Myself and my son play Apex legends. Its an online multiplayer game thats free, but you can optionally pay to unlock cosmetic items like character outfits (skins) etc.
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.
No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him.
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.
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.
It's not as fatalistic as you suggest: that randomly offered rewards always lead to complete zombie slave status in 100% of subjects, there's no way out, and the situation is hopeless.
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.
I suggest reading "Glow Kids" [1], and then telling how different is digital addiction from any other form of physical/chemical addiction.
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.
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'm currently reading The Dream Machine and it's my impression from that book that Skinner's work was largely discredited (or at least his results were greatly exaggerated).
I think a core tenant of his work was that there is no mental state at all and that everything is just conditioning.
And this mechanism might be more palatable if it got applied both ways: I get a game and then we roll the dice [144] to see if I have to pay full price or just with some junk I have lying around in the house. Same odds as that legendary(?) skin.
Not sure what you mean by "You can't beat the biological functions of what your brain is designed to do" ?? I have played slot machines many times and picked up and walked away when I won a decent amount or when I hit my allocated budget for the night. I find it fun (at least for a little while), but it's hardly overpowering.
Slot machines, in the USA, are regulated to minimize the skinnerbox effect. So while a Slot Machine is actually the classic skinnerbox, in many ways it isn't.
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.
There is permanent damage if you rewire your kids brain chemistry to get addicted to the near-miss of getting something good. Logical explanations don't undo 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.
Yes! Came here to say this. The f*ckery is indeed that. The near-miss makes it addictive. Logic and learning has nothing to do with it. I could not say it any better than how the game developers themselves say it: "“being the only good person is likely going to make you lose money”(Fortnite dev). https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/342130/Former_Fortnite_U...
I am not disagreeing, but, on the other hand, they will be exposed to this, at at least one order of magnitude higher intensity than I ever was as a kid, or even in my 20s.
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.
I mean when I was a kid you'd get this sticker album for your favourite thing(be it football players, star wars, whatever) and I'd always beg mum to get me yet another sticker pack so I could complete my collection. There were always stickers that I really really wanted and yeah, the disappointment of going through a few packs and not getting what you wanted was very real.
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.
I don't really think "just digitized" captures the problem with these boxes.
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...)
I was part of the development on a game which had loot boxes and we had a lot of talk about the reveal, building excitement, etc.
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.
The flashing lights are a nice bonus, but the comparison to trading cards is still valid imo. It's basically the same thing. Yes the technology has advanced, but the risks are the same.
Companies that sold trading cards, stickers, whatever did the same marketing and testing as video game companies.
Maybe just a little bit of a way to remove the dopamine high, or make it slightly worse, would be to have the kid physically hand you the money before they open the case so they feel the pain of spending the cash.
Well, you can do it the good ol' way with ceramic piggy banks that do not open but need to be crashed with a hammer.
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.
maybe... though, I think even at that age we are all the same with respect to losing things that you had. i think though that if you are letting your kids do lootboxes before they have earned the money to open them it's probably too soon anyway.
Not just that, digitized also means that it is available for purchase pretty much anywhere and at anytime verses in a specific place during business hours. Also unlike stickers and collectible cards these games get to advertise their newest goods everything you interact with the product.
The thing about sticker packs, Pokémon cards, etc. is that you could trade the ones you didn't want with your friends, so even getting a shiny that you already had was exciting because then you had something that you could swap for another shiny or a couple of lower-value cards/stickers. You'd naturally come to the point where some stickers were much more frequent than others so you'd end up with this little schoolyard economy where everybody knew what was worthless and what wasn't. Once your collection is complete there's no reason to buy any more. Hell, some of those things even become collectors items and retain some value over time.
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.
There was literally the exact same claims being made about kids being turned in to gamblers by pinball games decades ago:
“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]”
I don't think it is the same though. With pinball you pay 20c or whatever, and you get to play the game. That's it. It's like paying $100 for an entry ticket into a bike race - you pay, you get to do the activity, the outcome is "random" in that it only depends on your own skill and external factors. With sticker packs the contents are truly random, there is no skill involved, you literally don't know what you are buying.
Pinball games at the time often paid out prizes and didn’t always do so based solely on skill. The shift towards the modern idea of what pinball machines are like today was a reaction to laws threatening to ban them.
Fair enough, but in that case it's a bit disingenuous to say those claims were being made about "pinball games" without qualification, because what you describe is not what someone today[0] thinks of when you say "pinball".
0: citation: myself and gambiting and barneygale at a minimum
My feeling is that randomized packs of baseball cards were never great either—but they were never pervasive enough to be a "problem".
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.
One major difference between Magic and most skinner box video games: I can sell my magic cards for real world money, and I can just buy the cards I need as singles.
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...
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.
Like I said in my post, I think they're grayer than a lot of skinnerboxes, but that doesn't make them clean.
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.
> If there's a CS gun/skin/whatever in a loot box, you can't just go out and buy that thing for money.
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 will stop using this specific game as an example. This particular dev might allow this, but many others don't which is a huge problem on the issue since these things are functioning as gambling for access to a service (the right to use a feature) instead of access to a commodity (that you can trade/sell).
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.
There are definite parallels between something like MtG and lootboxes, but I think the barrier for purchase is much lower with lootboxes. A physical product like MtG cards must be purchased at a store, which will have limited quantities. It requires effort and occasionally timing to actually obtain the items. Even in our modern world of online shopping, there is typically a wait time between the impulse to buy and the reward of receiving the items of at least 24 hours, often more.
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.
While I agree with you that loot machines are worse because they're always available and hyper-immediate, we know that gambling addiction is a thing, and CCG cards fit the pattern. I mean to play a slot machine, people used to have to travel all the way to casinos, convert their money to coins, and then play the slots. The addicts still did it.
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.
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.
A sticker pack "whale" might be down $50, these games might crave a hundred to a thousand times that. Also while kids make the headlines, grown ups are a far bigger market. Simply banning loot boxes for kids is to ignore the majority of the problem.
The price to fill the World Cup 2018 Panini Sticker album is on average more than 800 Euros. If you can swap with a couple of friends (10+) the average price goes down to ~300 Euros.
A sticker pack whale will spend hundreds of Euros. If you only wanna spend 50 bucks better get another hobby tbh.
£150 for 3x500 stickers at Amazon. That should leave you missing approximately 75 stickers, which you can buy as singletons directly from Panini, at £0.25 a piece. So you can do it for £170 with absolutely no social interaction required. Definitely an unreasonable amount for a bunch of stickers, but still peanuts compared to what a freemium video game can cost.
Just to be clear, sticker collection economy is also shady, it just doesn't have a societal impact remotely like that of loot boxes.
I'm a developer in Las Vegas and have worked in actual casino gaming and slot machines and I have never disagreed with a comment on Hacker News as much as I do this one.
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.
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 :)
For every kid that "learns his lesson" there are tons who don't, who don't have parents or hey are just too busy to "guide" them through this experience. The whole thing is designed to wire your brain to increase engagement,as in addiction.
"No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him."
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?
I have no experience with football stickers, but my experience with Magic: the Gathering is that this sort of thing can absolutely get addictive.
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.
The old era football cards (and tea cards and petrol stickers or coins) where there were no intentionally rare ones, just randomly stuffing a few into packets, were OK. You traded a few in the playground, just about everyone got the set by end of school year.
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.
> The modern ones with carefully created low drop rate "rare" cards are lottery scratch card gambling.
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.
I think stated odds are actually where I get uncomfortable. There were always accidentally rare cards, purely from the luck of how packs were filled, and what was rare in one region was probably the common one in another from random chance in distribution. A lot of the card sets had a way to send off 5p or so for the last couple you missed, to fill the album at the end of the year.
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.
> 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?
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.
> As I'm writing this though, I'm not entirely sure what makes fruit machine bad, football stickers good.
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.
Bingo. Games that let you trade actually are in legally shakier territory because of the cash-out potential.
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.
You can clearly see the odds are against you with the 2p waterfalls and such like. The side exits ensure the odds are with the house - you can point them out and show it's a rigged game. Opportunity to dive off into risk/reward and the unbalance of economics where some get disproportionate reward for the same inputs, perhaps? Or show how the house always wins. :)
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.
Loot boxes for tradeable items move away from this. My kids want to open cases in CSGO because they think they'll win a skin they can sell for a lot of money. Winning money is the motivator.
"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'd like to think that understanding how the brain responds to gambling, why the games are designed the way they are and how exploitative the companies behind them are being can help, but I wouldn't expect a child to be able to really grasp all that well enough.
No, this isn't correct. For instance, any drop has a chance of being "painted" and among painted items there's an equal chance of any of several colors. However, because of demand, Titanium White painted items are much more valuable than, say, Burnt Sienna.
That's a weird quibble. If there are ten variants and only one of them is Titanium White, the desirable one is only available in 10% of the drops and is thus rare. Yes, desirability plays a role, but it's still rare.
Desirability determines demand. Rarity determines supply (relative to the entire value on the market). Both are taken into account to determine the price.
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.
Its not really a quibble, but you aren't wrong either. Its true that valuable items will be rare, but it isn't true that all rare items will be valuable. Both the titanium white and the burnt sierra colors are equally rare, but one is much more valuable because demand is not equivalent.
Sure, but there is a ceiling on any item that isn't one of the super super rare items that barely anyone goes for except the extreme collectors. (Usually an item that goes for much cheaper but has a special tag on it that's only visible to you.)
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.
I think there is no fire-proof way of handling this that will work with all, or even a majority of children. (And parents.) Teach your kids to handle it, do it wisely, but if the best way is a puritan approach or a market value approach as above, I think it depends which is best.
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.
> 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.
> France has one of the highest alcohol consumption rates in Europe, with the country trailing behind only Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic in the quantities of alcohol it drinks, according to the World Health Organization.
Maybe? There's a lot of other things to consider, such as the number of drinkers and whether it's customary to drink throughout the day or only during a small window (night).
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.
This thread starts by talking about "alcoholism" which is an unhelpful term because problem drinking, harmful drinking, and dependent drinking are all problems even if they're not accompanied by physical addiction.
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.
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.
