.
For alcoholism we're probably talking about people who need a medically assisted withdrawal from alcohol.
https://pathways.nice.org.uk/pathways/alcohol-use-disorders/...
A medically assisted withdrawal from alcohol would be considered if the person is drinking 15 units per day. That's two 750ml bottles of 10% ABV wine every day. This would be an outpatient programme.
An inpatient medically assisted withdrawal would be considered if the person drinks over 30 units per day. This is 750ml of 40% ABV spirits, or 4 bottles of that 10% ABV wine.
Yes, and so is the number of glass bottles they recycle. But it's the alcoholism that is a health problem to address.
Uhhh no we don't know that. Because it's not true at all.
When I was 16, this was the legal age to drink beer. I always thought it was a good idea to first learn what alcohol does, before you learn to drive (which is 18, where I live).
Aaanyway, at some point we did raise the legal drinking age to 18 (afaik, this was for no other particular reason than the Christian Democrats being in power).
I'm still awaiting the reports that binge drinking among kids and young adults has decreased. Because it hasn't.
Except now some kids will wait 2 years before they learn to not abuse alcohol the hard way. But they would anyway (by which I mean, some of them. I know enough people who are perfectly responsible or not drinking at all). Maybe it's a slightly tougher lesson because you're not 17 any more.
But all in all, if parents raise their kids, guide them, and can make sure their first experiences with alcohol are in fact responsible, this teaches the kid valuable lessons and it's good for them in the way they learn about alcohol and its dangers and how to deal with it, instead of having to figure it out alone, when adult. Parenting can be an extremely powerful positive force in the upbringing of a child and really I would need to see some strong evidence to the contrary.
You are talking about actual controlled conditions with the parents playing an active role. I really need to see evidence that that could possibly have any negative effect what-so-ever.
In the end he did learn his lesson, sort of. He realised he had squandered his cash but in learning the game mechanics also found out some skins could be unlocked by earning points through playing. As he doesnt like shooting anyone its up to me to grind for points. I agreed for the extra turns of course. Perhaps a lesson in effective delegation to boot :)
What's your model for what this is though?
The GP mentions a pub fruit machine. I suppose you could make the case for it being like football stickers.
As I'm writing this though, I'm not entirely sure what makes fruit machine bad, football stickers good. I would guess trading stickers is a social activity, and theres an in build limit to how many stickers you need? Where do loot boxes come out on these measures?
Slot machines pay out real money. It helps contributing to the illusion that you can recover from your losses by playing more. Football stickers, loot boxes, etc... make it clear that the money is spent.
And where would 2p machines [1] fit into this? It's acceptable to let your kids go on those and they have real money prizes.
That's not to say you're wrong though, because as I said I'm not really sure.
Those aren't going to break the bank though, or start a habit, so a harmless way to let the kids get rid of parent's pocket of excess coppers.
I think this thread is missing the main reason why gambling dangerous: it can turn money into more money. The blinking lights and the Skinner box pyschology only play a supporting role to the main attraction: which is the belief that you can walk out richer than you walked in. This particularly plagues the poor, either because they are desperate or lack the financial accumen, and is the main reason why it is regulated. In the UK where sports gambling is legal, it is widely considered a blight on the lower class.
The fact the next roll could win back everything I've lost tonight AND make a profit on top, is far more dangerous than the next pull being merely able to finally get me that coveted Overwatch skin.
Hence why colloquially everyone calls loot boxes gambling, but no one has been able to make a strong legal case for why Overwatch loot boxes constitute gambling. If anything, Counterstrike is in the worse legal position and has had ACTUAL gambling scandals due to the high resale value of certain weapon skins.
The modern ones with carefully created low drop rate "rare" cards are lottery scratch card gambling. No better than a fruit machine, or fixed odds thing in the bookies, and in need of regulation.
Same impulses that have led to addictive purchasing until you get the winner. Same cynical house always wins. Personally I put them in the same "clearly gambling" bucket as game loot boxes.
I was going to disagree with you because the odds are printed on packs but now that I've thought about it you're absolutely correct. I used to buy basketball card packs and the recent Beckett magazine and see how much each pack was worth, and only now am I seeing the tendencies that caused in me later in life.
Somewhere that morphed into artificial scarcity, and kids everywhere being set up to buy five sets worth of cards, to maybe get a full set.
But whichever thing it is, parental guidance is always a good idea. As a parent, you get a better idea of what's going on, and you can provide context for your kid and learn the lessons together. Maybe it was a scam after all, maybe it is addictive, maybe it's okay. But figure it out together.
Another thing to keep in mind: kids in France start drinking at a much younger age than elsewhere, but they do it at home, with half a glass of wine at dinner. The alcohol might still be harmful, but France certainly doesn't have the binge drinking problem that the UK has.
Is it not simply that the fruit machines are more addictive than the sticker packs?
The reason for this I think is probably the blinking lights and sounds, live control of the interaction (transaction) and environment, versus an inert packet of cards / stickers, that can at best be extremely shiny.
Of course, games are in a position to completely control the transaction and environment for maximum addictiveness, and given the lack of regulation (vs regular gambling) and technology, they can actually go beyond what fruit machines can do (or are allowed to do) to people.
They could, in theory, also make a more "boring" loot box that doesn't quite exploit our psychology as mercilessly, just a transaction. And then it would be more like sticker albums. Provided that the game allows free trading of any items in the loot box. Because that means you actually get something in return that isn't just a consumable.
But games will inevitably choose for the exploitative option, therefore yeah, regulate the hell out of it. It's not really a huge loss to culture or anything, nor is there IMO any fundamental reason why it is okay for people to make money that way.
I think ultimately, this is the same thing - just digitized. I don't really have an opinion whether that's good or bad, just that it's clearly aimed at kids to buy this stuff, just like the stickers were.
Imagine a fairly boring interface that has Pokemon cards or football stickers in. Like your hands holding them and trading them and sticking them on things.
Now contrast that to the loot box stuff that has exciting music, flashing lights, A-B tested into oblivion, the money comes from some ethereal 'account' rather than involving an actual exchange, etc.
I think the analogy is more with the flashing exciting slot machines at the pub (which seem to have evolved a ton since I were a small as well...)
Anecdata, I had one in the shape of a dinosaur, must have ben 5 or 6 and I still remember (some 50 years later) the day I decided that I needed a new toy the doubts about actually breaking it (with the assistance of my dad) and perfectly remmber the dinosaur, whilst I cannot remember at all which toy I was willing to get, probably a toy gun, but I am not sure.
One team member had previous experience from working on casino games and he said that at least there they had clear rules for how they were allowed to handle it and who they were allowed to target.
Companies that sold trading cards, stickers, whatever did the same marketing and testing as video game companies.
There's one big difference. Those stickers were immediately tradeable. Actually exchanging the missing pieces with others was most of the fun. If you can only rely on the packs, that's all social fun cut out.
“New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was responsible for the ban, believing that it robbed school children of their hard earned nickels and dimes.[41][42] La Guardia spearheaded major raids throughout the city, collecting thousands of machines. The mayor participated with police in destroying machines with sledgehammers before dumping the remnants into the city's rivers.[42]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball#Pinball_and_gambling
0: citation: myself and gambiting and barneygale at a minimum
Then, sounds like the hubbub at the time was both mostly reasonable and effective.
Video games have managed to make the items significantly more valuable. And it increasingly feels as though _most_ games are built around these gambling mechanics, as opposed to just the occasional game like Magic The Gathering which worked that way.
There's a lot of games that try to nudge closer to this with card "crafting" where you destroy card A to create in game currency that you can then use to purchase card B. This is ALMOST to the point where I find it acceptable, but until I can trade card A to another player for card B, it's still complicated gambling.
Real world collectable card games sit in the grayest area imo. You're buying a tangible object that represents some degree of gambling (if you buy packs) but there exists a secondary market that allows for you to bypass that and still enjoy the activity. It's mostly good, but then again my Magic collection sits somewhere around 15,000 total cards, so maybe I'm not the best person to talk about this...
In fact, conventional wisdom in MTGO is to never open packs and always draft them.
And you can sell CS:Go and TF2 items for Steam credit. I'm not convinced this makes anything better. A slot machine isn't the only way to get money, but I still don't think we should market slot machines to children.
I think a lot of the people who dislike "lootboxes", but grew up with collectible card games like Magic, try to rationalize why one is okay and the other is not. And the hard truth is that it was never okay when Magic did it either, but the problem wasn't pervasive to the point where we had to address it. This isn't to say that Magic is evil or that everyone who bought random card packs as a child is now scarred for life, but it's not a great practice.
