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The World Health Organization recognizes videogame addiction as a disorder, and the American Psychiatric Association says that the question of whether or not videogames can be addictive is “still being debated,” but that "early evidence suggests that videogames are one of the most addicting technologies around
Its clear that games can be addictive and the concept of „whale fishing“ is openly discussed in terms of game design. Obviously, the weakest of us in terms of addiction make the standard because its those who are harmed.
Obviously, cash shops should be banned in games immediately.
Obviously, cash shops should be banned in games immediately.
Upvoted specifically for that last part.
They try to make balantro a 18+ game because it resembles a card game. Meanwhile fifa is for 3+ year old and it’s just a card oprning game where they fish money from some sad football fans and children. I have no faith in anyone in charge of that
I have to think part of this is just all the ancient representatives we have. They’ve lived long enough to know what gambling looks like, and what good ol’ sports ball looks like, and by golly nobody can tell 'em any different!
I mean, it’s a legitimate question:
What is addiction, and how does it differ from just “really entertaining”?
I’ve got several thousand hours in Rocket League but I wouldn’t say that I’m addicted to it.
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.
If you employ psychologists and other specialists to design something for maximum retention, you‘re not making something „entertaining“, you‘re tricking the brain into a loop.
We could discuss this endlessly but suffice it to say that there are techniques for retention that dont make an experience necessarily better but more captivating. Infinite scrolling is a very simple example. i bet some game designers could shine a pretty bright light on this if they stumble across this thread.
I could abstract this to the real world like so: two people can speak exactly the same text but one cares if their audience is getting tired and stops, the other one speaks a little louder and turns on some more lights. I‘m pretty sure you will get a significantly longer retention despite the quality being the exact same.
And this is why methods for retention need to be carefully screened and regulated.
Infinite scrolling is a very simple example
Have to strongly disagree. Having to constantly reload entire pages of content is incredibly annoying. The only reason it makes people want to quit is because it’s annoying.
You can disagree. That doesnt make it invalid. Also, the point I‘m making still stands.
I didn’t say or imply that it was invalid.
The fact that you chose that specific example, one that I think is plainly wrong, just goes to show that the discussion is not as simple as you or other people make it out to be, and that any regulation around this will most certainly ensure that future games are shittier.
I dont like you stating things as if they were an objective truth. It is your opinion that infinite scrolling is “good” or whatever you wanted to say. But it is a retention method and not just a QoL feature. There are articles explaining this and some websites have expressly disabled it because it leads to problems for people who are vulnerable.
I dont like you stating things as if they were an objective truth.
You’re the only one doing that.
But it is a retention method and not just a QoL feature
So you agree that it’s both?
Many UX people disagree with you. Here’s a discussion on it, including the guy who invented infinite scroll:
His name was Aza Raskin and he now says he’s deeply sorry and feels guilty about it.
Raskin claims his intention was to create the most seamless experience possible for users
And it worked 🤷
You’re making my point for me.
Some of these are engineered to be addicting especially loot crates and stuff. A lot of them are just genuinely good.
They mention Minecraft, pretty sure that one was addicting since day 1 and completely unintentionally so. It’s just genuinely fun and you can spend hours in it easily. Same with Factorio.
Not exactly a new phenomenon, I’ve seen my own parents up at 4am just because they wanted to sneak a peek at the new level they reached. My mom had hand drawn and annotated the entire Zelda 1 map. For a little bit, that NES basically ran on a UPS to not lose their progress.
For some reason US parents always want to shift the blame to companies for their own failures. It’s her own damn fault she let this get out of control for 10 fucking years. Just like those that park their kids on an iPad all the time and then sues because their kid spends too much time on the iPad and cry out in the news how iPad babies are so bad. Who’s given them the damn iPad?
I think there’s a core difference between loot boxes, which is out and out gambling, and gameplay. Both can be addictive, but they have very different consequences.
Gameplay addiction steals your time and maybe your social life, but that’s it.
Gambling addiction also steals your money. And when that’s gone, drives you to extremes trying to find more.
Concerning Minecraft, as I know the game it seems fine, playing Java on a survival server I run for friends.
However, I wonder what the experience is for the other millions of players, on Bedrock, highly popular monetized servers, etc.
What crappy casino-like techniques are used to monetize Minecraft in those contexts? I really don’t know as I’m in my own Minecraft bubble, but I’m sure there are lots of examples as it’s such a monumentally large game.
Hyper monetized minecraft servers can be reeeeeeally bad but i wouldn’t say the offline play is designed to be addicting in the way that most modern AAA games are
Fine tuning a gameplay loop so people keep playing (and maybe spending money) isn’t as far from designing something to be addicting as most people would like to think. Hence why gaming and gambling addiction dovetail so well.
I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.
Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.
Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.
I know a kid that is really into multiplayer Minecraft on Xbox and he is always after his parents for more Xbox cards so he can buy different skins and texture packs. Servers like Cubecraft and The Hive must be making a lot of money.
The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it’s sort of fine, because they don’t benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.
It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.
In some respects, I can see this. Games such as unscrupulous MMOs are often carefully engineered to distort your ability to manage time and money. However, many games are still produced as entertainment products meant to compete on a basis of artistic or entertainment value. The addictive aspect doesn’t come from a manipulative design, but Rather just plain old fun, and in those cases similar arguments could be made about strawberries or books.