Again, apply my reasoning about games to this issue too. In France, you have an entire country as mirror and role model for drinking without mayhem. That is one data point to consider. :)
> 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.
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.
Hmmm. I definitely don't like the "give me a ton of money, and you might get what you want" payment mechanism. I saw it with PacMan cards and football cards back in the 80's, and then Pokemon cards for my own children.
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.
They can't be traded for legal reasons. If you were able to trade them, that would mean they'd have monetary value. As such, they'd be a nail in the coffin of labeling loot boxes as gambling.
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.
Pretty important point for how far we should regulate something.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm still not seeing how this is any different than Pokemon cards where I saw the same behavior in kids back then. Is it because these days companies have thrown far more psychology at optimizing it?
The difference is you walked into a shop with cash and couldn't accidentally buy 100 packets in the space of five minutes. They couldn't take your parent's bank card and let you spend thousands of dollars because your parents would come back to the store. The transaction amount and cash exchange was not deliberately obfuscated with layers of contrived pseudo-currencies when we bought packets of cards either.
It seems in this case, the use of a fake virtual currency to disassociate it from real money is the underlying problem. And in that case, I do not see any analogies to existing TCG booster packs. Also, it would mean the problem extends to more than just loot boxes, and as such even in games where there aren't lootboxes regulation would still be needed when virtual currency can be bought with actual currency.
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.
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.
My entire COUNTRY didn't wear a bike helmet when they were young. (this is a historical fact, am I being irresponsible?)
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.
Wearing a helmet is a good idea? Obviously, but you get much less fun out of that experience. Additionally you are suggesting we decelerate natural selection even more than we already have? Considering the number of humans around, I would consider the abolishing of common sense regulations to be a nett benefit for the Earth.
> Is it because these days companies have thrown far more psychology at optimizing it?
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.
Do they? I've only ever seen major TCGs sold three ways (not counting secondhand): Regular booster packs (fixed number of cards, odds of rarities in small print on the back), preconstructed decks (fully known, no randomness), and bundles (box with five or ten regular packs plus one specific card or random known-rarity card).
My 13yr old son has spent $100s on fortnite, I told him he's going to regret that when he wishes he saved for a car, or something that will matter in 6months.
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?
One major difference to point out is that fortnite doesn’t have loot boxes, you know exactly what you’re getting when spending their online currency.
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 feel 20 or so years ago kids that spent money on something that didn't provide a clear benefit would have been bullied. My wife was a gamer, when my son first asked for a gift card to buy a skin it was fun watching him try to explain that there is no benefit and it only changes the look. My wife kept asking him why do you want this?
You and I grew up in very, very different worlds then. Most things that made kids in my community were purely consumerist.
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.
I always wondered who are these people/kids spending money on useless cosmetics, but the other day a friend of mine told me how his 11 year old, a fine kid, spent his birthday money (about 50€) on his PlayStation. Naturally I thought he bought a new game - it's the first thing we would have done at his age whenever we had some money at hand.
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.
FWIW, you can buy specific skins that are on the character loadout with very few exceptions. I've never paid for premium in the game, just used the in game currency.
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!
i've played apex legend for more than 50 hours, and had no idea you could actually spend money in that game.
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.
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 do you say that? The content seems fine and generally applicable to a variety of games, even though mobile gaming was his focus. And yeah, he's not as successful as others in the area, but that doesn't mean the information is bad.
He's teaching people how to profit off of getting people (including kids) into virtual gambling, microtransactions and other addictive behaviour, and exploiting "whales" (who are actual human beings).
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."
Not the original poster, but paying for advantages in games is pretty common. I think of golf, where people will pay big money for expensive equipment that marginally improves performance. Or even more so the Sailing World Cup Series where the main differentiator is the cost of the boat. I assume F1 racing is like that as well.
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.
I'm with you, and I feel the same about 'unlockable' junk in multiplayer games. It's one of the many trends that I cite as a reason I don't play competitive online multiplayer anymore.
I think cosmetics are a much better alternative to purchasing advantages (that'd never work for a PC game anyway) but keep kids away from gambling absolutely.
The problem is that for a lot of games you can't just directly purchase the cosmetic items, you have to open many loot boxes in order to try and "win" the cosmetic item that you desire.
That's a problem for the business people to figure out. Items which make it easier to play are a massive red flag to avoid a game and they're always right.
Yeah, and all it takes for the business people to figure it out is for everyone to stop buying those games and those items within the game. Unfortunately these sorts of things are put into games because they work and because the games are already popular. I mean why is EA still making yearly sports games?
Yeah I was in the same boat. Had no idea how the coins worked and have zero interest in purchasing cosmetics.
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!
Fashion smells like classism to me. I don't see anyone below a certain tax bracket playing the fashion game. Fortnite has already become kind of classist, with the well-off kids bullying people who don't gamble their parent's money for skins. I think the whole system is name-brand evil.
> I don't see anyone below a certain tax bracket playing the fashion game.
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? :)
I don’t think the analogy carries because there are no “default” clothes. You have to make some sort of decision about what to wear, even the decision to avoid fashion trends is a form of fashion itself.
Are you into fashion IRL? I mean for a lot of people, flaunting their online looks is important, it pleases them - and they see others rocking a unique skin and appreciate that as well.
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.
Online multiplayer games are how kids socialise online these days. They don't meet up on Facebook, they meet up on Fortnite or Minecraft. Appearance is an important status indicator.
People play these games with their friends online. They also stream to potentially millions of people.
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
When it’s an online game played with friends, many will want their character to look cool/unique just as much as they want items/equipment that may give a competitive advantage
Honestly, I wouldn't even play a game where paying for power-ups was the norm. It's not something I'm interested in.
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.
analytics suggest that the only generational divide is the one where people admit to buying “superficial” things in game, or at all
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 dealt with my kids getting scammed like this in the past. I laughed and mocked them and explained how the scam works and how these companies hire industrial psychologists to facilitate their cons. Then learn how to avoid the scam in the future, and also later mock and ridicule their friends who fall for similar scams. This results in those friends learning to avoid these scams and teach others how not to get fooled.
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.
> Games should instead be required to disclose the scam after fooling the prey, and thus become educational.
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.
Yes, this is horrible and more and more toys, games are like this. That's why such products should get the same license as gambling companies.
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.
It doesn't allow you to buy the skins directly? In most F2P games I played (HotS, Paladins), you get random skins in lootboxes, but you can buy the skin directly, it just costs more than the lootbox (but obviously much cheaper than buying lootboxes hoping for that one specific skin).
Apex let's you buy most skins directly, but only using a currency you earn from playing or by getting duplicate items from boxes. You can also earn skins from boxes that you earn from leveling up, or by buying directly.
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.
I've always held Apex as an example of a Bad model when talking with people only tangentially knowledgeable of the topic.
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.
you mean, next time the kid has money would be spent again?
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
The idea of pocket money is usually that kids can spend it on what they want. That includes sweets. Although of course parents can say "no" - but that goes for virtual items, too.
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?
If people learnt not to gamble by gambling there would be nobody with gambling problems. Teaching kids how not to gamble by gambling can be pretty bad for people who have addictive personalities, getting that gambling high and wanting to replicate that again and again.
Teaching your kid it is a waste of money and not to endorse that practice might be a better choice.
It's not "teaching not to gamble by gambling", obviously. You have to talk with your kid, explain the methods of the gambling games, and stuff like that.
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.
> Teaching your kid it is a waste of money and not to endorse that practice might be a better choice.
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.
Years ago, when I was about 12 years old, I was addicted to RuneScape. Every evening after school, you'd find me cutting down trees, cooking, or venturing into the PvP zone for some awesome gear. One day, someone retired from the game by killing their character, which resulted in all of their items being dropped. I lucked out and snagged more gold than I could have ever imaged. I remember running around the house in joy.
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.
I know right? Runescape back in the day was the perfect sandbox to learn these lessons. I remember lending out my expensive sword to an online "friend" who promptly logged off and blocked me. Lesson learned.
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.
I used to play a game Puzzle Pirates as a 12 year old, which had an in game currency that could be used to play poker. I easily put 200 hours into that.
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).
If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
Yeah ... except the whole video game gambling is fine-tuned and relentless in its pursuit to prey upon the vulnerabilities and blind-sights of the very exploitable. It is an addiction machine fishing for kids to enthrall.
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.
It's not just virtual currencies, it's permanence and tradability, kids don't just buy booster packs and take what they can get, they trade cards in complex ways, in some cases gift them to friends who wants to play, and the stack of cards is a visual representation of how much you've spent, whereas in some games, PUBG Mobile for example, your cosmetics literally disappear after a fixed time and if you have many duplicates of a common item, you can trade them, but only for the in game currency that can only buy the cheapest forms of crates.
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.
Items disappearing takes this scummy business model to a whole new depth of viciousness.
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.
Because magic the gathering cards are an actual item tradeable for actual money to other players and resellers. It's still questionable in many ways, sure.
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.
So the reason Magic is different is because you are actually gambling for things with monetary value? That doesn't sound right.
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.
The reason Magic is different is for 2 major reasons:
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.
>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.
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.
To be able to have point #2 you have to have point #1. Someone has to take the risk to open the booster packs and get those cards out onto the market. Sometimes business oriented people do that, other times a group of friends buy a booster box to play with at the time. At least in these circumstances the people opening the packs know what could happen.
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.
> To be able to have point #2 you have to have point #1.
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.
The magic cards that cost thousands only cost so much because they aren't in print anymore. Ones with that kind of price point are collector's items and aren't even legal to use in the formats that are commonly played
But the booster packs that contains those cards are still available for sell. So why WotC isn't the one profiting off of it, private businesses still are selling them and some people do open them hoping for one of those rare cards. While it isn't a price point a normal child can afford, I don't see why it is different given that the items are still being actively sold.
Well the randomization is actually part of the product for a lot of people, boosters are typically used for sealed/draft games for example.
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
Your first point is actually the opposite of what the law says.
> 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.
Depending on the game they kind of do.
There's trading and gambling on CS-GO skins, places where you can get real world money for them.
For games like EA sport games in their online competition thing, you need to have the best players in order to compete, therefore there's a minimum you need to spend in order to get those players. You need to do that in order to have a hope of winning competitions and earn some money.