Collectible card games should not be a reason to allow loot boxes, and any laws we make ought to apply to both, instead of attempting to create strange carve outs.
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Disclaimer: I've never played Magic, and I avoid any video game that contains micro-transactions.
Edit: And just to be absolutely clear, this isn't to say that Magic should be banned any more than all video games should be banned, just that consumers should know what they're paying for, unless they're explicitly in a casino.
My understanding is that the vast majority of loot boxes are the sole way of acquiring the in game objects they posses. If there's a CS gun/skin/whatever in a loot box, you can't just go out and buy that thing for money. Transaction behavior is fine to me. That's one problem. Another is that you don't "own" that thing, you just have permission to use it. That's slightly different from owning a physical object.
It's an aggregate, and there are degrees of bad design patterns.
Whole game for single transaction > game with DLC > game with loot box for aesthetic features> game with loot box for core features.
I see your point that CCGs are basically the analogue version of loot boxes, and I can't entirely disagree. It's been called "cardboard crack" before, with good reason. As someone working for a tabletop gaming company who's primary product is randomized miniature figures used to play games, I also am WAY to close to this one to think objectively.
So, in Valve's games, this isn't true. Lootboxes are the only "first party" way to buy skins in CS: Go, but you can use the Steam marketplace to trade with other players.
I think the best example of a way to deal with acquired in game intems I can think of personally for something that didn't suck, was Diablo 3 when it first hit. If the game randomly dropped a high tier weapon, you could use it, trade it, or sell it for real money. The real money auction house was a great addition imo.
With lootboxes, the payoff is immediate. The barrier between the impulse of someone with an addiction and the payoff is virtually non-existent. I think that makes a difference in the potential for addictive behavior that shouldn't be overlooked.
The problem exists in all of them, we're just talking about the speed of delivery and how it makes somethings worse-bad instead of just bad.
A sticker pack whale will spend hundreds of Euros. If you only wanna spend 50 bucks better get another hobby tbh.
Just to be clear, sticker collection economy is also shady, it just doesn't have a societal impact remotely like that of loot boxes.
This is a good price. I've been paying CHF 1.20 for 5 stickers at the local corner store.
Loot boxes strip all of that away and introduce FOMO, so the only option you have is to keep pumping money into the machine, and then to up the ante if everyone else starts getting skins or emotes or dance moves that you don't have, so you don't get left behind.
What's more is that they're linked to micro transactions, so there's nothing stopping you throwing away as much money as you have in your bank account, or having your kid do it without any awareness of where the money is actually coming from. Spending £1.50 of your pocket money on a pack of stickers is a totally different situation to blowing £10-£20 a pop on in-game currencies to buy loot boxes.
There are few things that I'd call evil but this stuff is beyond malevolent. At best it's a shameless scam and they go to an incredibly effort to make the vanilla game boring without buying into the gamble.
For example in Dota 2 people can trade skins for heroes they don't play. Isn't that the same thing as trading a pokemon you don't want?
The majority of free-to-play games from Asia don't provide a mechanism for that.
I understand from a Louis Theroux documentary on gambling addicts that it is the feeling of the near miss that is actually addictive and not the feeling of the win. Gambling addicts are used to winning and so they don't get a buzz from that.
I don't have a perfect solution, just pointing out the bind we're in.
I'm actually not terribly prone to the "youth are just all messed up today compared to my generation" idea scheme, but while homo sapiens hasn't changed, the environment has changed radically and the amount of cognitive firepower being brought to bear on us to get our money and manipulate us has skyrocketed in the past decade or two. I've got a 11 and 8 year old and am still struggling through how to deal with it.
My perspective is that there are two kinds of people. Those who understand that slot machines are dangerous and a bad long term investment, and those who do not and gradually become more and more addicted to them.
I've never seen a casino customer who was initially attracted to slot machine mechanics, gradually learn that they a poor exchange of value, overcome their addictive nature and stop playing them.
They may stop playing because they are broke. They may learn to manage the addiction at a level they enjoy and can sustain. But they don't just suddenly understand that it's a bad deal and stop wanting to play.
You don't learn that gambling is bad by gambling a little bit and losing a bit of money.
If people were rational enough for that, people wouldn't suffer from gambling addiction.
There's only one way to protect kids from gambling: don't let them get near it.
Fully grown ADULTS fall prey to skinnerboxes (aka: Slot Machines) all the time. Its basic human psychology (heck: the skinnerbox is effective on virtually all Birds and Mammals). Its extremely fundamental to the function of the modern biological brain.
Its literally a "brain hack". This isn't some "willpower away" sort of training. This is literally how your brain, and your children's brain works. As well as how your dog's brain, and the bird's brains and the cats brains, and deer brains.
The only winning move is to not play. Its literally hopeless if you get sucked into a skinner box. You can't beat the biological functions of what your brain is designed to do.
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I don't think there's "long term damage" to be suffered here. Human brains, just like the brains of any mammal (or bird), are prone to operant conditioning. If you RANDOMLY give a reward when a subject (be it human, mammal, or bird) pushes a button, the subject will continue to push the button over and over again.
Its just biology.
EDIT: And random-rewards are far stronger than consistent rewards. If a reward is consistent, then when it "stops", the subject believes that the pattern is over. But if the reward was Random, then the subject will continue pushing the button even long after the pattern has stopped or been modified.
Studies have found propensities not absolutes across all subjects and species.
For example, river otters are notoriously difficult to train using operant conditioning because they are extremely curious, but also bore easily. Getting them to repeat a behavior indefinitely using a reward is extremely difficult if not impossible.
Likewise not all humans can be controlled as robot slaves incapable of escape as easily as the fatalistic determination description provided suggests.
People can learn to recognize scams and avoid them. Maybe there are some people who simply never learn. Maybe. Probably not though.
Addictions can be hard to overcome for many. But they are generally recoverable.
I don't think this is "addiction". Its clearly operant conditioning. You aren't going to suffer physical ailments like an Alcoholic or Heroin-abuser (or heck: even a coffee-drinker) would if you "stop pushing the button"
I'm pretty sure that our concepts of "addiction" (including "willpower") are mostly pseudo-science. While psychologists are carefully studying the issues, the mass media needs to keep making movies and stories, and those stories do NOT reflect upon reality very well. Even well-researched stories, like Inside Out, or Finding Nemo (Dory's character is a very well researched example of memory loss) may end up obsolete as research moves forward. (IIRC: Inside Out was initially based on some psychology research. But the research already dramatically changed by the time Inside Out was out of production, and it was too late to change the story at that point).
The sad truth is: most of the psychology the layman knows is wrong. Its "story" psychology, created for drama and storytelling. Not "real" psychology, which actually predicts human behavior.
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In any case, I believe that lootboxes are a clear, and simple, example of operant conditioning. We know how to "deprogram" operant conditioning. You either:
1. Remove the reward entirely -- Without a reward, and people will stop. It may take 10,000 cycles, but eventually all subjects stop when the reward is fully taken out of the picture. Its surprising how long subjects will continue their behavior in the absence of a reward, but it will eventually stop.
2. Introduce punishments -- Shock the user, or cause other forms of pain. If the punishment is greater than the reward, the subject will eventually stop.
As far as I know, those are the two ways to stop a conditioned behavior. Social pressure may probably serve as #2, but in my experience, it puts a lot of strain on the social relationships (ex: subject may just start lying instead of telling the truth about their behavior). In effect, using social pressure to stop #2 may only cause the subject to become more trained in the act of lying.
[144] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dice_by_number_of_sides#D...
I would love if we as a society would use the word "compulsion" for things that are not physical addictions, but I feel like that battle was lost some time ago, so I gave up.
I think a core tenant of his work was that there is no mental state at all and that everything is just conditioning.
While there are many healthy kids and highly functioning adults who grew up with electronics and playing games (myself included), the fact is that these last 10 years have been a landmine for kids and adults alike in terms of dark patterns and psychological manipulation at scale.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Glow-Kids-Screen-Addiction-Hijacking/...
At least, that's what the various casino engineers tell me.
EDIT: In particular: it costs money to pull the lever in a Slot Machine. So you have a penalty every time you pull the lever. Even with this penalty, many people pull that level compulsively, hoping for the slight chance to win.
"It's worse when he once in a while gets a cool skin, because in his eyes it makes it all worth it."
THAT is the whole problem. Those rewards. Kids absolutely cannot understand how to cope with that feeling. Getting lucky and opening the thing they want becomes an expectation. They EXPECT to get lucky now.