I would like to reiterate that there are addictive video games which really do try to manipulate you. Just like how a breakfast cereal might market itself as healthy and balanced while loaded with sugar and deceptive portion sizes, leading to unhealthy habits, a money first video game will contain elements carefully crafted to distort player’s perception and reasoning.
It’s just… All mixed together.
Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.
Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.
I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.
Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.
There’s a difference between addictive and entertaining.
I wouldn’t call nicotine entertaining.
Opening lootboxes you paid $5 each for is not entertaining.
Well, apparently we can
And now explain to me, what psychological tricks Minecraft uses that make you addicted to it.
One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.
Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …
Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?
I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like.
This is the part of any online game I absolutely hate. The feeling of being even slightly beholden to someone else, like now I have to think about them having a good time too.
Games that forbid direct communication, and allow you to drop in and out of a match without hurting others feel a bit better in this respect imho
Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?
Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What you said is all true, but what I’m saying is precisely the opposite of this. I don’t like playing certain games with others because I empathise with others and want them to have a good time.
So I usually avoid games (video and otherwise) that are designed so that my continued enthusiastic participation are required for the enjoyment of others. To me, that doesn’t feel like play; it feels like work.
I’ll do it, but it’s exhausting. Maybe it’s an introvert thing, because I’ll come away from those games feeling completely drained.
Note I’m not saying those games are bad, just that i hate them. At least, if my social battery is already used up for the week (which it usually is just from regular life).
Ahh, that makes sense!
In the case of Minecraft the issues you listed are pretty much present in almost anything entertaining, video games or not, including in-person events and social functions.
As with anything moderation is key and people just need to learn not to let it control them. Some people are incapable of that though.
There are definitely certain things that game companies need to avoid doing but multiple goals, a little bit of luck, and online cooperative play is not it.
This is the same as Trump saying he was just challenging the results of the election.
Namely, nobody is trying to prosecute him for his legal challenges…and nobody is complaining that games are too entertaining. They are bold strawman arguments that most people see through immediately. “Complete bullshit” is now a common argumentative tactic.
It would help the prosecution’s case if there first was scientific evidence of there being such a thing as gaming addiction, and not just boomers arguing it because they think kids these days should go outside more.
It’s not a gaming addition that’s the problem, it’s that many of these games basically follow the same playbook that casinos do. They’re gambling disguised as a video game.
It would help if the lawsuit was actually focused on lootboxes, microtransactions, and the like as harmful gambling.
But it doesn’t. The lawsuit claims video games themselves being good creates an addiction.
Well that’s fucking stupid
Yes, but that’s not what this story is about, and they don’t cause gaming addiction, they cause gambling addiction. You can’t get addicted to gaming itself.
You can get addicted to literally anything, but that has more to do with your personality than the vice. I knew a guy who was addicted to advil. Didn’t have chronic pain or anything, but couldn’t stop taking it.
I feel like this is more of an OCD issue, rather than addiction. Did he get an official diagnosis by anyone?
I mean, there kinda is. Gambling addiction is a fairly well known phenomenon and while the vast majority of games aren’t purely gambling, many of them do share mechanics with gambling games. One could argue that if a game shares too many mechanics normally seen in gambling and are associated with addiction, then gambling addiction could apply.
Another thing to note is that, if I understand correctly, the modern professional definitions of “addiction” aren’t exclusive to substance abuse but include anything that can cause someone to repetitively engage in a particular behavior despite any negative effects it may have. You could argue that if someone is engaging in gaming to the detriment of their own lives, then they’re addicted. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the developers fault though, people can get addicted to just about any system that triggers some kind of reward in the brain.
However, to add onto the previous statement, it is fairly well documented that some games (World of Warcraft is an infamous example) are specifically designed to keep players engaged for as long as possible without any regard for the player’s wellbeing. If a game has a lot of systems that are designed to keep the player hooked for as long as possible then it’s reasonable to argue that the game is designed to be addictive. The catch is that you’d likely have to prove that the developers were being intentionally malicious.
So, what exactly does Minecraft (one of the primary games mentioned in the lawsuit) do to cause this? Because that seems like a major outlier compared to the other listed games.
I was speaking in a general sense. You’re right that it seems like an outlier, but it’s also possible they were playing on custom servers which could implement addictive mechanics like lootboxes. However, at the same time, it’s not the fault of Minecraft’s devs if a custom server has lootboxes. Again though, I was speaking in a general sense because I was replying to someone saying that gaming addiction is unproven boomer shit; and not about this specific case.
That’s gambling addiction, which is researched and does exist.
Gaming addiction, on the other hand, is purely speculative and often pushed by people who do not understand or like games.
While, yes, a game can have login bonuses and season passes to raise player retention, that also doesn’t become addiction, just as having a membership card with bonuses at a grocery store isn’t going to land you with a grocery addiction.
It doesn’t become gaming addiction just because the game utilizes exploitative mechanics, it becomes gambling addiction, or whatever addiction the mechanic was made to exploit. Gaming addiction in itself is as stupid of a concept as soccer addiction or book addiction.
It would help the prosecution’s case if there first was scientific evidence of there being such a thing as gaming addiction
There’s already evidence, and studies showing how u can also develop an addiction (which basically applies to everything and anything).
But-t we aint talking about games in general, we r talking about those games focused solely on lootboxes and “surprise mechanics” as ubisoft likes to call their digital casinos.
Im also a gamer dude, and thats why we need to recognize when theres a problem in the industry instead of trying to ignore it.
Heisenberg approves this.