So while you can't just cash out directly there are ways in which it can be done.
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).
No, it has a monetary value, But you can't resell it.
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.
It has value sure but it's not monetary if you can't convert it to money. These things have no monetary value. So you should know going in you will never make your money back. You will only get better or worse game items.
That's farther than gambling than the trading card model.
> So you should know going in you will never make your money back.
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.
Not having intrinsic value is why these mechanics were allowed in the first place. If they do have intrinsic value then it's straight up gambling. There's almost no difference between gambling with casino chips and magic the gathering cards in terms of what makes it gambling.
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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).
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
> 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.
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.
We even have an alternative system that has been proven: the Living Card Games (LCG) system from Fantasy Flight.
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.
Even millionares' kids should not be spending thousands of their parents' dollars indiscriminately. If we don't hear horror stories about it, it is because those parents are able to absorb the cost, but it still doesn't teach the kids good money habits.
I buy booster packs for MTG because I like drafting and sealed deck events. Randomness here is a good thing because it makes gameplay more skill based than money based when compared to constructed decks (build from your collection).
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.
>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.
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?
Yes, generally you acquire in-game currency which you can buy for real money or earn through playing the game. You use this to buy a digital booster pack which contains a random collection of cards, similar to the paper game.
Most collectible card games nowadays work like this, because it makes the publisher a lot more money than the model you describe.
The physical boosters are different, because they are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are set and won't change.
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.
Another aspect is that the physical items take up actual physical space. You have to store them somewhere, and you have to look at them, and you might easier come to the realization that what you are doing is completely ridiculous.
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.
Scratch-off lottery cards also are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are known to the public (and probably right there on the card), the card has a fixed value but until you've bought it you just don't know if this card will be worth $0.25 or $500.
That's 100% gambling. And the concept is soooo very similar to booster packs.
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
To me banning virtual loot boxes is the right way to go. There is no real reason for them to be there except to trigger that random reinforcement mechanic that gambling also triggers. They also make the gameplay of the game worse in order to support the economy of loot boxes.
Because the crucial thing about lootboxes is that in-game currency obfuscates the actual value of your purchase. You know when you buy a booster pack how much that booster pack is worth in real life money; you don't when you're buying lootboxes. When I was a kid and bought booster packs I knew how much they were worth because I also knew the value of each card and how much they compared to other physical stuff I could buy (candy).
The difference is that loot boxes can drain an arbitrary amount of money whereas with trading cards you will eventually have enough duplicates that you can sell them and buy all remaining cards at market price. And if you want a specific thing you can just buy it outright.
This is a good idea, but they really need to stop all the gambling advertising disguised as kids games on daytime TV. I've observed (UK) that daytime TV commercials mainly consist of Personal Injury Compensation, mail-order-fashion and "games that you can play on your phone, tablet or computer". Always brightly coloured, very animated, and always played by attractive people. Often there's a "social" theme were the participants all get together with their phones and tablets and game, er, gamble a day away together at bingo. Very sad, very cynical and very pervasive. But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon.
I think those adverts are targeted at lonely housewives/husbands and the unemployed rather than children. As you said, they make it seem like these virtual fruit machine/bingo games are very social, when in fact the users are probably sitting on their sofa alone. It's a similar problem though, it's aimed at exploiting a problem (loneliness) and replacing it with another problem which generates a recurring income.
But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon.
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.
Remember when loot boxes promising valuable rookie cards of baseball players captured America's youth and squandered the nation's fortune back in the 20th century?
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.
1) They have perceived value, which for children who don't know any better, is really important.
2) In many cases you can cash out. Fortnite accounts with'valuable' or rare skins getting hacked and sold is a real thing. Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 both have real actual economies where things that come out of loot boxes have listed values that someone will probably pay you for in REAL WORLD DOLLARS.
3) Gambling is gambling regardless of whether it fits into your worldview and these companies shouldn't be able to sidestep defined and enforced regulations that exist for a reason. That's the issue here.
I don't think people are arguing that collectibles are the problem. They're arguing that the gambling is.
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.
So this goes like lotteries and several other things we already write laws about. What we care about is the behaviour. If your product triggers the problem behaviour then that's a problem.
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.
Where does the money come from, that the kids spend? Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending?
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.
Aw man, you're bringing back memories of my childhood here: I spent all my pocket money on those. Well, those and the chewing gum that had a "tattoo" in them :)
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.
Reading this I can't help but think that Apple Arcade has to be a huge success with parents - a quality, woory-free gaming environment with fixed, affordable cost.
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
I wonder how solid the knowledge about this is? Are there actual studies showing a risk from "gambling games" at young age inducing gambling addiction? From your quotes, it sounds more like individual opinions that actual scientific knowledge?
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.
I think if we were starting to see these physical card packs now we would probably have a similar reaction as we're having to loot boxes but since they're older and a more normal part they're not getting as much scrutiny. Digital packs can do a lot more skinner boxing though with sound and visual cues going along with chest opening and the little dopamine hit for getting a rare item.
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.
>Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending?
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 have no strong opinions about kids gambling in real casinos. Again, where does the money come from? Are there any studies showing gambling addiction can develop from exposure during childhood?
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 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.
They're definitely a thing in the US, maybe not Panini brand but there's a huge collectors market for baseball cards. Some have a resale values of hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
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 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.
Fifa is the biggest offender IMO, you can spend $10k on loot boxes and you'd still not get the top tier players in the game.
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
Well, when they (publishers in general) put the chances at getting the good characters and skins behind "less than 1% chance", and fill the loot pool with useless cruft when there's an anti-dupe mechanism, it's going to be super expensive to get the exact character/skin you want.
> Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending?
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.
And this is the unsung hero of Apple's new Apple Arcade subscription -- 100 games, no loot boxes, pay to win crap. You can safely pay $4.99 and the entire family can have access to the games without having to worry about this crap or advertising.
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.
I wonder when someone in power finally recognizes that Magic the Gathering and other CCGs, especially their digital versions, are essentially gambling machines.
With collectible card games, one has at least a tangible, transferrable object - meaning if someone wants to sell off their Pokemon/MtG cards, there is a pretty healthy market available. Even if the original manufacturer would go out of business, you would still have the assets.
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.
I'm not sure if transferrable and sellable rewards make CCGs less of a gambling activity. If anything, obtaining a physical object which can be exchanged for cash, with a potential for profit, is the definition of gambling.
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).
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.)
The free market doesn't regulate flaws in human psychology. Gambling is designed to hit all these flaws to trick and manipulate you out of all your money. Children are especially vulnerable to this.
The correct solution is for governments to ban companies shoving gambling at kids.
I think education would be more effective than a ban. Teach children to recognize gambling at early stage. Show them with examples how the house/gaming studio wins by exploiting human nature. If you just protect children from exposure to gambling you will end up with vulnerable adults and adults don't have a guardian who can stop the bleeding even if the cost is a lot of kicking and screaming.
That only works however if the parents or schools are capable of providing the required teaching, many (most?), are not.
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.
Would you also be in favor of removing age related gambling restrictions on real world gambling like slot machines? How about on things like purchasing tobacco? Let the free market handle it. These things literally hack the developing brain in not so nice ways. If you were to let marketers control it, you'd end up with a bunch of brain damaged teenagers. Countries like Singapore don't even let adults gamble freely.
I think gambling is harmful similarly to the worst of drugs. I would much rather see cocaine legal than gambling. I just think children are a demographic the least vulnerable as there is always a guardian to put stop to it, they can't lost life saving etc. I am all for limiting gambling (or outright banning many forms of it). I see the whole loot box thing as very low priority though and I think better results can be obtained by education and maybe even slight exposure to the exploitive mechanisms. If anything it's better if a child learn the hard way and lose pocket money than an if an unaware adult gets suckered in and lose their live savings, family, job.
Gambling is already banned for people under the age of 18 in nearly the whole world. Why should digital gambling be exempted from this and instead we would need to "educate" children about its dangers? If it's gambling it shouldn't be for children.
I know tens of people who got into trouble because of gambling as I spent most of my adult life in gambling world. None of them got exposure to it as a child. Losing toy money in soft form of gambling may be a valuable lesson for the future while still having a protective umbrella children enjoy. Worst that can happen is some kicking and screaming where the child discovers something they wanted to buy in the game isn't provided and there is no more money to spend. With an adult coming across the same deceptive mechanism for the first time the results could be and very often are tragic.
> How does a free market self-regulate this problem?
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.
Gambling doesn't self regulate overall. It gets predatory.
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.
I would say that kid's parents will notice that a given game is addictive and costs a lot and will just forbid children to play it?
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.
> Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. (...) Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist.
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.
Saying that all ethics must be obstructions commerce is a pretty extreme view, that I really can’t see any justification for. An economy is nothing more than the sum of decisions made by the individuals that comprise it. I’m pretty sure the only way anybody could hold such a view would be to view all decisions they disagree with as unethical. Which is an opinion, I guess...
I'm not saying all ethics is against commerce, though I can't think of an ethical rule for which I couldn't construct a situation, in which breaking it is profitable. What I am claiming, though, is that the market strives to extract profit from everything that's possible, and that it will break every ethical rule that can be broken for profit in absence of very strong controls against that.
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 mean this is really just a substanceless metaphor that you’ve come up with. Your definition of economics is also just flat out wrong. Economies are comprised entirely of economic actors interacting with each other. Every economic agent is either a human being, or a collection of human beings. There are no non-human economic agents, and there are no human non-economic-agents.
By mentioning large bureaucratic structures like corporation and calling them "non-human actors", I wanted to focus your attention on the fact that behavior of a group of people working together, cooperating and competing with other such groups of people, is not well-predicted by looking at behavior of each individual involved. Much like you don't reason about a computer system by looking at what each transistor and resistor does - instead, you look at aggregates as a unit (CPU, power converter, ...), at aggregate's behavior (firmware) as modulated by the information and energy flow within the system.
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.
That’s simply not true. Large organisations of people have decision makers, and their decisions can be predicted just as well as anybody else’s. Perhaps your confusion lies in the fact that in an organisation, not everybody is going to have equal influence over decisions, therefor your suggestion that every individual be accounted for in such predictions is pointless.