You can talk to your kid without spending a dime, without letting them engage in the activity. What else are you just going to "try" and then talk about? Let him smoke some cigarettes, get cancer, and then say, see son, there's a lesson to be learned here...... no.
I'm afraid you are going through what Chinese and to some extend Russian parents went through 1 and 2 decades ago. Chinese parents understood long ago what businesses like Google and Tencent were are all about. In China, they call them "pocket slot machines" The very reason they link the game to your bank account is to milk money from you, or god forbid, your children.
My former high school classmate who did not manage to leave Russia is running a typical "smartphone fixer" kiosk. He said few years ago that the most common request he gets from people is to "remove Google nagware and lock, block or delete Google Pay" so their child will never ever buy anything "in that Internet thing," and do the same for clickfarming "social" apps.
There is also a store where you can buy certain skins/items directly with money, but these items rotate (I think weekly?). Finally, there is a "battle pass" that lets you earn rewards by doing in game challenges (get so many skills in a certain part of the map, play as a certain character so many times, etc). The battle pass costs $10 US dollars. You can also spend real money to buy levels for your battle pass - so basically, dump money to earn everything, and avoid doing the challenges.
Believe it or not, Apex is one of the better F2P games when it comes to ease of getting items without paying much money. With that said, I think my complicated description above serves as a good example of how filthy these games can get. If Apex is what is considered a "good" model, just imagine the bad ones.
1. Apex plays a real dirty game of hooking you on boxes then slowly phasing them out.
You start by getting a box every level. Then every second level. Then every 5th level, then, no more boxes at all. Sure, once every few months a battlepass will be introduced that gives you another crack at free boxes (as of Season 2, Season 1 had no free boxes I believe). But they tease you all through the game: "If you buy our Season pass you'd have gotten a box at this level".
2. Limited availability
You can never just go buy a skin unless its on the timed rotation. You miss that rotation? You're S.O.L.. Maybe it'll rotate in again? Maybe you need to gamble it to get it before the entire opportunity is gone (Limited events)
3. Hidden costs
You can't exchange cash for skins. First you buy a "currency" and then you exchange that currency for the cosmetic. This again, is done with seedy practices like encouraging you to buy more currency than you need (you can only buy intervals of the currency, never just an exact amount to afford the skin). Then they go around and do shitty things like "discounting" a skin from 1,800 coins to 1,200 coins... but you can only buy coins in 1,000 or 2,000 intervals?
4. They bait people with promises
You are guaranteed an heirloom item every 500 boxes. I'm pretty sure there's a 15 or 25 box limit on Legendaries too. So you get all your free boxes and didn't get a Legendary? Well just pay us for 10 more and you'll get it!
5. (Opinionated) The bang for your buck is low
Most games I have experience with tie in special bonuses for the highest rarity items. Either they're changing the graphics of more than just your model (such as affecting particle effects of abilities) or they change voice lines and other unique features. Apex does none of that and a "Legendary" item is essentially just a higher effort skin. I argue the value of an "$18" skin is not worth that cost.
Ranting further, "Legendary" is a loosely termed tier of cosmetic loot. A Legendary banner is far less valuable to people than a Legendary skin for their character or weapon. There's numerous guns that the developers have outright said are not meant to be late game viable so getting a Legendary skin for a gun you're suppose to discard eventually feels greedy. The boxes come with filler junk like "crafting material" that doesn't even afford you to buy a cosmetic item of the tier (Legendary skins are 1,200 materials, but a Legendary Crafting Material drop is only worth 600)
---
With all that ranting done, I will say that I have like... 120 hours in Apex? I love the game, I do support the developers via Battle Pass but have no fantasy that their business model is "Good" and see many seedy practices occurring meant to hook people.
The game is an absolute blast, but don't encourage the Loot Box bullshit, you can play the game, enjoy it and get everything it has to offer without paying them a dime.
I definitely blew my fair share on video games, but I also believe this is a generational shift. I do not believe charging $$ for "cosmetics" would have been as successful in "my day". But what does it mean?
I keep hearing about the social aspects behind these games (kids who don’t have skins in fortnite are bullied at school, etc.) It sounds like goods that make a child popular are just digital these days as opposed to physical items like Pokémon cards.
I was in high school then. The people who didn't care about aesthetics were always the ones bullied.
Air Jordans, Pokémon cards, brand name clothes like hollister and AE, and then popular phones like the razer were ubiquitous among those that were popular. Kids who didn’t have those things were bullied relentlessly.
However, he wasn't interested in new games at all - instead he spend that money, all of it, on Fortnite cosmetics, which seems absolutely bizarre and alien to me. Growing up with Quake, Half-Life, Deus Ex and other classics we also loved games and didn't think twice about spending money on it, but I'm sure we would have laughed away any attempt to charge for skins and random items. Of course strong modding communities helped as well.
Anyway, this insight really surprised me - I always thought it's a few whales that participate in this nonsense, but apparently it's everyone, including the otherwise sane and reasonable kid from next-door.
Facebook maliciously obfuscated virtual currency abstractions once they realized kids disassociating the cash transaction was a great way to bump their numbers - https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...
Absolutely. Including hiring former casino personnel. Cards don't have flashy lights, music, nor the concept of a near miss.
You could call them the same only if you ignore all the context around it. For example, I know of no cards where you can purchase a more expensive card pack that has slightly higher odds of getting something good. Different loot boxes costing different amounts of money with the only difference being a slight increase in percentages are a completely common occurence.
But I agree with your overall point that the games are more flashy and do exploit more than cards ever could.
It's not okay to say "something has been done before" or "this is like that".
As human beings, we are learning what types of things are destructive. When we learn about these problems, it's not healthy to justify doing another thing wrong because we happened to live through doing it wrong before.
For example, people who say "I didn't wear a helmet when I was a kid" are being irresponsible. No, you didn't. But thankfully, science, data, and time have shown us that wearing a helmet makes far more sense for our health and safety, so that's what we do now. We learn, we change, we adapt. It's part of the process.
So, Pokemon, and Baseball cards, etc, were all gambling. The whole ordeal of spending money in hopes of getting what you want, then every once in a while getting a jackpot is very unhealthy and can be destructive in our development.
Are we okay after going through all that? Pretty much. But would we not be far better without having had that in our lives? Maybe. So now we know. And now we must stop these destructive business practices.
Thankfully due to science and data, we now know that providing infrastructure, bike lanes, good traffic rules for bikes, lessons in school for biking, car driving lessons including bike safety and just being the nr.1 method of transportation besides legs, increases safety AND public health AND bike usage AND decreases car usage with all its negative externalities.
There is no brain damage epidemic here. But maybe we don't wear helmets, but we DO regulate the ever loving shit out of what we can advertise and sell to children.
I agree. But if you look at one of those wrongs and don't actually think it is wrong, then it may mean the other wrong isn't wrong as well.
My point is NOT: 1: TCG booster packs are like loot boxes. C: Therefore people should have a problem with loot boxes.
My point is: 1: TCG booster packs are like loot boxes. 2: People don't have a problem with TCG booster packs. C: Therefore people should have a problem with loot boxes.
The inclusion of the second idea is very important.
Also, as someone else pointed out in a different comment threat, the problem seems to be with the way virtual currency is used. In this case, that is a chance that has no analogy with TCG booster packs, and as such my argument doesn't apply.
>For example, people who say "I didn't wear a helmet when I was a kid" are being irresponsible. No, you didn't. But thankfully, science, data, and time have shown us that wearing a helmet makes far more sense for our health and safety, so that's what we do now. We learn, we change, we adapt. It's part of the process.
In this case, what is being said is that you should've wore an helmet when you were a kid, but we can't go back and change the past. Imagine if science instead said that in the past people shouldn't have worn helmets but kids these days should. I would definitely want more information. But in this case, both past and present are being condemned so there is consistency.
>So, Pokemon, and Baseball cards, etc, were all gambling.
They are still a think, but I don't see people calling them gambling even today. Thus my question about a potential lack of consistency.
The confusion with Apex is that there are 3 types of currency. One is the in game free currency. That's typically used to unlock characters who cost 12,000 units. The second currency are the gold coins, which are used as premium purchasing power from the devs for things like the battlepass and specific items in the rotating store. The third currency refers to materials. Materials can be used to purchase any skin/celebration/quip etc. Materials can be bought with gold. I believe that you purchased the wrong thing.
If you really want a particular skin it's not that hard to get!
This is what we thought too but theres no way to buy materials with gold. Only through Apex packs. Eg [0], [1].
