[flagged]
Gambling companies, drug dealers, and scammers share a business model that is only profitable when preying on the vulnerable (and causing more suffering in the world), yet they hide behind the excuse that it’s up to the individual to self-regulate.
The people that can self-regulate are not their target audience! Their “tactics” are engineered to take advantage of the vulnerable, and not your average person. And they get away with it because of the American self-centered individualist mindset.
Second, addiction suggests lack of full consent.
And clearly there are negative externalities to such a choice. That person may have a family, other debts they don't pay, may make poorer life choices as a result of blowing their paycheck , may choose violence or drugs or self-harm ... most of which will cost taxpayers and other third parties.
Also "enjoy" is a loaded term.
Also, just as likely this person is already abusing their body with drugs.
This planet is HARD and not every thing born on it is going to have a good time. Ask the squirrels my neighbors shoot at if life is fair.
A more accurate devils advocate could be one who suggest that forms of manipulation and coercion should be allowed because its physically possible in reality to do so.
As for when coercion is used... I don't think it's useful to play devils advocate for coercion. That one is settled, everyone already agrees that coercion is bad.
Protecting the weak is both a noble and selfish endeavour: it fosters a habitat in which you and your children will enjoy living so much more. A lot of people have completely lost sight of this and now they're walled up, gunned up, copped up, screaming about crime and unemployment and bootstraps.
Tell people what design choices were taken to maximize profits, what specialists were consulted, what went on behind closed doors, what is the research and statistics on gambling and addiction and how they used it to waste people's lifes and drain their money.
Tell them that and see how your "business" is doing.
Yes, we have agency. But it's not absolute. For instance, you don't have the agency not to use the toilet for days on end (or end up going somewhere less sanitary) if you're eating and drinking.
If you're on your third day without food, you don't have complete agency not to eat whatever food is put in front of you, even if there's some negative consequence to it. Yes, technically you can choose not to. But even if you know, without a doubt, that you will have another opportunity to get food before you would literally starve to death, there are biological and neurological processes at work that make it very, very, very hard to choose not to eat the food in front of you.
I have ADHD. In a very real sense, I am "addicted to doing engaging tasks". I don't always have full agency to choose to do a task that I know will be stressful and unrewarding. My brain treats it as if it is painful and dangerous.
Many games create a dopamine loop that is very hard to break out of. Many game companies have done neurological research to understand how to make that even stronger.
Agency is not a binary thing: you aren't either completely free of outside influence, or completely under the control of another. There are influences all around us all the time, some of which are heavy and obvious like near-starvation, others of which are much more subtle like advertising.
However much you may think you are immune to outside influences, you're not. None of us are. That's just an undeniable fact of how human brains work.
I understand that we do not live in a vacuum. Yes of course we respond to stimuli, that's part of what it means to be alive. What I am advocating for is more agency in your own life.
You are the one in the drivers seat. Act like it and your life will be better. Pretend you don't have agency and your life will get worse. It's really that simple. I think that's why your original comment triggered me so much.
Aside from that, people like you make me sick. Acting like everyone who has an addiction, or a mental illness, just has to "act like they're in the driver's seat" and everything will be all better.
It just makes it painfully obvious how privileged you are, and how you take that privilege as proof of your rightness and completeness—and other people's lack of that privilege as proof of their inferiority.
Question. The addict you mentioned. Do you believe they more or less likely to recover if they believe they have agency rather than believing "informed choice is an illusion" as the other commenter so eloquently put it?
The question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious.
Choice is either fully in our hands, or fully an illusion.
We either have full agency, or no agency.
I understand full well about the importance of a growth vs entity mindset, but that's not going to stop the very powerful dopamine-seeking urge of the brain. At best it can keep you moving forward toward something that will (eg, rehab, ADHD medications, parental controls that prevent you using gambling apps on your own phone). But unless you've experienced one of these genuine mental disorders, preaching at people who do or have had them about how easy it is to get out of it, you just have to believe you can do it, is nothing but condescending bullshit. However many "vices" you have.
I never said it was easy, and I never even said you can get out of it at all. I simply said you're better off believing one thing over another.
>that's not going to stop the very powerful dopamine-seeking urge of the brain
This is our fundamental disagreement. Plenty of people have their urges under control. Believing you are somehow "different" or your brain is "broken" is the ultimate toxic mindset. You can't fix your life until you fix your mind
Bye now.
> As long as it's not a forced choice, the user/player downloads the game at their own will, knows exactly what they are getting
Most ads are not about informing us but manipulating into buying their crap.
You would also need to prove to me that a deterministic universe where individuals do not have the capacity to calculate the future is somehow distinct from a non-deterministic universe from the individual's perspective
Quitting smoking is one of the most difficult things for someone to do. Some people can go cold turkey and power their way through it. However most people struggle because of their body's biochemistry. When discussing this topic I've noticed common responses along the lines of, 'that person didn't actually want to quit', or 'that person didn't want to quit strongly enough'. Yet I see it as their limited agency was unable to overcome their body's physical dependency.
As for the random thing, it isn't random. You fit a profile to spend 1 time every 3 months and it's been 3 months since your last purchase. "Random" can be stacked against you. The next player who by age and demography shall never spend, he will get favorable "RNG". You are far behind, do you even belong in this clan?