Perhaps. But I feel you're overestimating just how much choice the decision makers have. The interactions between an organization and the rest of the market severely constrain the space of choices available to decision makers, and there may very well be no good/ethical course of action available to them (except resigning and passing the choice to someone else, which isn't an attractive option either).
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.
> 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.
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.
>Yes, and because of that, nothing highly unethical ever happens on the market.
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.
There's degree to unethical behavior, but I've become disillusioned and no longer thing it's an outlier on the market. Some things I've seen:
- 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.
We seem to disagree on what unethical behavior means it seems. For instance, I don't think Groupon, Airbnb or advertising in general are unethical at all. I can understand why you have the position you do if your meter for unethical behavior is like this, but I don't think this meter will do you much good in life. Either way, we won't really get any further on this argument when we have such basic disagreements so this is where I'll stop.
> I would say that kid's parents will notice that a given game is addictive and costs a lot and will just forbid children to play it?
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)
In my experience, a free market does not self-regulate in order to gain a competitive advantage. The self-regulation I've seen has been done in order to avoid punishment by the state or federal government. The formation of the ESRB, for example, or the manta tourism permitting system on Moku O Keawe.
My only thinking is that promoting non-gambling like games to parents would be the advantage. Doubt it would work as there’s too much noise in the marketing and children probably convince the parents.
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.
That's the thing though - games nowadays are ridiculously good. Doesn't mean they're successful, but they're good.
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).
Maybe there isn't really a problem with all of those games. To adults it seems ridiculous to spend money on virtual items, but to be honest, a lot of other things kids would spend their money on also seem ridiculous.
If those games cost a lot of money to make, perhaps it is fair to ask for money for some items.
The nasty trick isn't the "asking for money for some items". As you observe that's not so different from asking for money for sugar candy, it's basically useless but it did cost money to make and you don't need it per se, so fine.
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.
The politicians report covers gambling-like mechanics that don't involve money.
> 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
"there are concerns" - what exactly does that mean? Scientists are concerned? Or parents? Or religious groups?
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.
This is a moot point, there does not need to be a competitive advantage in not providing chance items. A 'free market' (an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.) does not equate to zero regulation.
Well in a free society you might think parenting should be left to parents, not governments. Because this is entirely a parenting problem. No market, free or otherwise is going provide parenting to children.
I’m not a parent so of course have no right to make a suggestion, but could parents only buy devices without an internet connection? Games that cost X and X only?
Pretty much every single game adopts loot boxes alike - as it's profitable. That leaves very options (if any) for a decent games overall - children excluded.
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.
That should also include watching adverts as a competitive advantage within games marketed for kids - it leads to constant intake of essentially user hostile videos being shown to young kids and it's predatory imho.
I came into this thread with a strong opinion: Ban loot boxes. I think they weaken the value of all gaming, and I think they take advantage of people. Plenty of things have been banned for attempting to take advantage of people.
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.
I completely agree -- it's exploitative and relies on parental intervention for those kids who don't know any better. As others have mentioned, these could be an educational opportunity, but I don't think the experiences described here are representative.
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?
It might actually be better to let them learn the hard way before they have real money to lose. Has anyone studied the relation between this and gambling as an adult?
Great, finally some movement on regulating the children's video gaming industry, it's a total disgrace and reflects very poorly on the tech industry that it's most vulnerable users are frequently the least considered. The UK is working on some of the worlds most progressive child protection legislation and I hope they create an example that will be adopted worldwide.
Too old to have gambled in games as a kid, but I was at the right age for the POG phenomenon. I remember a rough afternoon at the schoolyard where I went past my limit and lost some of my most cherished pogs.
With trading cards, you can trade with your friends, or buy rare cards on Ebay. Since they're physical, there's no DRM.
With skinner boxes, most games don't let you transfer skins so there's no marketplace and the only way to get rare skins is to buy coins and gamble.
Physical comes with its own set of problems, like bootlegs, which I've fallen before. And there are games that do have aftermarkets like PUBG and Counster Strike iirc. Are those blameless? They were/are some of the biggest lootbox games actively played today
These games shouldnt either with parental/family friendly controls. Would that make it good enough? Because I'm pretty sure at least on consoles you need to go through the platform to use saved credit data, and consoles offer parental controls.
I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. Either they understand the issue but it's their profits at stake, so they'll ignore the potential problems. Or have these stealth gambling mechanisms entered the games gradually and without the industry realising that what it's doing is actually gambling and there repercussions to that.
The idea that they are ignorant is repugnant, they know exactly what they are doing, and they have ALL the data that shows how the 'child whales' of their industry can be best exploited.
Indeed they know very well what they're doing. One could even say that they're openly spitting in the face of regulators' inability to do something about it, see for example a trailer for a new NBA game, where you mostly see literal casino-like gambling machines, and only a few seconds of actual gameplay on a basketball court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y
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.
A while ago I noticed that a small child in my family had a jigsaw puzzle with a Disney princess on it and since that seemed unexpected, I asked how that came. The answer was that they didn't gift it to her but she wanted it herself. They were surprised themselves but argued that maybe it's really something that girls/kids like.
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 :/
I'll clarify a little: I know basically nothing about the games industry, so my thinking was along the lines of...
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 wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue.
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.
"I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. "
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.
It's willful and there's seriously smart people and engineers that crunch the numbers and do customer testing to optimize these. It came from mobile and Facebook games (Zynga) and made the transition to console/PC games about ten years ago, in the west it was popularized by Team Fortress 2, followed by multiple games, e.g. FIFA and Mass Effect 3.
They know exactly what they are doing. If anyone wants proof, see Torulf Jernström's talk "Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play"[1]. He discusses strategies for building the perfect Skinner Box, and how to design your game around operant conditioning and other psychological tricks that help people become addicted.
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.
> Apple, Google, and game makers need to understand what's happening here.
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.
Myself and my son play Apex legends. Its an online multiplayer game thats free, but you can optionally pay to unlock cosmetic items like character outfits (skins) etc.
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.
No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him.
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.
Its called a skinnerbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
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.
It's not as fatalistic as you suggest: that randomly offered rewards always lead to complete zombie slave status in 100% of subjects, there's no way out, and the situation is hopeless.
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.
> Addictions can be hard to overcome for many.
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.
I suggest reading "Glow Kids" [1], and then telling how different is digital addiction from any other form of physical/chemical addiction.
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/...
> I don't think this is "addiction"
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'm currently reading The Dream Machine and it's my impression from that book that Skinner's work was largely discredited (or at least his results were greatly exaggerated).
I think a core tenant of his work was that there is no mental state at all and that everything is just conditioning.
And this mechanism might be more palatable if it got applied both ways: I get a game and then we roll the dice [144] to see if I have to pay full price or just with some junk I have lying around in the house. Same odds as that legendary(?) skin.
[144] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dice_by_number_of_sides#D...
Not sure what you mean by "You can't beat the biological functions of what your brain is designed to do" ?? I have played slot machines many times and picked up and walked away when I won a decent amount or when I hit my allocated budget for the night. I find it fun (at least for a little while), but it's hardly overpowering.
Slot machines, in the USA, are regulated to minimize the skinnerbox effect. So while a Slot Machine is actually the classic skinnerbox, in many ways it isn't.
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.
There is permanent damage if you rewire your kids brain chemistry to get addicted to the near-miss of getting something good. Logical explanations don't undo 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.
Yes! Came here to say this. The f*ckery is indeed that. The near-miss makes it addictive. Logic and learning has nothing to do with it. I could not say it any better than how the game developers themselves say it: "“being the only good person is likely going to make you lose money”(Fortnite dev). https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/342130/Former_Fortnite_U...
I am not disagreeing, but, on the other hand, they will be exposed to this, at at least one order of magnitude higher intensity than I ever was as a kid, or even in my 20s.
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.
+1 I was thinking about this too, dopamine creating strong neurons which you cannot get rid off easily.
I mean when I was a kid you'd get this sticker album for your favourite thing(be it football players, star wars, whatever) and I'd always beg mum to get me yet another sticker pack so I could complete my collection. There were always stickers that I really really wanted and yeah, the disappointment of going through a few packs and not getting what you wanted was very real.
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.
I don't really think "just digitized" captures the problem with these boxes.
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...)
I was part of the development on a game which had loot boxes and we had a lot of talk about the reveal, building excitement, etc.
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.
The flashing lights are a nice bonus, but the comparison to trading cards is still valid imo. It's basically the same thing. Yes the technology has advanced, but the risks are the same.
Companies that sold trading cards, stickers, whatever did the same marketing and testing as video game companies.
Maybe just a little bit of a way to remove the dopamine high, or make it slightly worse, would be to have the kid physically hand you the money before they open the case so they feel the pain of spending the cash.
Which surely only works for older kids who've had the experience of earning money with hard graft.
Well, you can do it the good ol' way with ceramic piggy banks that do not open but need to be crashed with a hammer.
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.
maybe... though, I think even at that age we are all the same with respect to losing things that you had. i think though that if you are letting your kids do lootboxes before they have earned the money to open them it's probably too soon anyway.
Not just that, digitized also means that it is available for purchase pretty much anywhere and at anytime verses in a specific place during business hours. Also unlike stickers and collectible cards these games get to advertise their newest goods everything you interact with the product.
I completely agree with this - those flashing lights, music and big reveal is all optimised for a dopamine hit. It feels pretty manipulative.
The thing about sticker packs, Pokémon cards, etc. is that you could trade the ones you didn't want with your friends, so even getting a shiny that you already had was exciting because then you had something that you could swap for another shiny or a couple of lower-value cards/stickers. You'd naturally come to the point where some stickers were much more frequent than others so you'd end up with this little schoolyard economy where everybody knew what was worthless and what wasn't. Once your collection is complete there's no reason to buy any more. Hell, some of those things even become collectors items and retain some value over time.
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.
Lots of loot boxes and in game cosmetics can often be traded in the same way though?
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?
> Lots of loot boxes and in game cosmetics can often be traded in the same way though?
The majority of free-to-play games from Asia don't provide a mechanism for that.