[0] https://www.shacknews.com/article/109806/how-to-get-crafting...
[1] https://www.techjunkie.com/get-crafting-metals-apex-legends/
Much transactions in the world are scams run by con men. Wise parents teach their kids. No better way to learn than from losing some real money in a scam, as long as you recognize the principles involved and it helps increase your distrust and skepticism of others in the future.
In the end, only the paranoid survive. Only con artists and rubes claim otherwise. Street skills are paramount, something few schools teach, by design.
Should we ban kids from these games? Maybe not. This is a good way to learn about scams as long as you learn. Games should instead be required to disclose the scam after fooling the prey, and thus become educational. Where people get into trouble is when they've been so sheltered and protected that they hit the legal contract age of 18 and believe fairy tales that the world is good and people can be trusted. Those poor kids are ripe for the plucking by the predators and get into a lot of trouble. Many lives are ruined at that point. Better to let them get ripped off a few times when younger for small amounts with these games. Regulation should focus an making rip offs of minors be fully refundable upon request, and to require scam disclosure. Scamming kids without disclosing how the scam works should be punishable with long prison sentences for everyone involved in the scam, executives, programmers, accountants, graphic artists. Games can be educational and there's no better lesson than how the adult world is actually going to work.
this just means every company can try to scam children as many times as they want. Either they keep making up new ways to trick children, or they word their disclosure of the scams in a way children can't understand so they keep falling for it. Either way allowing companies to prey on children so that they learn better is like letting people lure children into the back of vans so they "learn their lesson" after they get raped.
It'd be far better to forbid companies from predatory practices when we identify them and also try to educate kids on the tactics used against them and how to identify them, but that kind of education has to happen throughout their development. The companies who make these games hire people with advanced degrees to research, design and and implement the most additive systems possible. The reality is that children don't have the mental capacity to fully understand everything involved.
I agree that we should instill a distrust of corporations in our children and that we should try to build their defenses against manipulation, but learning by letting them be repeatedly exploited is some very backwards thinking.
I think you could probably get the same results by creating games specifically designed to demonstrate ways companies try to take advantage of us and you could do it without giving companies a chance to profit off your "teaching" method.
They should pay for license, they should have proper responsible gaming policy, ability to self-exclude, in case of products for kids, their parents should be informed that given product is a gambling product (older parents might not be aware of this), etc.
In RuneScape at the time, there was another PvP zone where you could fight another player and bet gold on whether you would win. Now having "expendable gold" and false confidence, I dropped some big money on this PvP zone, and over the course of a day, I lost it all. I was devastated. I've never lost a ton of money in real life, but this left a really sick feeling in my stomach even in the digital world.
Reflecting on this experience, I feel it has actually benefited me. I've experienced the pain and risk that gambling can bring, and have never felt a need to do this with my actual money. To me, games can be a sandbox to learn life lessons without major consequences.
Nowadays all these sorts of transactions have been shifted into auction house-like marketplaces to prevent abuse. I think taking out this human interaction component does more harm than good, especially bundled with the new ability to (legitimately) buy game money for real cash. The adversary moved from other players taking your ingame stuff, to the game's maintainer itself taking real world money.
You can see how if you'd gambled this huge amount of gold, and then won, that things may be different?
And I would say I had a similar experience, you win some, you lose some, but it helps show that it's not just up and up. I haven't spent more than $50 in a casino in my entire life, and the gacha games I have played I haven't spent money outside of the starter packs.
Some people are gonna lose money gambling, with or without games with similar mechanics. I've never seen a study show that the two are in any way correlated. Just that kids are playing these games (with money they get from their parents, if they do spend money).
As it's written in the article, problems arise for a minority of children. From the article, we know little about the background of these children and about their parents. It is possible that those children would have developed an addiction to something else if it wasn't video games loot boxes. Yes, some of them spend thousands, but what if they are millionaires's kids? They play by different rules.
In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults.
To me, banning virtual loot boxes is extreme and doesynt solve the actual problem (education programs are misaligned, lack of mental healthcare programs, etc). Addiction might reveal a problem, but it's not necessary the root cause.
Instead of boosters a serie of card is divided in “chapters” that are fixed and have a balanced distribution of cards. Every other month a new chapter is released, at a fixed schedule. All cards are known so you can decide which chapter you care about and want to buy. And a few times each year a big expansion pack is released, dedicated to one faction or group of cards.
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games...
But many of these virtual items are closed economies with the supply entirely owned by the producer of the game. These have no intrinsic value outside of this closed system and there is no ability to exchange them for real money.
I'm not saying booster packs are necessarily morally correct either, but want to highlight that there is a qualitative difference between them and most loot box economies.
I'd think it'd be less like gambling if the rewards had no monetary value, like random candies or skins in a video game. Then even the hope of getting your money back isn't there. You know all you're getting is just candy or toys.
People spend thousands on skins, with some of the items only accessible by repeatedly rolling the dice on a loot box. (Others have price ceilings for direct purchases).
The closed nature of the economy just means you can only purchase from the one person who is setting the price and you have no ability to trade it back in for cash.
Magic cards you can resell your cards to another player at a later date. You can't in Apex Legends.
That's farther than gambling than the trading card model.
You don't require this to be sucked into destructive tendencies in the same way as gambling. This isn't a logical choice, it's kids getting manipulated by the game into purchasing these lootboxes.
I erred in my use of monetary value, I mean that kids are very willing to spend lots and lots of money to get these skins - just as much as magic, if not more.
As I originally commented, I don't think magic is a good thing either, and Hearthstone is basically the equivalent of it in video game form - but at least you can sell out of Magic at a later date, and there is some form of market for trading old cards with others. Hell, you can even just be given your deck by a friend - this is not possible in hearthstone or fifa or Apex Legends (for cosmetics), you can't with games like Hearthstone and Apex Legends, you never get your money back, and people are just as willing to drop lots of cash on it as Magic.
1) You can sell your cards and get money from them (could be less, could be more) and they have some tangible value to other people.
2) You don't have to acquire magic cards through booster packs (aka loot boxes) only. If you want a particular card then you can go to the store and buy it. This was the major concern from the parent in the top comment of this post, that you couldn't just buy the skin directly but had to gamble for it.
Additionally if you just want to play with your friends and experiment there's no reason you can't just use proxy cards or fakes and have fun playing a deck. Though that's not for tournaments or anything serious.
Shouldn't this make it a bigger problem, not a smaller one?
>2) You don't have to acquire magic cards through booster packs (aka loot boxes) only. If you want a particular card then you can go to the store and buy it. This was the major concern from the parent in the top comment of this post, that you couldn't just buy the skin directly but had to gamble for it.
I wonder if the skins were priced per their rarity values, would people still be okay with it. Some mtg cards costs $1,000s. I wonder what people would say if some game added loot boxes containing rare items that were worth similar that players could then trade for money. My guess is people would respond far more negative to this.
I think if you could buy all of the items that were included in these loot boxes then it wouldn't be as bad. You want skin X, just go ahead and buy it. However there would still be a problem as people might pay way too much trying to get that expensive item in a loot box than just paying for it.
Well, no. You can require (on pain of jail time) that the producer provide all N possible skins for individual sale at prices that add up to less than or equal[0] the cost of N 1-skin loot boxes.
0: To preempt the obvious "make individual skins so expensive noone can actually buy them" strategy.
Secondly the booster packs that contain cards that cost thousands aren't still for sale, at least not from Wizards, though you might still find a few unopened ones around. Some of the cards available in current standard legal boosters might cost quite a bit, but not thousands
> At present, the Gambling Commission states that purchasing loot boxes does not meet the regulatory definition of licensable gambling under the Gambling Act 2005 because the in-game items have no real-world monetary value outside the games.
The thing with Magic Cards though is that when you buy a pack you still end up with a bunch of physical magic cards which you own and can do with as you please. Either sell them, trade them, give them away, or burn them in a fire. With digital goods from loot boxes this is rarely if ever possible.
Now ask yourself which would you rather have, something physical which you can do something with once you no longer want to play the game, or something digital which is useless and has no value once you stop playing the game (or even when next year's game comes out).
I don't necessarily disagree.
However, if I want card X for Magic/Pokemon, I can look up the card online, find its value, and buy the card. Sure, I can buy booster packs, but they are not the only way to get the card I want.
With online games, loot boxes are often the only way to get what you want. That's not good.
> In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults.
The problem is that you are up against companies that are spending a lot of money to optimize the addictiveness of their product. We already know how the lack of regulation turned out in one sector(smoking)--and we especially penalize them if they try to target children.
