https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/03/24/liter...
Whether it's irresponsible to let kids play the same games as their friends is of course up to individual parents. I think it's possible to both be exposed to these types of traps and learn how to avoid them. They can't gamble without access to money from parents anyway.
Fortnite is another excellent example of introducing gambling to minors with their sales of loot boxes, which the FTC has fined for $245M. Recently one of my children asked to play Genshin Impact because their classmates were all hooked on the game. I was firm in saying that I did not want my children to play gacha games which were designed to fool players into gambling on loot boxes and paying to win. Instead I tried to get them to switch to another game without these poisonous mechanics.
I’ve always been hesitant to be too forceful in getting children off these bad game platforms because I didn’t want to be labeled as the bad parent who took away their fun and in turn causing issues for my children at school. But I think my new strategy is just to buy their friends games to play that I feel are more constructive such as Minecraft instead of playing freemium mobile games.
I just hope more parents become aware of the negative and addictive aspects that these games pose to children. I strongly believe that one day we will look back at this industry and it will be compared to the tobacco industry and the harm it caused.
that is my solution. i allow my kids to play games, but i am not spending a single cent on them. their accounts never even get the ability to spend money, and so the kids can waste their time, but they can't gamble because they don't have access to money. i know my son tried to earn some robux, but he didn't get far and he focused on games that were playable without. eventually the kids lost interest...
same goes for genshin impact. we even played that together for a while. my oldest made it to level 48 out of 50 by just grinding. money was never an issue because he knew that i'd be firm on that, so he never asked. (i just asked him about that and he found that the benefits from spending money wouldn't really have been worth it. they didn't make the game much easier, so why bother?)
My view is that freemium games tend to be engineered to hook people into playing for long periods of time. They use strategies similar to how casinos hook gamblers with behavioral conditioning giving intermittent rewards for long play time; basically timed dopamine hits.
So going back to your question regarding not spending money, even though they’re not spending money now they are being conditioned to find such behaviors in games as a norm and one day when they have a source of income themselves those dopamine hits are just a few dollars away.
But my kids are strong willed and they won’t fall for these tricks, you may say. That may be so but the fact that they’re participating in these game platforms is drawing in other children who may not have the same mental fortitude.
I guess my long winded rant is just to say that we shouldn’t be promoting these casino-like games. We should be promoting games that foster creativity and a sense of achievement without pay to win shortcuts and gambling for rewards.
There are some folks who seem to only let kids watch old movies and old shows on DVD.
Also most kids are in school in person which may help mitigate the brain rot.