There was literally the exact same claims being made about kids being turned in to gamblers by pinball games decades ago:
“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
I don't think it is the same though. With pinball you pay 20c or whatever, and you get to play the game. That's it. It's like paying $100 for an entry ticket into a bike race - you pay, you get to do the activity, the outcome is "random" in that it only depends on your own skill and external factors. With sticker packs the contents are truly random, there is no skill involved, you literally don't know what you are buying.
Pinball games at the time often paid out prizes and didn’t always do so based solely on skill. The shift towards the modern idea of what pinball machines are like today was a reaction to laws threatening to ban them.
> The shift towards the modern idea of what pinball machines are like today was a reaction to laws threatening to ban them.
Then, sounds like the hubbub at the time was both mostly reasonable and effective.
Fair enough, but in that case it's a bit disingenuous to say those claims were being made about "pinball games" without qualification, because what you describe is not what someone today[0] thinks of when you say "pinball".
0: citation: myself and gambiting and barneygale at a minimum
For anyone who's curious, this article has some more details on this: https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-deat...
There is more to that story. Pinball and other gaming machines were rackets mostly controlled by the mafia and others of that ilk.
Pinball is skill-based; loot boxes are not.
My feeling is that randomized packs of baseball cards were never great either—but they were never pervasive enough to be a "problem".
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.
One major difference between Magic and most skinner box video games: I can sell my magic cards for real world money, and I can just buy the cards I need as singles.
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...
> I can sell my magic cards for real world money
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.
Like I said in my post, I think they're grayer than a lot of skinnerboxes, but that doesn't make them clean.
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.
> If there's a CS gun/skin/whatever in a loot box, you can't just go out and buy that thing for money.
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 will stop using this specific game as an example. This particular dev might allow this, but many others don't which is a huge problem on the issue since these things are functioning as gambling for access to a service (the right to use a feature) instead of access to a commodity (that you can trade/sell).
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.
There are definite parallels between something like MtG and lootboxes, but I think the barrier for purchase is much lower with lootboxes. A physical product like MtG cards must be purchased at a store, which will have limited quantities. It requires effort and occasionally timing to actually obtain the items. Even in our modern world of online shopping, there is typically a wait time between the impulse to buy and the reward of receiving the items of at least 24 hours, often more.
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.
While I agree with you that loot machines are worse because they're always available and hyper-immediate, we know that gambling addiction is a thing, and CCG cards fit the pattern. I mean to play a slot machine, people used to have to travel all the way to casinos, convert their money to coins, and then play the slots. The addicts still did it.
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.
You can also use your packs to draft Magic. Even if you don't get the cards you want, you still get to play a fun game.
In fact, conventional wisdom in MTGO is to never open packs and always draft them.
> I think ultimately, this is the same thing
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.
A sticker pack "whale" might be down $50, these games might crave a hundred to a thousand times that. Also while kids make the headlines, grown ups are a far bigger market. Simply banning loot boxes for kids is to ignore the majority of the problem.
The price to fill the World Cup 2018 Panini Sticker album is on average more than 800 Euros. If you can swap with a couple of friends (10+) the average price goes down to ~300 Euros.
A sticker pack whale will spend hundreds of Euros. If you only wanna spend 50 bucks better get another hobby tbh.
£150 for 3x500 stickers at Amazon. That should leave you missing approximately 75 stickers, which you can buy as singletons directly from Panini, at £0.25 a piece. So you can do it for £170 with absolutely no social interaction required. Definitely an unreasonable amount for a bunch of stickers, but still peanuts compared to what a freemium video game can cost.
Just to be clear, sticker collection economy is also shady, it just doesn't have a societal impact remotely like that of loot boxes.
> £150 for 3x500 stickers at Amazon.
This is a good price. I've been paying CHF 1.20 for 5 stickers at the local corner store.
I'm a developer in Las Vegas and have worked in actual casino gaming and slot machines and I have never disagreed with a comment on Hacker News as much as I do this one.
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.
Thats a good point!
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 :)
For every kid that "learns his lesson" there are tons who don't, who don't have parents or hey are just too busy to "guide" them through this experience. The whole thing is designed to wire your brain to increase engagement,as in addiction.
"No, you did good! He needs to learn how to handle this and you're right there guiding him."
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?
I have no experience with football stickers, but my experience with Magic: the Gathering is that this sort of thing can absolutely get addictive.
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.
The old era football cards (and tea cards and petrol stickers or coins) where there were no intentionally rare ones, just randomly stuffing a few into packets, were OK. You traded a few in the playground, just about everyone got the set by end of school year.
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.
> The modern ones with carefully created low drop rate "rare" cards are lottery scratch card gambling.
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.
I think stated odds are actually where I get uncomfortable. There were always accidentally rare cards, purely from the luck of how packs were filled, and what was rare in one region was probably the common one in another from random chance in distribution. A lot of the card sets had a way to send off 5p or so for the last couple you missed, to fill the album at the end of the year.
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.
> 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?
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.
> As I'm writing this though, I'm not entirely sure what makes fruit machine bad, football stickers good.
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.
Bingo. Games that let you trade actually are in legally shakier territory because of the cash-out potential.
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.
Perhaps. Someone with a problem could easily convince themselves football stickers (the rare ones) are a sound investment.
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.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=su5xcK9FhRw
You can clearly see the odds are against you with the 2p waterfalls and such like. The side exits ensure the odds are with the house - you can point them out and show it's a rigged game. Opportunity to dive off into risk/reward and the unbalance of economics where some get disproportionate reward for the same inputs, perhaps? Or show how the house always wins. :)
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.
Loot boxes for tradeable items move away from this. My kids want to open cases in CSGO because they think they'll win a skin they can sell for a lot of money. Winning money is the motivator.
Its not related to the point of your comment, but Rocket League's loot boxes are going away https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/6/20757348/rocket-league-crat...
No no no no no.
"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.
That's wishful thinking.
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.
I'd like to think that understanding how the brain responds to gambling, why the games are designed the way they are and how exploitative the companies behind them are being can help, but I wouldn't expect a child to be able to really grasp all that well enough.
On the plus side, at least in Rocket League you can trade others for the skins. There is a market rate of items due to this.
This is not always the case on apex legends, where some limited offer items are only obtainable from loot boxes.
The market rates are purely manifestations of drop rates, so a rare item will likely be extremely expensive/unaffordable.
No, this isn't correct. For instance, any drop has a chance of being "painted" and among painted items there's an equal chance of any of several colors. However, because of demand, Titanium White painted items are much more valuable than, say, Burnt Sienna.
That's a weird quibble. If there are ten variants and only one of them is Titanium White, the desirable one is only available in 10% of the drops and is thus rare. Yes, desirability plays a role, but it's still rare.
Desirability determines demand. Rarity determines supply (relative to the entire value on the market). Both are taken into account to determine the price.
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.
Its not really a quibble, but you aren't wrong either. Its true that valuable items will be rare, but it isn't true that all rare items will be valuable. Both the titanium white and the burnt sierra colors are equally rare, but one is much more valuable because demand is not equivalent.
Sure, but there is a ceiling on any item that isn't one of the super super rare items that barely anyone goes for except the extreme collectors. (Usually an item that goes for much cheaper but has a special tag on it that's only visible to you.)
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.
I think there is no fire-proof way of handling this that will work with all, or even a majority of children. (And parents.) Teach your kids to handle it, do it wisely, but if the best way is a puritan approach or a market value approach as above, I think it depends which is best.
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.
> 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.
> France has one of the highest alcohol consumption rates in Europe, with the country trailing behind only Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic in the quantities of alcohol it drinks, according to the World Health Organization.
I think most parents would be more worried about alcoholism and/or risky levels of drunkenness than total consumption.
Wouldn't alcoholism be very correlated with total consumption?
Maybe? There's a lot of other things to consider, such as the number of drinkers and whether it's customary to drink throughout the day or only during a small window (night).
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.
This thread starts by talking about "alcoholism" which is an unhelpful term because problem drinking, harmful drinking, and dependent drinking are all problems even if they're not accompanied by physical addiction.
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.
4 glasses of wine over a day, on a regular basis is alcoholism. That's ~20 drinks/week.
It may be functional alcoholism, if it doesn't affect your finances/job/relationships, but it's still alcoholism.
I'd say many are but don't suffer from it except lower life expectancy.
> Wouldn't alcoholism be very correlated with total consumption?
Yes, and so is the number of glass bottles they recycle. But it's the alcoholism that is a health problem to address.
Sure, there’s a long cultural history of drinking a glass of wine with a meal.
What’s your broader point?
I would imagine rather earlier at home in the Uk I used to have a small glass of hard cider with meals at the week end when I was 10 or 11.
Again, apply my reasoning about games to this issue too. In France, you have an entire country as mirror and role model for drinking without mayhem. That is one data point to consider. :)
> 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.
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.
This is very true! The words "it's a scam" is always fun for a kid to learn and repeat.
I think this is an exceptionally good response. Thank you.
Hmmm. I definitely don't like the "give me a ton of money, and you might get what you want" payment mechanism. I saw it with PacMan cards and football cards back in the 80's, and then Pokemon cards for my own children.
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.
With Pokemon cards, you can at least buy specific cards from sellers. Many loot box items cannot be traded.
They can't be traded for legal reasons. If you were able to trade them, that would mean they'd have monetary value. As such, they'd be a nail in the coffin of labeling loot boxes as gambling.
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....
Pretty important point for how far we should regulate something.
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.
Trading would make things so much worse. See CSGO skins. Then you have grey/black market gambling sites.
> 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.
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.
I'm still not seeing how this is any different than Pokemon cards where I saw the same behavior in kids back then. Is it because these days companies have thrown far more psychology at optimizing it?
The difference is you walked into a shop with cash and couldn't accidentally buy 100 packets in the space of five minutes. They couldn't take your parent's bank card and let you spend thousands of dollars because your parents would come back to the store. The transaction amount and cash exchange was not deliberately obfuscated with layers of contrived pseudo-currencies when we bought packets of cards either.
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-...
It seems in this case, the use of a fake virtual currency to disassociate it from real money is the underlying problem. And in that case, I do not see any analogies to existing TCG booster packs. Also, it would mean the problem extends to more than just loot boxes, and as such even in games where there aren't lootboxes regulation would still be needed when virtual currency can be bought with actual currency.