If anything, Magic teaches you that gambling is usually the worst way to get the card you want.
Back a while ago, I remembered my MtG friends complaining that they couldn't get some box (Modern Masters?) because they ran out immediately. I was at my hometown and ran into a dedicated gaming store owner who vastly overestimated the wealth of his rural clients in buying higher end MtG stuff (or maybe he didn't--I did spend a lot of money after all).
So, I bought all his stock--something like 10 boxes at almost $3000, IIRC, (there is more than one reason they call it cardboard crack) and brought them back.
I kept a couple boxes for gifts and sold the rest to very happy MtG players.
Every single box had a card at the time valued at more than the price of the whole box--plus a smattering of other fairly valuable cards.
Since then, my MtG friends make me pick out any "lottery" things they buy. My luck is decent, but it has never been that good again.
With lootboxes, you allow dynamic regulation, which can be abused. For example, a famous streamer is opening your lootboxes live? Give him better droprate so that he constantly opens "Epic" items, so that his followers think it's so easy and want to try it for themselves too. See a whale opening your lootboxes? Starve him when it comes to loot for a bit to make sure he buys more lootboxes.
And for the sellers of these physical items they also take up space, shelf space, and seeing a large number of extremely similar items for similar games in one retail location, might also clue you in faster on how ridiculous the thing is.
The physical items quickly run into physical limitations, which is good. The virtual items on the other hand have zero limitations, zero rules, it's all just pixels and database entries, and the presentation of what you "have" can be managed, hidden, manipulated, so that you still think you have nothing and need to buy more pixels.
That's 100% gambling. And the concept is soooo very similar to booster packs.
By all means educate your kids, but also make sure to protect them at their most vulnerable against an 'opponent' in a very uneven playing field.
As for your comparison to trading card game boosters: sure, there are some dimensions of the experience that are similar. Varying rarity and desirability of items contained in a purchased container that does not reveal its content until after purchase. There are also things that are vastly different. There are things like the virtualization of the transaction (spending online virtual coins, even though you purchased them with real money has been proven to be psychologically very different from a cash transaction), the sensory stimuli that are build into the opening rituals (real card packs at most can optimize the tearing experience and the smell of the freshly opened pack, which they do btw) which makes it a very different matter.
Sometimes there are real grey zones when it comes to the balance of overprotectiveness vs predation. It is not because the delineation can't be made extremely precise that we can't identify that some things are clearly outside of the acceptable middle.
IMHO lootboxes do not fall into this grey area, and are clearly a predatory mechanism that the most vulnerable should be prevented from having to be in a perpetual armsrace against.
Also, depending on the platform kids can spend their parents money with no oversight if their parents don't understand how in app payments work, whereas most parents would never send their small child to a store with their credit card unsupervised.
A few years ago i wanted to get my young sons a Disney Cars game to play on my iPad. There was a new one available, it was very pretty, but reasonable progress in the game depended on building your town using coins, and every single building you placed, had a timer counting down until it would disappear.
I don’t like wishing ill on other people, but it’s very hard to think kindly towards whomever designs games like that.
Obviously I immediately uninstalled the game before showing it to my boys. Zero dollars for Disney. If they’d just put a price tag on the whole experience, even if it had been quite high, I would have paid it.
Yes please! Or at least just the slot machine aspect. It would be great if you could buy a box of cards and know exactly what's inside.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/challe...
Video games are always available. You can purchase lootboxes 24/7 without any real effort. They use the same techniques to manipulate people as various casino gambling games. There have been players, especially some with learning difficulties, who haven't really been able to tell the difference between virtual currencies and real currencies and have ended up spending quite staggering amounts of money on lootboxes or virtual crap.
Pokemon cards, Panini football stickers and so on generally have to be purchased in a real world shop - either a newsagent or a comic book or games shop. There is a physical limit there, and a limit imposed by social reality. I'd like to think that if a twelve-year old walked into my local supermarket and wanted to buy £1,000 worth of Pokemon cards, the shop owner would probably query whether that's a good idea.
(There's also the issue that, strictly, by common law in England, any contract entered into by a minor for all but the most essential goods is voidable on the grounds of capacity.)
Lootboxes and gambling-like mechanics now exist in all sorts of games. The latest FIFA game has lootboxes and has been determined by PEGI to be rated '3+' and by the ESRB to be suitable for 'E' (Everyone). Up until they were patched out in response to critique, NBA 2K20's lootbox functionality took the form of literal slot reels, in a $60 premium game.
If a parent goes and buys children Pokemon cards or Panini stickers, they kind of know what's going on. If a parent goes and buys a game with zombies and chainsaws on the cover, and a Mature or Adults-Only rating from the ESRB/PEGI, they know their kids might see a fair amount of blood and guts.
No ordinary person who isn't familiar with the details of the video game industry thinks a FIFA or NBA game contains gambling. When faced with Doom, Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, something like FIFA or NBA 2K seems a relatively 'safe' option - except 3+/Suitable for Everyone rated games now have gambling in them.
For some real examples of how this is affecting people: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48925623
If I want a specific card, I'm not going to gamble with boosters, I'll just buy the card outright at the store.
And that's the primary reason I stopped playing online games like MTGA and Eternal: playing draft was too expensive and not as fun as playing in person. A lot of people online would "rare draft" instead of drafting to win, and the social aspect is completely missing compared to FNM. I think that's because you can't trade cards online, so your options are: pull the cards you want or use craft them, and rare drafting improves your ability to do both.
I'm not very happy about the direction online gaming is going, so I'll have to be very careful about how I introduce my children to the concept to help them see it for what it is.
I've never played them online and just assumed you would get access to all the cards so you could build your deck as you wished. You have to pay for the different cards?
Most collectible card games nowadays work like this, because it makes the publisher a lot more money than the model you describe.
Because I can buy the actual cards I want on the secondary market and avoid the bullcrap that is booster-packs.
Secondly: Drafting and "Sealed" decks are extremely fun. Being stuck with only 6-booster packs worth of cards (no trading allowed) is great. You have enough cards to probably make a good deck. MTG is well balanced that some of the best cards are common (Lightning Bolt, Doom Blade, etc. etc. are "power" commons that would be a first-pick in drafts). So the drafting / sealed format ensures that most decks have the important, powerful, cards needed to make a decent deck.
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You can't sell skins on a secondary market. Heck, you don't even own the skins in a video game.
In effect, MTG is fine because the company who makes MTG cards aren't predatory assholes. MTG could very well become predatory in the future, but they're actually very well balanced in my experience.
We really should.
Generally, buying and opening a $4 magic booster pack gives you a shot at a card worth $30+ (sometimes 10x more) on the secondary market, but it's a lot more likely you get card worth $1.
This is clearly gambling.
AFAIK, Wizards only gets away with this by pleading ignorance to the secondary market value of the cards and claiming the contents of each pack is worth the same amount. To this end, they can't discuss prices internally, even though they definitely know if a card is very powerful, it is likely to be sought after and expensive.
Now a lot of you will say, "No one opens packs for cards, people just buy the cards they need." Well, that is easy to say when you have $500 dollars of disposable income to put towards a single Magic deck (which will be obsolete within the year due to rotating sets). As a child, I couldn't afford all the cards I needed for my decks, so I bought packs and cracked them. Specifically, I would buy a box of booster packs and hope to get lucky. This is what all my friends did, and AFAIK continues to be extremely common among kids.
Moreover, despite feigned ignorance, they do know the relative desirability of each card in a given set. They test very heavily internally. Therefore, they can know how many copies the market will demand, and adjust the rarities accordingly to boost sales of booster packs to the secondary market (the card sellers are also buying bulk booster packs and cracking them to get their stock).
The current government seems willing to crack down on other areas of gambling, Ladbrokes have announced they are closing 700 shops because of tighter regulations around slot machines.
Or the countless families devastated by beanie baby addiction?
Me neither. Collectibles aren't the problem.
And it isn't gambling if you can't cash out. Why do you think there's so many casino games in the app stores even though digital gambling is illegal? Cuz they aren't gambling - they're hobbies. Thirty years ago you bought a $20 handheld slot device from the department store. Now you download an app.
In this context, we're defining gambling as exchanging money for a chance at receiving something of value. I think that's a reasonable definition and it certainly fits here.
If I go to McDonalds and there's a queue of people buying Happy Meals because they want a specific toy, and they either don't actually take the meal or it goes straight in the garbage, that's a huge problem -> gambling.
If I go to McDonalds and every kid just seems to be eating Happy Meals and enjoying whatever crap they got by chance, no problem -> not gambling.
