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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

This is my field of study. Sometimes It's difficult to draw the line between well-designed and addictive. My personal deal breaker is when play becomes a sinkhole for money.

A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."

If you're interested, I highly recommend N. Schüll's Addiction by Design.

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There is danger in creating artificial scarcity by cutting off gamblers after a threshold. It will likely result in an increase in desire and addiction. Consider Candy Crush, a game where players are cut off access to the game after a certain amount of plays. This has the result of increasing desire, habit formation, and decreasing burnout.

If there is a solution, I think it lies in educating the population and making access as inconvenient as possible.

A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."

I wonder why mobile app stores haven't implemented such a mechanism.

1) It's less profitable.

2) The popup might "break the spell" and frustrate players. They would likely move to more compelling activities.

People who are severely addicted to slot machines don't care about winning or losing. They just want to keep the flow. Every distraction is detrimental to the experience.

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