2 wrongs don't make a right.
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.
>2 wrongs don't make a right.
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.
My entire COUNTRY didn't wear a bike helmet when they were young. (this is a historical fact, am I being irresponsible?)
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.
Wearing a helmet is a good idea? Obviously, but you get much less fun out of that experience. Additionally you are suggesting we decelerate natural selection even more than we already have? Considering the number of humans around, I would consider the abolishing of common sense regulations to be a nett benefit for the Earth.
> Is it because these days companies have thrown far more psychology at optimizing it?
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.
No, they definitely had those special, more expensive packs for Pokemon, and Yugioh.
But I agree with your overall point that the games are more flashy and do exploit more than cards ever could.
Do they? I've only ever seen major TCGs sold three ways (not counting secondhand): Regular booster packs (fixed number of cards, odds of rarities in small print on the back), preconstructed decks (fully known, no randomness), and bundles (box with five or ten regular packs plus one specific card or random known-rarity card).
My 13yr old son has spent $100s on fortnite, I told him he's going to regret that when he wishes he saved for a car, or something that will matter in 6months.
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?
One major difference to point out is that fortnite doesn’t have loot boxes, you know exactly what you’re getting when spending their online currency.
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 feel 20 or so years ago kids that spent money on something that didn't provide a clear benefit would have been bullied. My wife was a gamer, when my son first asked for a gift card to buy a skin it was fun watching him try to explain that there is no benefit and it only changes the look. My wife kept asking him why do you want this?
You and I grew up in very, very different worlds then. Most things that made kids in my community were purely consumerist.
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.
That sounds awful. I'm sorry you had to go through that. Sounds like an American high school sitcom TV series scene.
Yep, I’m quite happy to have peaked in adulthood and not in high school.
20 years ago, kids were being bullied for not wearing Abercrombie & Fitch.
I was in high school then. The people who didn't care about aesthetics were always the ones bullied.
I always wondered who are these people/kids spending money on useless cosmetics, but the other day a friend of mine told me how his 11 year old, a fine kid, spent his birthday money (about 50€) on his PlayStation. Naturally I thought he bought a new game - it's the first thing we would have done at his age whenever we had some money at hand.
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.
FWIW, you can buy specific skins that are on the character loadout with very few exceptions. I've never paid for premium in the game, just used the in game currency.
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!
>> Materials can be used to purchase any skin/celebration/quip etc. Materials can be bought with gold.
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/
i've played apex legend for more than 50 hours, and had no idea you could actually spend money in that game.
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.
Well, to be blunt, that's cos you're not a kid.
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.
That isn't generational, it is part of your personality though. You just described two of the four player profiles in this talk on monetizing games:
https://youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4
Blech. Torulf Jernstrom. I'm surprised they left that one up. It's not going to age well.
Why do you say that? The content seems fine and generally applicable to a variety of games, even though mobile gaming was his focus. And yeah, he's not as successful as others in the area, but that doesn't mean the information is bad.
He's teaching people how to profit off of getting people (including kids) into virtual gambling, microtransactions and other addictive behaviour, and exploiting "whales" (who are actual human beings).
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 would gladly pay games for a leg up (better weapons, higher jumps, that sort of thing)
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.
Not the original poster, but paying for advantages in games is pretty common. I think of golf, where people will pay big money for expensive equipment that marginally improves performance. Or even more so the Sailing World Cup Series where the main differentiator is the cost of the boat. I assume F1 racing is like that as well.
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.
I'm with you, and I feel the same about 'unlockable' junk in multiplayer games. It's one of the many trends that I cite as a reason I don't play competitive online multiplayer anymore.
I think cosmetics are a much better alternative to purchasing advantages (that'd never work for a PC game anyway) but keep kids away from gambling absolutely.
The problem is that for a lot of games you can't just directly purchase the cosmetic items, you have to open many loot boxes in order to try and "win" the cosmetic item that you desire.
That's a problem for the business people to figure out. Items which make it easier to play are a massive red flag to avoid a game and they're always right.
Yeah, and all it takes for the business people to figure it out is for everyone to stop buying those games and those items within the game. Unfortunately these sorts of things are put into games because they work and because the games are already popular. I mean why is EA still making yearly sports games?
Yeah I was in the same boat. Had no idea how the coins worked and have zero interest in purchasing cosmetics.
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!
What if they offered you a sealed envelope that might or might not have contained the floppy disk?
It’s exactly the same reason people pay for fashion. The clothes don’t provide practical benefit, yet people still pay 100x more for branding.
And you can’t hack this because these are multiplayer games.
Fashion smells like classism to me. I don't see anyone below a certain tax bracket playing the fashion game. Fortnite has already become kind of classist, with the well-off kids bullying people who don't gamble their parent's money for skins. I think the whole system is name-brand evil.
> I don't see anyone below a certain tax bracket playing the fashion game.
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.
> I don't see anyone below a certain tax bracket playing the fashion game.
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? :)
> Fashion smells like classism to me.
That's because that's pretty much exactly what it is. It's a signaling mechanism.
You don't gamble for skins in Fortnite, you buy them directly.
I don’t think the analogy carries because there are no “default” clothes. You have to make some sort of decision about what to wear, even the decision to avoid fashion trends is a form of fashion itself.
>same reason people pay for fashion.
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.
yes, but fashion in games? paying for worthless pixels?
i do get what you're saying thou...
Are you into fashion IRL? I mean for a lot of people, flaunting their online looks is important, it pleases them - and they see others rocking a unique skin and appreciate that as well.
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.
Online multiplayer games are how kids socialise online these days. They don't meet up on Facebook, they meet up on Fortnite or Minecraft. Appearance is an important status indicator.
At least Minecraft doesn't charge you to change your skin.
People play these games with their friends online. They also stream to potentially millions of people.
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
When it’s an online game played with friends, many will want their character to look cool/unique just as much as they want items/equipment that may give a competitive advantage
Honestly, I wouldn't even play a game where paying for power-ups was the norm. It's not something I'm interested in.
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.
analytics suggest that the only generational divide is the one where people admit to buying “superficial” things in game, or at all
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
do you ever buy clothes?
I dealt with my kids getting scammed like this in the past. I laughed and mocked them and explained how the scam works and how these companies hire industrial psychologists to facilitate their cons. Then learn how to avoid the scam in the future, and also later mock and ridicule their friends who fall for similar scams. This results in those friends learning to avoid these scams and teach others how not to get fooled.
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.
> Games should instead be required to disclose the scam after fooling the prey, and thus become educational.
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.
Yes, this is horrible and more and more toys, games are like this. That's why such products should get the same license as gambling companies.
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.
It doesn't allow you to buy the skins directly? In most F2P games I played (HotS, Paladins), you get random skins in lootboxes, but you can buy the skin directly, it just costs more than the lootbox (but obviously much cheaper than buying lootboxes hoping for that one specific skin).
Apex let's you buy most skins directly, but only using a currency you earn from playing or by getting duplicate items from boxes. You can also earn skins from boxes that you earn from leveling up, or by buying directly.
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.
I've always held Apex as an example of a Bad model when talking with people only tangentially knowledgeable of the topic.
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.
Once his money has run out, he might have learned a valuable lesson.
Also perhaps better than spending the money on sweets.
you mean, next time the kid has money would be spent again?
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
The idea of pocket money is usually that kids can spend it on what they want. That includes sweets. Although of course parents can say "no" - but that goes for virtual items, too.
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?
If people learnt not to gamble by gambling there would be nobody with gambling problems. Teaching kids how not to gamble by gambling can be pretty bad for people who have addictive personalities, getting that gambling high and wanting to replicate that again and again.
Teaching your kid it is a waste of money and not to endorse that practice might be a better choice.
It's not "teaching not to gamble by gambling", obviously. You have to talk with your kid, explain the methods of the gambling games, and stuff like that.
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.
> Teaching your kid it is a waste of money and not to endorse that practice might be a better choice.
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.
Let him lose his money so he understands how it feels. It might prevent him from losing his house to bookies in the future.
Years ago, when I was about 12 years old, I was addicted to RuneScape. Every evening after school, you'd find me cutting down trees, cooking, or venturing into the PvP zone for some awesome gear. One day, someone retired from the game by killing their character, which resulted in all of their items being dropped. I lucked out and snagged more gold than I could have ever imaged. I remember running around the house in joy.
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.
I know right? Runescape back in the day was the perfect sandbox to learn these lessons. I remember lending out my expensive sword to an online "friend" who promptly logged off and blocked me. Lesson learned.
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.
I used to play a game Puzzle Pirates as a 12 year old, which had an in game currency that could be used to play poker. I easily put 200 hours into that.
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).
When we talk to people who have problems with gambling we tend to see that they all started young, and had an early win.
You can see how if you'd gambled this huge amount of gold, and then won, that things may be different?
If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
Yeah ... except the whole video game gambling is fine-tuned and relentless in its pursuit to prey upon the vulnerabilities and blind-sights of the very exploitable. It is an addiction machine fishing for kids to enthrall.
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.
It's not just virtual currencies, it's permanence and tradability, kids don't just buy booster packs and take what they can get, they trade cards in complex ways, in some cases gift them to friends who wants to play, and the stack of cards is a visual representation of how much you've spent, whereas in some games, PUBG Mobile for example, your cosmetics literally disappear after a fixed time and if you have many duplicates of a common item, you can trade them, but only for the in game currency that can only buy the cheapest forms of crates.
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.
Items disappearing takes this scummy business model to a whole new depth of viciousness.
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.
Because magic the gathering cards are an actual item tradeable for actual money to other players and resellers. It's still questionable in many ways, sure.
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.
So the reason Magic is different is because you are actually gambling for things with monetary value? That doesn't sound right.
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.
The reason Magic is different is for 2 major reasons:
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.
>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.
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.
To be able to have point #2 you have to have point #1. Someone has to take the risk to open the booster packs and get those cards out onto the market. Sometimes business oriented people do that, other times a group of friends buy a booster box to play with at the time. At least in these circumstances the people opening the packs know what could happen.
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.
> To be able to have point #2 you have to have point #1.