You might argue, well, how can McDonalds control this? There are a bunch of things they can do to avoid causing the problem and thus avoid triggering an investigation. For example when somebody proposes "Ooh, let's make Toy #3 way better than the others, and then also only give it out 0.1% of the time" don't do that. That's going to trigger the problem. Or if a parent comes in and says they really need Toy #6 and they're willing to give you the price of a Happy Meal for that toy, you should say "Yes" and hand them the toy, if you insist they keep buying Happy Meals to have a chance you are encouraging the problem behaviour.
We see this stuff with other industries that trigger problem behaviour, we say "Don't do that" and we tell them things they should avoid to prevent the problem behaviour. Good actors work very hard to avoid a problem. Bad ones work very hard to avoid getting caught. Either way we did our best to protect people.
For example "Direct Sales" companies are told not to allow their "sales partners" or whatever they choose to call them to build up stock, because that's part of a negative behaviour. They're told to make sure those "sales partners" are deriving revenue from actually selling the product, which is ostensibly the point of their business, not from selling the opportunity to also become a partner, which would be a Pyramid Scheme, also negative behaviour. Invariably the people who own (and profit from) these companies insist the problem behaviour isn't what they want, and yet so often they do encourage it, because of course it makes them rich. Similarly with video game gambling.
While I despise many of the techniques used in modern games to make kids spend money, I also prefer them learning about these things in games, rather than in the real world (with much more money at stake).
One thing that cost us a lot of money for example are the "Panini collectible cards", that predate the computer era. I don't know if they are a thing in the US. Basically for soccer world cups and other events, you are supposed to collect all the pictures of all the players. You buy packs of 5 with random stickers, and you swap with your friends to fill the sticker book. It costs ridiculous amounts of money (easy to spend 100€ or more, on a book with some pictures). I grudgingly admitted to it, as it is almost a rite of passage in European childhoods and a learning experience to some degree.
I'm with you on the "what are the parents doing while this is going on?" camp.
My son, now 8, plays some games on the iPad. He's got a bunch of Lego games and a couple of multiplayer games but he cannot interact with the other players except to fight on the same team: so no chatting or anything like that. In addition, he's been told he's not buying anything in-game and we've locked down the iPad so that he can't... in fact it pops up a message if he clicks anything to do with buying.
We've used the default list of acceptable websites when you lock down the iPad. We may have removed a couple too and added Nickelodeon I think (for the games on it) and a couple of others but nothing like YouTube... that's pure shite imo!
He moans sometimes that his pal has Fortnite and he plays it at his house sometimes but he's not getting it at our house.
In all honesty a Google search and a bit of time is all it takes for parents to protect their kids online these days. No excuse.
I was never into these though, it's very much dependent on your own networks - is anyone else collecting them. I did have a short spat of Magic the Gathering though, but never to the point where I bought things off the trading market. I did sell off two rare cards for 30 odd euros apiece, which paid for most of what I had spent on cards. That was nice.
You can make the exact same argument for kids playing in online (or offline, really) casinos. And yet it is fairly widely accepted that this isn't a good idea. Online casinos have to jump through a million hoops in terms of age and identity verification. Where's the difference?
I think I might actually have played a few slot machines in my youth. But pocket money was just enough for one round or so.
I also plan on teaching my kids how to play Poker, I think it is a survival skill. When shit hits the fan, maybe they can play Poker with the captain of a ship to win a trip to safety.
The report isn't just about the money being spent. It's also about introducing gambling mechanics to children at a young age.
> acknowledge the distinction between licensed online gambling, social casino-style games that “have the look and feel of traditional gambling” but may not be licensed as such, and games containing features akin to gambling as one aspect of the overall product or game experience rather than the predominant quality.132 Our inquiry has focused on the latter, although the other two are both important issues that merit further consideration.
> 69.Many games contain features that are highly similar to conventional gambling products, without gambling being the primary aim of the game. However, there are concerns that being exposed to such features from a young age might normalise gambling. One parent expressed concern that the game Bricky Farm, which is rated suitable for children, contains a gambling-like feature. He told us:
> > Most worrying for me is a roulette style wheel mini-game whereby differing amounts of gems can be won for further advancement. This is where the game could become addictive to someone with a susceptibility but more than that it is introducing children as young as 4 to the ‘thrill’ of gambling.133
> 70.The parent’s concern is supported by Dr David Zendle’s acknowledgment “that a really good predictor of problem gambling is the social acceptance and availability” of it.134 Indeed, the Gambling Commission told us that the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling expressed concerns in response to the Online Harms White Paper about the associations between “gambling lite behaviours and children’s behaviours”.135 Furthermore, Brad Enright from the Gambling Commission told us that even when games do not meet the regulatory threshold for gambling, but contain gambling-like features, the regulator does:
> > not think the current age ratings are in line with public expectation, so that should not be available for four-plus or even 12-plus.136
Most games have a luck component, after all. Even Monopoly, to name one popular board game.
I don't like Roulette Wheels in my children's games, ad I have certainly seen things I don't like. For example "garden scapes" even sends notifications on the tablet computer, that new "loot" is available (I forgot how they called it).
Nevertheless, I see it as an opportunity to talk with my kids about such strategies.
You can literally spend tens of thousands of dollars in FIFA - most of these games don’t incorporate any kind of cap. Even Apex Legends recently had a limited time promotion that would require in excess of $200 to get everything.
That’s right up there with gambling, cars, technology, and significant others when it comes to real life spending for most people.
Around $150 CAD gets you around 100,000 in-game coins considering average yield from loot boxes. A player like Ronaldo costs 2.5 to 3 million coins (aka $3750 to $4500) for the first 4-5 months of each game cycle. And he's not even the most expensive card in the game, some cards trade for 15 million coins. To unlock all the top players for your team, you'd probably have to spend way over $10k. To top if off, every Sept. a new game comes out and you have start from scratch
I think the market will react, for example by preferring phones and providers that prevent dirty tricks for ripping of customers.
It should be, but the kids pay the price. Most parents don't care because the gambling is disguised as a game, they make it hard to track spending by making you buy and spend fake money, this again reinforces the idea that it's not real money, it's all just a fun game.
> I also prefer them learning about these things in games, rather than in the real world (with much more money at stake).
The money, games and people that are affected all exist in the real world, just because it's themed as a game does nothing to prevent the harm gambling can cause.
Loot boxes aren't cheap [0] estimated $50 billion spent on loot boxes, there is serious money at stake comparable with the gambling industry [1] estimated $73 billion spent on online gambling.
Game developers are able to get away with this practice because they push the idea that it's all just fun and games but its not, they have taken a gambling mechanic like for like its gambling.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/04/17/video-game... [1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-online-gambl...
One thing I will say is there is a big difference between the digital version of these loot box/card pack mechanics and the physical ones; it's way easier to just keep buying the digital packs, especially for kids who may have a loose grasp of money matters anyways. There's no total racking up where they can see it and their account will generally be link to their parents card where if they want to keep buying physical packs it'd be their own (probably physical) money.
As for limiting that spending some places make it hard to limit the amount spent on child accounts until quite recently.
The magical credit card fairy. Parents who aren't into gaming or technology may not be aware of the risks that these games pose, and therefore are unprepared to properly supervise their children when playing such games. Historical methods used to signal parents like ESRB / PEGI ratings are deliberately unhelpful in the regard as they draw no distinction between gambling mechanics and more straightforward purchases. And even then those are fine-print addendums that don't impact the actual age rating. So you wind up with a situation where games with gambling mechanics are rated by PEGI as being suitable for children 3+, leading many to be unaware of the risks a particular game poses. In comparison, a game that introduces "real" gambling with cashout possibilities gets an "Adults Only" ESRB rating as a matter of course. And even those flimsy addendums are actively circumvented by game companies who will wait a month or so after launch to add in the gambling features, after the game has already been rated and warning labels have already been printed.
In contrast, things like card packs or stickers are far easier to control. You give your child $20 and they can waste it as they please. Or they ask you for something and you buy it. Almost everybody intuitively understands that if you give your credit card to the child then you're playing with fire. Setting up a payment method in a game system is more risky in that credit cards are typically the only option (plus store gift cards that parents may not be aware of). Even so, it is not at all obvious to many just how much you can spend in a game. A child might ask for a $5 pack of loot boxes, and it seems reasonable. Then your numbers are in. If your child can then social engineer your password from you or get you to check the "don't ask for password" box then they have free reign. You might even knowingly do it because, again, it is not obvious that you can even spend that kind of money in a game.