It's similar to the reasons we chose to eliminate certain classes of drugs. They cause significantly more harm than good, so what is lost by limiting the ability to produce and sell them is less important. Of course, there are often problems with the way such bans are enforced (the disastrous effects of the war on drugs, or prohibition before it, are hard to overstate). But that doesn't mean that there aren't workable ways to regulate such things without being so vicious to the victims (as can be seen in the much more successful bans on the sale of many other substances, such as non-addictive prescription medications or weapons-grade chemicals).
But of course the customer's going to lose. They never had a chance to begin with. Regulate these like we do gambling. Because that's what it is under the hood.
I'm not saying curing addiction is easy, yet if they have that much power, they can focus their efforts there.
But it's not just addiction that needs to be solved for videogames like these, it's highly targeted psychological manipulation they're employing (for example, "don't be a default"). That's not even counting the targeting of various age groups.
It shouldn't magically be an issue when the company provides gambling games.
This isn't even getting into "nanny state" policies. It is in the best interest of everyone to not go down a lot of these "free market" directions. Folks like to bitch about regulations, but everyone wants to have safe water. This is not much different. For another very real and recent example, consider the peril of allowing the free market to ignore earthquake building codes.
"could the devs really be held responsible for anything" - Yes.
"It's a free market" - algorithms which can hijack the mind are a form of coercion. A free market is roughly defined as voluntary exchange without coercion. That's why we ban children from gambling.
"playing by the playbook" - society gets to define ethical constraints in which companies must comply. We learn this in business ethics. eg: Labor rights, safety, health, etc.
I think everyone here knows (including me OP) more or less how algorithms manipulate people.
So did people manipulate others into buying things that they don't need for centuries without technology too.
It doesn't have anything to do with algorithms, it's just automating an existing process.
With the same logic we should practically ban every commercial and ad, as they are trying to manipulate us to buy something to some extent.
Nevertheless, I think many people can agree with you that action should be taken when one party is no longer able to make a choice. Perhaps it's fine for gamers in 1st world countries to choose how they waste their money.
What isn't okay is when people have no other choice but some shady practice like the company that employees them also setting their rent prices.
Something to think about - the number of anti-corruption laws on the books of a given country/state/city is a reliable proxy for how much corruption is there. The reason being, non-corrupt jurisdictions don't need those laws.
There is a very real (but arguably small) problem with phasing out laws which have long outlived their usefulness. These occasionally get used as a sneaky way to either escape prosecution, or prosecute someone who otherwise has done nothing wrong by modern standards.
Mostly the things that are harmful to society. Turning children into gambling addicts seems like an easy target. Kids have no defenses against even unsophisticated manipulation and don't always know what's real money or just part of the game. I've seen adults unclear on that sometimes!
Choice is great, but it has to be a free choice. You can't have that when you're being manipulated and deceived. Forcing games that feature gambling with real money to be transparent about their odds would help.
> People like their cars. I don't think they want this
"They would like subways more"
> Are you sure about that? Phoenix is geographically massive. People tow their boats, horses, and trailers to remote places here
"That's not very green of them"
Makes me sick. Its basically impossible to stop because you have a Trillion dollar corporation with psychologists, marketers, and astroturfers who's job it is to reinforce the brand with persuasive techniques.
Today all of this stuff seems fine under the guise of 'free will'.
In the long term future this will look ignorant as we find out the brain merely responds to impulses.
Everything one does to themselves or to their own body should be legal as long as they don't harm others.
I never support narcotic use, but I equally think government should never have rights over what people put into their own body either.
Or maybe prohibition?
War on terror?
The government could easily require a gambling license (or a "random gaming" or a "f2p game" license or whatever form it takes) to be able to distribute a certain type of game which would be legally defined. Then, they could impose requirements like age checking for such games, and companies who failed to respect the requirements would lose the right to distribute these games in that country. International treaties could be used to extend this ban across a wider economic area.
Note that there already exist laws that define precisely what types of games require a gambling license, extending that to a new type of game has to be done carefully, but is definitely achievable. As just a low-effort pass at it, we could require a license for any game that includes a way for the player to pay to have some advantage in-game, where this advantage is obtained via random chance after the payment is made. An advantage could be defined as any change to the player that statistically increases the player's chances of reaching a win state.
As long as it's not a forced choice, the user buys the drugs at their own will, knows exactly what they are getting and the odds of addiction (if the chemist clearly states that, say, there is 1/1000 of "being addicted" some random thing and the does is indeed randomized to produce that outcome 1/1000 of the time fairly), and even the outcome is not real money, could the dealers really be held responsible for anything?
It's a free market and someone did a terrible choice. Condolences to their family, yet... As a for profit company it's perfectly normal for a company to follow tactics that guide the user into spending, it's called, well, business.
So we should sue everybody? Of course not. Purdue Pharma is just playing by the playbook, which is perfectly normal for a company to maximize the profit. As long as they don't outright lie like saying you can get some addicted 1/1000000 of chance but it's actually 1/10, they should be fine.
The same applies: your body, your money, your choices.
It shouldn't be anyone else's business as long as you don't, say, do drugs and physically attack someone.
I see no reasons why games designed to extract wealth from gambling addicts should be freely available to anybody (including children) and why anybody should be allowed to spend any amount of money on them.