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.
The magic cards that cost thousands only cost so much because they aren't in print anymore. Ones with that kind of price point are collector's items and aren't even legal to use in the formats that are commonly played
But the booster packs that contains those cards are still available for sell. So why WotC isn't the one profiting off of it, private businesses still are selling them and some people do open them hoping for one of those rare cards. While it isn't a price point a normal child can afford, I don't see why it is different given that the items are still being actively sold.
Well the randomization is actually part of the product for a lot of people, boosters are typically used for sealed/draft games for example.
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
Your first point is actually the opposite of what the law says.
> 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.
Depending on the game they kind of do. There's trading and gambling on CS-GO skins, places where you can get real world money for them. For games like EA sport games in their online competition thing, you need to have the best players in order to compete, therefore there's a minimum you need to spend in order to get those players. You need to do that in order to have a hope of winning competitions and earn some money. So while you can't just cash out directly there are ways in which it can be done.
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).
No, it has a monetary value, But you can't resell it.
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.
It has value sure but it's not monetary if you can't convert it to money. These things have no monetary value. So you should know going in you will never make your money back. You will only get better or worse game items.
That's farther than gambling than the trading card model.
> So you should know going in you will never make your money back.
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.
Not having intrinsic value is why these mechanics were allowed in the first place. If they do have intrinsic value then it's straight up gambling. There's almost no difference between gambling with casino chips and magic the gathering cards in terms of what makes it gambling.
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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).
>If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
You can. These are called Challenger Decks.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/challe...
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
> 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.
If anything, Magic teaches you that gambling is usually the worst way to get the card you want.
Although ... I'm glad I'm not a gambling man...
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.
Honestly those boosters are a scummy product and we would all be better off without them.
We even have an alternative system that has been proven: the Living Card Games (LCG) system from Fantasy Flight.
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...
Even millionares' kids should not be spending thousands of their parents' dollars indiscriminately. If we don't hear horror stories about it, it is because those parents are able to absorb the cost, but it still doesn't teach the kids good money habits.
I buy booster packs for MTG because I like drafting and sealed deck events. Randomness here is a good thing because it makes gameplay more skill based than money based when compared to constructed decks (build from your collection).
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.
>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.
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?
Yes, generally you acquire in-game currency which you can buy for real money or earn through playing the game. You use this to buy a digital booster pack which contains a random collection of cards, similar to the paper game.
Most collectible card games nowadays work like this, because it makes the publisher a lot more money than the model you describe.
The physical boosters are different, because they are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are set and won't change.
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.
Another aspect is that the physical items take up actual physical space. You have to store them somewhere, and you have to look at them, and you might easier come to the realization that what you are doing is completely ridiculous.
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.
Scratch-off lottery cards also are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are known to the public (and probably right there on the card), the card has a fixed value but until you've bought it you just don't know if this card will be worth $0.25 or $500.
That's 100% gambling. And the concept is soooo very similar to booster packs.
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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 we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops?
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.
To me banning virtual loot boxes is the right way to go. There is no real reason for them to be there except to trigger that random reinforcement mechanic that gambling also triggers. They also make the gameplay of the game worse in order to support the economy of loot boxes.
Because the crucial thing about lootboxes is that in-game currency obfuscates the actual value of your purchase. You know when you buy a booster pack how much that booster pack is worth in real life money; you don't when you're buying lootboxes. When I was a kid and bought booster packs I knew how much they were worth because I also knew the value of each card and how much they compared to other physical stuff I could buy (candy).
The difference is that loot boxes can drain an arbitrary amount of money whereas with trading cards you will eventually have enough duplicates that you can sell them and buy all remaining cards at market price. And if you want a specific thing you can just buy it outright.
They probably should be. If you are buying a chance then it is gambling. If it is gambling then laws should treat it as gambling.
Shall we just ban entropy then?
This is a good idea, but they really need to stop all the gambling advertising disguised as kids games on daytime TV. I've observed (UK) that daytime TV commercials mainly consist of Personal Injury Compensation, mail-order-fashion and "games that you can play on your phone, tablet or computer". Always brightly coloured, very animated, and always played by attractive people. Often there's a "social" theme were the participants all get together with their phones and tablets and game, er, gamble a day away together at bingo. Very sad, very cynical and very pervasive. But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon.
I think those adverts are targeted at lonely housewives/husbands and the unemployed rather than children. As you said, they make it seem like these virtual fruit machine/bingo games are very social, when in fact the users are probably sitting on their sofa alone. It's a similar problem though, it's aimed at exploiting a problem (loneliness) and replacing it with another problem which generates a recurring income.
But hey, it brings in lots of tax revenue, so it won't stop anytime soon.
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.
No one watches daytime TV anymore except old people in the US. Is it different in the UK?
Remember when loot boxes promising valuable rookie cards of baseball players captured America's youth and squandered the nation's fortune back in the 20th century?
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.
1) They have perceived value, which for children who don't know any better, is really important. 2) In many cases you can cash out. Fortnite accounts with'valuable' or rare skins getting hacked and sold is a real thing. Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 both have real actual economies where things that come out of loot boxes have listed values that someone will probably pay you for in REAL WORLD DOLLARS. 3) Gambling is gambling regardless of whether it fits into your worldview and these companies shouldn't be able to sidestep defined and enforced regulations that exist for a reason. That's the issue here.
I don't think people are arguing that collectibles are the problem. They're arguing that the gambling is.
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.
Do Happy Meals constitute gambling then, because they contain one of eight great toys?
So this goes like lotteries and several other things we already write laws about. What we care about is the behaviour. If your product triggers the problem behaviour then that's a problem.
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.
Where does the money come from, that the kids spend? Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending?
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.
Aw man, you're bringing back memories of my childhood here: I spent all my pocket money on those. Well, those and the chewing gum that had a "tattoo" in them :)
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.
Reading this I can't help but think that Apple Arcade has to be a huge success with parents - a quality, woory-free gaming environment with fixed, affordable cost.
> Where does the money come from
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
I wonder how solid the knowledge about this is? Are there actual studies showing a risk from "gambling games" at young age inducing gambling addiction? From your quotes, it sounds more like individual opinions that actual scientific knowledge?
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.
I think if we were starting to see these physical card packs now we would probably have a similar reaction as we're having to loot boxes but since they're older and a more normal part they're not getting as much scrutiny. Digital packs can do a lot more skinner boxing though with sound and visual cues going along with chest opening and the little dopamine hit for getting a rare item.
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.
>Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending?
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 have no strong opinions about kids gambling in real casinos. Again, where does the money come from? Are there any studies showing gambling addiction can develop from exposure during childhood?
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.
> Where does the money come from
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.
They're definitely a thing in the US, maybe not Panini brand but there's a huge collectors market for baseball cards. Some have a resale values of hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
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.
> with much more money at stake
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.
Fifa is the biggest offender IMO, you can spend $10k on loot boxes and you'd still not get the top tier players in the game.
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
Well, when they (publishers in general) put the chances at getting the good characters and skins behind "less than 1% chance", and fill the loot pool with useless cruft when there's an anti-dupe mechanism, it's going to be super expensive to get the exact character/skin you want.
You can play without Ronaldo, though? Who pays the 10k? Is it unsuspecting kids, or rich people who don't care?
Addicted normal folks, usually. It’s really hard to tell how much you’ve spent, with all the auto purchases and currency redirects.
But don't people eventually learn their lesson? They could use prepaid credit cards, for example?
I think the market will react, for example by preferring phones and providers that prevent dirty tricks for ripping of customers.
> Shouldn't it be the parents concern to limit the spending?
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...
And this is the unsung hero of Apple's new Apple Arcade subscription -- 100 games, no loot boxes, pay to win crap. You can safely pay $4.99 and the entire family can have access to the games without having to worry about this crap or advertising.
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.
> You can safely pay $5.99
Minor correction: It's $4.99 per month
I wonder when someone in power finally recognizes that Magic the Gathering and other CCGs, especially their digital versions, are essentially gambling machines.
With collectible card games, one has at least a tangible, transferrable object - meaning if someone wants to sell off their Pokemon/MtG cards, there is a pretty healthy market available. Even if the original manufacturer would go out of business, you would still have the assets.
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.
I'm not sure if transferrable and sellable rewards make CCGs less of a gambling activity. If anything, obtaining a physical object which can be exchanged for cash, with a potential for profit, is the definition of gambling.
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).
Agree that games that advertise loot-boxes should be restricted, given their relatively addictive nature to impressionable children.
Children of younger ages shouldn't be exposed to this dopamine inducing idea similar to that of slot machines.
The income from the loot boxes has to be taxed like gambling. It's a slot machine (or FBT in the UK) essentially.
Possible there should be an option to self-define a spending limit (per month, day, week) that cannot be increased immediately.
How does a free market self-regulate this problem? What is the competitive advantage of not providing chance items?
It doesn't.
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.)
I am curious who would downvote such an explanation.
The free market doesn't regulate flaws in human psychology. Gambling is designed to hit all these flaws to trick and manipulate you out of all your money. Children are especially vulnerable to this.
The correct solution is for governments to ban companies shoving gambling at kids.
I think education would be more effective than a ban. Teach children to recognize gambling at early stage. Show them with examples how the house/gaming studio wins by exploiting human nature. If you just protect children from exposure to gambling you will end up with vulnerable adults and adults don't have a guardian who can stop the bleeding even if the cost is a lot of kicking and screaming.
That only works however if the parents or schools are capable of providing the required teaching, many (most?), are not.
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.
Would you also be in favor of removing age related gambling restrictions on real world gambling like slot machines? How about on things like purchasing tobacco? Let the free market handle it. These things literally hack the developing brain in not so nice ways. If you were to let marketers control it, you'd end up with a bunch of brain damaged teenagers. Countries like Singapore don't even let adults gamble freely.
I think gambling is harmful similarly to the worst of drugs. I would much rather see cocaine legal than gambling. I just think children are a demographic the least vulnerable as there is always a guardian to put stop to it, they can't lost life saving etc. I am all for limiting gambling (or outright banning many forms of it). I see the whole loot box thing as very low priority though and I think better results can be obtained by education and maybe even slight exposure to the exploitive mechanisms. If anything it's better if a child learn the hard way and lose pocket money than an if an unaware adult gets suckered in and lose their live savings, family, job.