It's a win for everyone.
Publishers are reportedly getting paid up front so they don't have to worry about not making their money back on their investments.
Consumers avoid the above mention pitfalls of modern mobile gaming.
Apple is "commoditizing its complements" and making iOS/MacOS/iPadOS/tvOS a more attractive platform for casual gaming.
EDIT: Corrected the price is $4.99 not $5.99.
Minor correction: It's $4.99 per month
With DLC gambling (which is what lootboxes really are), however, there are many problems:
1) the device OS manufacturer (Google/iOS) can go out of business, rendering the money one spent on the collectibles worthless
2) the application developer not providing updates for the software to run on new OSes or revoking the software outright, leading to the same result
3) there is no real transferability - at best one can restore their account on a different device, at worst (like in Train Conductor) there is no transferability at all. Moving DLCs across platforms (Android <-> iOS <-> PC <-> consoles) is extremely rare. Selling off the collected DLCs is not possible anywhere.
Non-transferrable rewards exploit the same weakness of the human psycology, but offer even less in return.
Both kinds of gambling in games should be regulated. It's not easy to define what constitutes a lootbox, and what kind of randomized output is safe. The industry will probably argue that the lootboxes are actually randomized content, not prizes.. From that point of view they sell a non-transferrable experience (service), not a tangible item (product).
Children of younger ages shouldn't be exposed to this dopamine inducing idea similar to that of slot machines.
Possible there should be an option to self-define a spending limit (per month, day, week) that cannot be increased immediately.
I think they are popular with parents, too.
Children are not the only target - far from, but the argument is easier to make. Video Game industry suffers massively, lacking good content as loot boxes dominate most popular titles - the freemium model. Kids would like to play what their friends play and often online - the latter statement is not limited to kids at all.
Also a parent is extremely unlikely to limit phone usable (prime target) to no inet connection. It's doable of course but it's futile and the kids feel excluded.
And they don't even HAVE to be good - I mean pubg looks and runs like shit but it was ridiculously popular. Fortnite's popular battle royale mode was more like a weekend project (iirc), but it had a benefit over pubg in that it had a big professional studio behind it that was able to scale its production up enormously once Fortnite took off.
And Apex was developed from scratch (or well, probably based off of a lot of work done for Titanfall) and intent. Another example is Overwatch, which was salvaged from the remains of Blizzard's Project Titan.
Anyway long story short, a lot of these games are really really good. And that's also why they have microtransactions (according to the manufacturers / publishers) - they take a lot longer and cost a lot more to make. They (feel like they) have to earn money from a game for at least one year, preferably more after the initial release / purchase. (one year for the annual game series - CoD, Assassin's Creed, FIFA, etc, more for the longer term ones that will likely not get a sequel like Apex, Fortnite, even Minecraft).
If those games cost a lot of money to make, perhaps it is fair to ask for money for some items.
But what is being called out here as _gambling_ is that you pay your money and then you get something random. It will probably be something you don't want, it might even be something you consider utterly useless.
Example: You want the Funky Guitar for Tara, your favourite character in a game. A Funky Guitar is "often" found in a Cluster Artefact the game tells you. For $10 you can buy 480 diamond blibbets. For 600 diamond blibbets you can buy a Cluster Artefact, so you give them $20, now you have 960 diamond blibbets, you can buy a Cluster Artefact. The Cluster Artefact is then smashed open by your character to reveal... a Top Hat wearable only by Steve, a character you hate playing. Too bad, buy more blibbets and maybe Tara will get lucky next time?
Gambling. A bad idea for grown-ups, obviously not something we should encourage children to do.
> 69.Many games contain features that are highly similar to conventional gambling products, without gambling being the primary aim of the game. However, there are concerns that being exposed to such features from a young age might normalise gambling. One parent expressed concern that the game Bricky Farm, which is rated suitable for children, contains a gambling-like feature. He told us:
> > Most worrying for me is a roulette style wheel mini-game whereby differing amounts of gems can be won for further advancement. This is where the game could become addictive to someone with a susceptibility but more than that it is introducing children as young as 4 to the ‘thrill’ of gambling.133
My grandmother hat a toy Roulette table, we liked to play with it occasionally when we visited her. I don't have a gambling addiction. I even gave up World of Warcraft after 2 weeks. (Social Media, however...).
We have at least one game that sends notifications on the tablet "the Roulette guy is here again, check out your winnings of the day". Of course that is awful. On the other hand, it is presumably limited (not infinite spins of the wheel every day), and also, I can talk to my kids.
> I don't have a gambling addiction.
We're not talking about you. We're talking about a population of about 15 million people.
The correct solution is for governments to ban companies shoving gambling at kids.
The games industry also goes to great lengths to obfusticate and hide the mechanics - it is truly predatory.
I agree that regulation is no panacea, but in this instance, combined with additional approaches such as education I belive it to be a suitable approach.
I find it tedious to find the in app purchase amounts of an app or game before purchasing, and even then you’ve no idea what it’s for.
Gambling industry is ==heavily== regulated throughout EU (Swiss too) for instance to a point each slot game [very similar to chance items] is reported to the regulator (Italy, Spain) in close to real time. Responsible gaming options and self exclusions are available everywhere, incl. state-wide options.
Also gambling tends to 'enjoy' very heavy taxation.
Side note. Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. The same way democracy does not mean that majority can do everything ignoring minority. Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist. Some people believe that ethics can be replaced by law and regulations. To some extent this can be true, but the law will never cover all aspects of human life and in the society that accepts unethical behavior both democracy and free market will rot.
In real markets, there are feedback loops that are much stronger than individual ethics. Under intense enough competitive pressure, unethical actors outcompete ethical actors, because the former can sacrifice more human values.
> in the society that accepts unethical behavior both democracy and free market will rot
Unfortunately, in a society that is less accepting of unethical behavior, that is still only one input to the economy as a system, and to the extent the society is malleable, the input may diminish.
Consider the following mental picture: imagine society's ethical standards as a tilted landscape, through which the river of market activity flows. In a maximally amoral society, the landscape would be so that the river flows straight. The more ethical/moral concern the society has, the more meandering the river becomes. Now two effects happen: one, a strong enough river flow will outright cut corners and flow over some bends. This can be compared to companies acting unethically and getting away with it. Second, the current will erode the landscape over time, bringing it closer to the amoral straight-line terrain. This can be compared to effects of competitive pressure described above, when viewed over longer time spans.
It's not about what I personally view as ethical or not[0]; here I'm talking about the market as if it was a fire. You don't act surprised that fire will burn everything combustible it can get to.
As for "no more than sum of decisions", I disagree. Economic forces are way more powerful than any individual or group of individuals. Individuals reacting to them in aggregate give rise to behavior that's - to my current belief - best described as amoral, profit-seeking, non-human entities, essentially the closest humanity got to creating an AI.
--
[0] - if we go there, I hold that most advertising is deeply unethical.
I'd say it's systems thinking 101 - the behavior of the system is nothing like the behavior of individual components, and is defined primarily by the interactions that happen.
>Under intense enough competitive pressure, unethical actors outcompete ethical actors
This isn't what actually happens in reality because highly unethical behavior is distasteful to most people and for the most part people don't want to work alongside unethical people. Your river analogy has similarly flawed premises that make it hard to even engage with.
Yes, and because of that, nothing highly unethical ever happens on the market. No wide-scale environmental destruction, no robbing whole populations of their livelihoods, no murders for control over assets, or just to cut down on safety-related costs. And definitely no exposure of children to gambling.
> Your river analogy has similarly flawed premises that make it hard to even engage with.
Can you name these faulty premises?
This is quite the leap. The world is a big place full of people and of course there will always be unethical people doing unethical things somewhere, that's a fact of life. But you musn't be so cynical to think that the outliers are the norm when they aren't. If unethical behavior was the norm society wouldn't function, which is what the person you first replied to said and what the video I posted also said.
- When writing the paragraph you quoted the beginning of, I had mostly particular situations involving large corporations in mind. You see such shenanigans featured regularly on HN, and if people are outraged, they aren't really surprised.
- People I know personally worked in "pedestrian", small-business areas like e-commerce, customer service, shipping&handling, grocery stores, restaurants and medical care. I've heard plenty about practices that are common in these businesses - like bribing people to remove negative ratings, blatant copyright violation on promotional material, washing stale food with detergent to remove the smell and selling it as fresh, microwaving food and adding burn marks and then selling it as grilled, etc. Minor and major issues.
- Then there's plenty of companies like Groupon or AirBnB that an ethical person would shut down, or at least heavily rework their business model, upon learning how big a negative impact they have on the market at large.
