Comment by SnowProblem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SnowProblem | Hacker News Reader

Like many other commentors here, I grew up playing primarily skill-based video games, like Legend of Zelda, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Counter-Strike, StarCraft. It was wanting to make these games that led me to become a software developer. But games were different. Even a game like Pokemon, which has a few loot-box mechanics, was only mildly addicting. The first game I remember being extremely addicting was World of Warcraft. It became a habit to simply click the icon as soon as the desktop loaded, and although I do have many good memories, I also know friends that played 8 hours a day for years whose lives look worse off to me. Through loot-boxes, social scores, and now mobile, addiction has been perfected.

And yet, we are not robots. We make our own choices. Parents set limits and create alternatives, and schools and community groups do too. Games also simply get old after a while. Anyone who really wants to stop a gaming addiction can stop it - it is only a question of will. So I find what the CCP is doing abhorrently wrong because their actions create the very dependence on government, and the removal of will at any other level, that perpetuates themselves as a solution. The Western way is messier for sure, but if we want freedom, we have to be OK with mistakes.

> Anyone who really wants to stop a gaming addiction can stop it - it is only a question of will.

| sed "s/gaming/drug/"

> The Western way is messier for sure, but if we want freedom, we have to be OK with mistakes.

Syncs with the outcome of prohibition.

Free will is a pretty religious and naive concept, IMO. A way to phrase what you're saying is that a laissez-faire society gives everyone more net utility than the up-front utility gains of banning all sources of harm. Then it's up to everyone's imagination to see how/personal relationship to harmful things/moral arrogance to say yea or nay.

> But games were different.

They were, and I wonder why. If you run some open source 16-bit gaming console emulator, you also know that there won't be in-game purchases, because it just wasn't a possibility. Perhaps it was a technological sweet spot that limited capitalist exploitation within video games?

The games still had ethical issues then, like, it's actually difficult to find non-violent games. Even Zelda is addictive in its immersiveness and the game mechanics rely a lot on assaulting baddies.

> The first game I remember being extremely addicting was World of Warcraft. It became a habit to simply click the icon as soon as the desktop loaded,

This is interesting to read, that you as a ex-gameaholic disagree with this law. I wonder whether it could really be the forces that are moving game development (as in money, as in capitalism) that are the real problem because they profit from creating addiction, rather than computer games as such. One can only wonder what computer games would look like in a world not dominated by neoliberalism, and whether a healthier game development model is possible?

I am reminded of this longer comment that was removed from the Godot source code recently:

> A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class.

From https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/commit/b872229427d...

A few possible causes:

- Game prices have not kept up with inflation.

- Games are more expensive than ever before.

- More games now have online multiplayer, requiring constant funding.

I have family and friends who work in the game industry, and I can tell you it is none of the above.

Here is the answer: Crappy gatcha games and skinner boxes branded with a popular IP marketed towards kids are:

1. Much easier to make

2. Makes A TON MORE MONEY.

A gatcha game is basically a slot machine, which is basically a website with a fancy front-end. This means you can shovel out these games with low-skill labor, make your money, and then re-skin the same website with another property.

A lot of the gaming companies that used to be owned by a visionary leader are now owned by VC firms that don't give a shit about games, they give a shit about the money machine.

So they produce the same crap over and over again, employing behavioral psychologists to develop the most addicting loop possible.

Should we ban this?

I don't think it is realistic to ban, honestly.

I think there is probably some precedent from gambling laws we could apply to protect minors from predatory behaviour.

Games are more expensive to make and prices have not kept up with inflation, but units sold are at least two orders of magnitude than they were twenty years ago, and individual free-to-play titles have playercounts that dwarf the total userbase of all games at the turn of the millennium.

Multiplayer does not require constant funding, unless you want to lock the game down so you can sell microtransactions. I can fire up the original Quake or UT99, pick a server, and play online; it doesn't cost id a cent. On the other hand, I recently tried playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist again, a game released in 2013, and their centralized online services don't work.

Developers have made an effort to keep players from hosting their own servers, which has introducing many new problems. For example, the lack of community moderation / 'toxicity', homogenization of gameplay options within a title to support a matchmaking pool, and stagnation due to lack of new maps, modes, and mods that used to be created by the community.

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