Gambling is already banned for people under the age of 18 in nearly the whole world. Why should digital gambling be exempted from this and instead we would need to "educate" children about its dangers? If it's gambling it shouldn't be for children.
I know tens of people who got into trouble because of gambling as I spent most of my adult life in gambling world. None of them got exposure to it as a child. Losing toy money in soft form of gambling may be a valuable lesson for the future while still having a protective umbrella children enjoy. Worst that can happen is some kicking and screaming where the child discovers something they wanted to buy in the game isn't provided and there is no more money to spend. With an adult coming across the same deceptive mechanism for the first time the results could be and very often are tragic.
> How does a free market self-regulate this problem?
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.
Gambling doesn't self regulate overall. It gets predatory.
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.
I would say that kid's parents will notice that a given game is addictive and costs a lot and will just forbid children to play it?
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.
> Free market (as imagined by Adam Smith, Hayek and others) does not mean that greed and income maximization is everything. (...) Without ethics neither democracy nor free market can exist.
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.
Saying that all ethics must be obstructions commerce is a pretty extreme view, that I really can’t see any justification for. An economy is nothing more than the sum of decisions made by the individuals that comprise it. I’m pretty sure the only way anybody could hold such a view would be to view all decisions they disagree with as unethical. Which is an opinion, I guess...
I'm not saying all ethics is against commerce, though I can't think of an ethical rule for which I couldn't construct a situation, in which breaking it is profitable. What I am claiming, though, is that the market strives to extract profit from everything that's possible, and that it will break every ethical rule that can be broken for profit in absence of very strong controls against that.
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 mean this is really just a substanceless metaphor that you’ve come up with. Your definition of economics is also just flat out wrong. Economies are comprised entirely of economic actors interacting with each other. Every economic agent is either a human being, or a collection of human beings. There are no non-human economic agents, and there are no human non-economic-agents.
By mentioning large bureaucratic structures like corporation and calling them "non-human actors", I wanted to focus your attention on the fact that behavior of a group of people working together, cooperating and competing with other such groups of people, is not well-predicted by looking at behavior of each individual involved. Much like you don't reason about a computer system by looking at what each transistor and resistor does - instead, you look at aggregates as a unit (CPU, power converter, ...), at aggregate's behavior (firmware) as modulated by the information and energy flow within the system.
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.
That’s simply not true. Large organisations of people have decision makers, and their decisions can be predicted just as well as anybody else’s. Perhaps your confusion lies in the fact that in an organisation, not everybody is going to have equal influence over decisions, therefor your suggestion that every individual be accounted for in such predictions is pointless.
Perhaps. But I feel you're overestimating just how much choice the decision makers have. The interactions between an organization and the rest of the market severely constrain the space of choices available to decision makers, and there may very well be no good/ethical course of action available to them (except resigning and passing the choice to someone else, which isn't an attractive option either).
Many extremely smart people have made the point you're disagreeing to before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JYk5aCB4A and your reply is not addressing it correctly.
>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.
> 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.
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?
>Yes, and because of that, nothing highly unethical ever happens on the market.
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.
There's degree to unethical behavior, but I've become disillusioned and no longer thing it's an outlier on the market. Some things I've seen:
- 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.
We seem to disagree on what unethical behavior means it seems. For instance, I don't think Groupon, Airbnb or advertising in general are unethical at all. I can understand why you have the position you do if your meter for unethical behavior is like this, but I don't think this meter will do you much good in life. Either way, we won't really get any further on this argument when we have such basic disagreements so this is where I'll stop.
> I would say that kid's parents will notice that a given game is addictive and costs a lot and will just forbid children to play it?
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)
In my experience, a free market does not self-regulate in order to gain a competitive advantage. The self-regulation I've seen has been done in order to avoid punishment by the state or federal government. The formation of the ESRB, for example, or the manta tourism permitting system on Moku O Keawe.
My only thinking is that promoting non-gambling like games to parents would be the advantage. Doubt it would work as there’s too much noise in the marketing and children probably convince the parents.
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.
By providing better games, and parents waking up and closing the money faucet.
That's the thing though - games nowadays are ridiculously good. Doesn't mean they're successful, but they're good.
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).
Maybe there isn't really a problem with all of those games. To adults it seems ridiculous to spend money on virtual items, but to be honest, a lot of other things kids would spend their money on also seem ridiculous.
If those games cost a lot of money to make, perhaps it is fair to ask for money for some items.
The nasty trick isn't the "asking for money for some items". As you observe that's not so different from asking for money for sugar candy, it's basically useless but it did cost money to make and you don't need it per se, so fine.
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.
Sure, but they will be confronted with that trick in their lives. Maybe they can learn that it is a waste of resources.
The politicians report covers gambling-like mechanics that don't involve money.
> 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
"there are concerns" - what exactly does that mean? Scientists are concerned? Or parents? Or religious groups?
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.
Scientists are concerned. Please read the actual report, not just the BBC coverage. It's pretty good.
> I don't have a gambling addiction.
We're not talking about you. We're talking about a population of about 15 million people.
Hello sanity, we should hang out :)
This is a moot point, there does not need to be a competitive advantage in not providing chance items. A 'free market' (an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.) does not equate to zero regulation.
Well in a free society you might think parenting should be left to parents, not governments. Because this is entirely a parenting problem. No market, free or otherwise is going provide parenting to children.
I’m not a parent so of course have no right to make a suggestion, but could parents only buy devices without an internet connection? Games that cost X and X only?
Pretty much every single game adopts loot boxes alike - as it's profitable. That leaves very options (if any) for a decent games overall - children excluded.
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.
There are devices just for children available, presumably with limitations on the available content.
I think they are popular with parents, too.
The report isn't just about children.
The ESRB thinks gambling is pretty much an open season from age 13.
That should also include watching adverts as a competitive advantage within games marketed for kids - it leads to constant intake of essentially user hostile videos being shown to young kids and it's predatory imho.
I came into this thread with a strong opinion: Ban loot boxes. I think they weaken the value of all gaming, and I think they take advantage of people. Plenty of things have been banned for attempting to take advantage of people.
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.
I completely agree -- it's exploitative and relies on parental intervention for those kids who don't know any better. As others have mentioned, these could be an educational opportunity, but I don't think the experiences described here are representative.
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?
[1] https://store.hypixel.net/
It might actually be better to let them learn the hard way before they have real money to lose. Has anyone studied the relation between this and gambling as an adult?
Great, finally some movement on regulating the children's video gaming industry, it's a total disgrace and reflects very poorly on the tech industry that it's most vulnerable users are frequently the least considered. The UK is working on some of the worlds most progressive child protection legislation and I hope they create an example that will be adopted worldwide.
Too old to have gambled in games as a kid, but I was at the right age for the POG phenomenon. I remember a rough afternoon at the schoolyard where I went past my limit and lost some of my most cherished pogs.
Why this coming into the spotlight now as opposed to collectible sports cards, trading carding games, coin operated gacha/cache capsule machines, etc?
With trading cards, you can trade with your friends, or buy rare cards on Ebay. Since they're physical, there's no DRM. With skinner boxes, most games don't let you transfer skins so there's no marketplace and the only way to get rare skins is to buy coins and gamble.
Physical comes with its own set of problems, like bootlegs, which I've fallen before. And there are games that do have aftermarkets like PUBG and Counster Strike iirc. Are those blameless? They were/are some of the biggest lootbox games actively played today
Edit: it's to its
None of those could result in $thousands charged to parents' credit cards without a lot more effort.
These games shouldnt either with parental/family friendly controls. Would that make it good enough? Because I'm pretty sure at least on consoles you need to go through the platform to use saved credit data, and consoles offer parental controls.
Good point. 99% of the games for smartphones are free but involved a lot of gambling.
You might win a price every few minutes. It makes people pretty addictive to the games
I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. Either they understand the issue but it's their profits at stake, so they'll ignore the potential problems. Or have these stealth gambling mechanisms entered the games gradually and without the industry realising that what it's doing is actually gambling and there repercussions to that.
The idea that they are ignorant is repugnant, they know exactly what they are doing, and they have ALL the data that shows how the 'child whales' of their industry can be best exploited.
Indeed they know very well what they're doing. One could even say that they're openly spitting in the face of regulators' inability to do something about it, see for example a trailer for a new NBA game, where you mostly see literal casino-like gambling machines, and only a few seconds of actual gameplay on a basketball court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y
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.
A while ago I noticed that a small child in my family had a jigsaw puzzle with a Disney princess on it and since that seemed unexpected, I asked how that came. The answer was that they didn't gift it to her but she wanted it herself. They were surprised themselves but argued that maybe it's really something that girls/kids like.
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 :/
I'll clarify a little: I know basically nothing about the games industry, so my thinking was along the lines of...
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 wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue.
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.
"I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful"
Of course it's completely wilful.
The purpose of a computer game is to get you to play it. All the time. Every waking moment if possible. Companies know this.
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.
"I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. "
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.
It's willful and there's seriously smart people and engineers that crunch the numbers and do customer testing to optimize these. It came from mobile and Facebook games (Zynga) and made the transition to console/PC games about ten years ago, in the west it was popularized by Team Fortress 2, followed by multiple games, e.g. FIFA and Mass Effect 3.
They know exactly what they are doing. If anyone wants proof, see Torulf Jernström's talk "Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play"[1]. He discusses strategies for building the perfect Skinner Box, and how to design your game around operant conditioning and other psychological tricks that help people become addicted.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4
It's cold calculated and willful. It's just too damn easy to sidestep the law in this matter.
This has me thinking all games with loot box mechanic should be labeled 18+
The actual report is here: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...
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.
> Apple, Google, and game makers need to understand what's happening here.
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.
We all know children can't have credit cards, so parents must be lacking responsibility towards their children.
Don't expose kids to gambling until they're ready to lose real money and seriously mess up their lives.
ok
35121212312331212
Sounds like a solution a desk jockey lawmaker, or at least to their knee-jerking constituent pitch-fork mob demanding justus wouls come up with!
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 ;-)