- Then there's the whole advertising industry, which turns a lot of otherwise friendly interactions into adversarial experiences.
A lot of this is caused not (just) by ethical deficiency of people involved, but through market pressure. Consider grocery stores washing stale food: I don't know of a worker who's happy about it (but they do this, or else they lose jobs). I'm convinced managers aren't happy about it either - but they have an inventory that will otherwise go to waste, and they need to figure something out or else it's their job.
My standard of ethics is that of friendly cooperation. That standard is routinely broken in interactions with businesses, big and small (and I do my best to keep trading with businesses that do not break that standard). Thus I conclude it's the market at large, and not some occasional bad actor.
They can also become "successful" betters starting out from nothing, and in such a case I would be suprised if your typical parrent would notice (see csgo/dota skins)
As a baseline, games with gambling elements will be more profitable than games without, ceteris paribus. You have two competing effects here: games with gambling are better able to monetize their players, but might find it harder to attract these players in the first place if the gambling element is known and understood by the players beforehand. Unfortunately, that "if" is trivially eliminated with marketing, through popularization (people start to play despite their knowledge of gambling mechanisms) and disinformation (people don't know about the gambling elements up front, or about their true impact).
This is the case of the market exploiting a quirk of human psyche. Like always, it will stop doing so once exploitation becomes less profitable than not doing it. For that to happen, new costs related to gambling mechanisms must appear that aren't there before - hence the proposal for regulatory intervention, as this is the standard way for market economies to adjust the costs landscape.
(Regulatory solutions impose additional overhead on the market, and it would be more profitable to everyone if people voluntarily refrained from an activity instead of having that activity banned. However, a different quirk of human psyche precludes the market from ever doing that.)
On a free market, if someone has it and someone else wants it, that's all that's needed. A truly free market can not self-regulate against gambling, drugs, child pornography, or slavery.
> What is the competitive advantage of not providing chance items?
Engaging on these practices isn't exactly riskless. State legislators could decide that "chance items" are, in fact "gambling". And that your company has been doing that to children. So a lot of "fun" can ensue: mass-action lawsuits, cessation of activity in a whole country, incarcelation, etc.
The "competitive advantage" is that your competitors might simply become illegal.
Going through this thread, I am softer on the view, but I think there is two big differences between what most people here are saying. First, with cards, you have a physical exchange of money---kids see that money going away and they can't just hit "OK" in a game again to spend money. Second, with online games like demonbae mentioned, you are spending your own money, not your parents money. YOU reap the consequences, not your parents bank account.
I'm less convinced these need to be banned, but I still don't see any upside for people who are not benefiting by getting as much money as possible to be spent in their game.
My exposure to these things isn't through any free apps, but Minecraft. The biggest server by player number has 9 different types of boxes for sale from $3 for 10 [1]. Some of them guarantee a number of boxes at a high 'level' of reward - this seems like reinforcing gambling as something that is certain to be beneficial?
Edit: it's to its
You might win a price every few minutes. It makes people pretty addictive to the games
I couldn't help saying that it's hard for children to not like them when the other side is whole departments of grown-ups doing nothing but engineering the best ways to hack a child's brain :/
EDIT: The above link is not the trailer itself, but a video discussing the trailer, from an independent game critic who has been speaking out against gambling mechanics in computer games for many years, long before it became a big issue.
Of course it's completely wilful.
You will make more money for the company if you're addicted!
Facebook, YouTube etc. are all doing the same: the more you use it, the more money they make.
Until the law intervenes, they'll keep doing it.
This must be sarcastic, the entire monetarization model depends on being gambling and -unregulated- gambling at that. No laws, no deposit/spending limits, no gameplay limits, no age restrictions, no regulatory reports, no compliance, no declared 'return to player' (save China), No Taxation. It's a loophole.
From the report:
"62.We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape. For example, bank statements showed that in one day the individual spent £247.95 by making five separate payments to the company. The resulting debt caused significant financial harm for both the player and his parents, whose evidence attributed the situation to the fact that Jagex has no limits on the amount of time or money players can spend on the game.118 This demonstrated to us that even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas."
You don't take £50,000 from a player without realising something's fucked up.
Many years ago, when social media was just starting, maybe somebody thought "Wouldn't it be cool if we could share photos so that we knew what our friends were doing." At the time they might not have forseen all the negative outcomes, the social anxiety, addiction, body dysmorphia, bullying, etc... caused by our buggy psychological processes.
In a similar way I was wondering if the first developer that thought about adapting the normal random item drop in a game and instead making it a purchasable mystery box, actually realised that this fits the definition of gambling and the myriad legal and moral problems that introduced.
In the present day I'm sure there are plenty who know exactly what they're doing or are willfully ignoring the moral issues around loot boxes. But quite often how something is today doesn't fully explain how it started.
I found this remarkable: "‘Lack of honesty and transparency’ reported among representatives of some games and social media companies in giving evidence."
Some quotes from the report:
> 62.We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape. For example, bank statements showed that in one day the individual spent £247.95 by making five separate payments to the company. The resulting debt caused significant financial harm for both the player and his parents, whose evidence attributed the situation to the fact that Jagex has no limits on the amount of time or money players can spend on the game.118 This demonstrated to us that even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas.
You don't take £50,000 from a player in microtransactions without realising something is fucked up.
> 65.With so many games featuring microtransactions, we asked other leading games companies what they do to prevent people from spending more than they are able to in a game. Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite: Battle Royale, said that although it has no specific cap on how much people can spend, purchases are limited to what is in the virtual shop and so the maximum anyone could spend would be about $200 a day.124 The company’s director of marketing suggested that it is an individuals’ responsibility to manage spending and that the company provides tools, including parental controls, “to allow players to make those decisions for themselves.”125 However, as we have already examined, parental controls are of limited effectiveness when it comes to adult players.
> 66.The games companies we spoke to were generally reluctant to accept that they might have a role or responsibility to intervene proactively if a player’s spending fell outside of normal patterns. Moreover, they said that it would be too difficult to determine what level of spending might be harmful. Alex Dale, senior vice president for King, the makers of Candy Crush Saga, told us that while it used to alert users when they reached a certain spending threshold, it had stopped doing so because of player feedback. He told us:
>> we would send an e-mail out when a player’s spend was $250 in a week for the first time. It was an e-mail that said, “We notice you are enjoying the game a lot at the moment. Are you sure you are happy with this?” […] We got back, “I wouldn’t spend the money if I didn’t have it” and things like, “I’m fine, please leave me alone”. We felt it was too intrusive so we stopped doing that.126
> 67.Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones told us that the games industry might learn from approaches in the gambling industry, which has much clearer, industry-wide protocols enabling people to self-exclude from spending.127 She told us that “gaming is several years behind gambling in relation to protecting the vulnerable”, a situation that the then Minister described, if true, as “lamentable”, adding that “the industry has a job to do.”128 When we asked Neil McArthur, Chief Executive of the Gambling Commission, whether games companies should be obligated to monitor how much people spend, identify people with a problem and proactively support them, he responded that, “this is an area where progress needs to be made.”129 His colleague Brad Enright went on to tell us that self-exclusion measures to protect players “could be adopted by the video games industry voluntarily to address some of the concerns about excessive time [and] excessive expenditure.”130 Yet the Royal College of Psychiatrists goes further in suggesting that:
> > There should be no in game spending by children. Children are less prepared to deal with the potentially addictive nature of some modern computer games and are less able to make informed decisions about spending.131
Apple, Google, and game makers need to understand what's happening here. This is a push towards regulation. They need to implement pretty effective self regulation or UK government will impose strong regulation upon the industry.
I'm pretty sure Apple understands. That seems like the whole point behind their new game subscription deal - the games included aren't allowed to have microtransactions. On the other end of things their screen time and ask to buy features are global, powerful, and not super hard to discover.
Google has similar parental control tools, though that's tempered by the fact that they can't be made global. The Fortnite port on Android, for instance, completely side steps it.
That said, I'm pretty sure neither stores make distinction between gambling and other forms of in app purchases.
But in reality a ban prevents regulation and will usher in an era of illegal underground loot-box mods with hyper effective sublimal hypno-tech.
Well I mean the prohibtion of kitten-huffing should be example enough of the consequences of an unregulated drugs bazaar.
Better to have government issued loot boxes provided to children at school, like the UK lottery or the sugar-tax
/Sarcasm
But seriously the way things play out on the street is rarely how they look on paper as idealistic laws.
The solution ?
A little of both ;-)