Parents Sue Gaming Companies Over ‘Video Game Addiction’, Because That’s Easier Than Parenting::Video game addiction. Sigh. Big sigh, even. Like, the biggest of sighs. We’ve talked about claims that video game addiction is a documentable affliction in the past, as well as the pushback that claim has received from addiction experts, who have pointed out that much of this is being done to allow doctors to get…
This author seems pretty comfortable mocking the concept of games being addictive.
Loot boxes need to stop for sure, but things like limited-time content are 100% designed to form habits and ultimately feed gaming addiction. Season passes or weekly achievements require you to log on and grind out challenges at regular intervals to avoid missing out on rewards that are required for competitive play.
I know plenty of people who have had to make an active choice to stop playing certain games because they found they couldn’t play the game ‘on their own terms’. It sucks as an adult, but kids without fully developed brains capable of rational thinking would stand no chance.
I was quite addicted to a Facebook game back in the day. Never went more than a day without playing it and even then I had scripts to play the repetitive parts of the game while I was away. I might’ve spent $50 total on the game but I never really felt like I was missing out because of not spending money. When they got to the point where it was blatantly obvious I would miss rare items or other collectibles if I didn’t pay then I quit altogether.
I think the system could use a change but I still prefer minimal interference. It could do a lot of good if players were notified (monthly/weekly) how much they’ve played the game and how much they’ve spent. The “micro” part is probably what gets a lot of people and they never realize what they’ve paid in total.
One of my first tasks in my game development career was to change the data type used for the main currency in [Famously Addictive Farm Simulator Game], because a user had exceeded the maximum value.
I eventually found out approximately how much IRL money this person had spent on this game…
6 figures. And not barely 6 figures.
People don’t spend that much because they’re just having fun.
There is absolutely something different about these kinds of games. It’s abusive and dangerous, and we should consider it a health hazard.
I won’t read the article with such a stupid title.
In other situations they call it victim shaming. There is a reason laws exists to forbid gambling for minors. Many video games are built as loopholes to circumvent such laws. Publishers and producers must be punished for this. Parenting is not a relevant topic here, as we are talking about society.
In a society the distribution of parenting capabilities has large variability, and it does not always depends on the parents themselves, but also on environmental factors (such as work-related stressors).
As society we need to fight any predatory business model that exploits society and individuals weaknesses.
Many games work on the exact same feedback loop as gambling. Squeezing as much dopamine out of your brain as they can.
Big companies spend a huge amount on psychologists to make their games as addictive as possible.
The same way my parents had no idea how dangerous the internet could be in the late 90s, many parents won’t know about this.
This is my biggest concern about video games when I become a parent. My parents were far more concerned about “violence,” but I’d rather have a 10yo child play doom than candy crush. One might initially look more dangerous to the untrained eye, but looks can be deceiving.
100% I’ve pushed my kids towards games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley. Games that need a bit of focus and planning rather than quick fire rounds full of ads or micro transactions.
You are also not allowed as a parent to enforce your child not playing after a certain age. It will depend on the country, but where I live you are, among other things, not allowed to forbid social contacts of your child unless there is significant harm involved. No judge would see “they are playing video games at their friends house” as serious harm.
Where do you live? I’ve never heard of anything like that.
I live in Germany. You can read about the law here, for example:
Social contacts or social contracts? Does gambling fall under this? I could see someone arguing that some of these games are essentially gambling.
Actual gambling is for adults (18+ and I think casinos are 21+). So when parents can proof the friend of their child is actively involving the child into that type of gambling they could potentially forbid the contact.
But Fortnite for example is free for kids 12 and older. There is nothing you can legally do about your child visiting a friend and playing Fortnite there.
You also can’t stop your child from coming into contact with games on smartphones other people bring to school.
Yes parents need to parent their kids first and foremost. However, we can’t keep just giving video game companies a pass for intentionally making their games addictive. When they’re literally hiring psychologists to pinpoint target their games for a child’s brain, that’s also a problem. Both need to be addressed.
I also want to point out that a lot of these games purposefully misclassify themselves in the AppStore. Meaning if you are a parent and you say “I want my kid to have 1-2 hours of game time, but all research tools are allowed all the time” Some games will report themselves as “Information and Reading” to get around settings. I find oftentimes the more garbagey the game the more likely it will do that.
This isn’t shitty parenting, companies are intentionally creating addictive mechanics in games. Instant gratification causes a release of dopamine, which keeps the person playing over and over again. It’s the reason why people “grind”.
They’re virtual Skinner Boxes. If you don’t know what that is, I suggest looking up the term and B. F. Skinner himself.
Parental controls are a thing on all of these systems aren’t they? If not they should be.
Nope! Why would the company intentionally limit the way they designed the game? That’s counterproductive.
Aren’t a lot of current games built with gambling mechanics built in? Is that not done with the intention of wanting a person to keep playing and buying? I agree parents should be policing their children’s activity, but these companies shouldn’t get a pass for creating the fire people burn themselves on.
In the past I might’ve been more critical of the parents, but honestly in this day and age?
Large publishers and developers exist to exploit people. They exploit workers by overhiring, overworking, and then firing them gracelessly whenever they’ve managed to push out the next paint-by-numbers turd they have planned. It releases to the public in an unfinished state, yet the consumer is expected to shell out hundreds of dollars not only for the base game, but for season passes, FOMO mechanics, in-game shops, gambling and other anti-consumer bullshit.
They scheme to create more and more insidious systems to keep the player hooked, all the while they’re abusing their workers, playing with their lives, and sometimes literally stealing from them.
The modern AAA gaming industry is worse than it ever has been, and these parents aren’t wrong; the games are designed to be addictive. They’d outright encourage people to mortgage their home and steal their parents’ credit cards if they thought they could get away with it.
There’s absolutely a level of addictive manipulation in some games targeted towards children, but on the other hand, you are responsible for making sure your child doesn’t participate in their systems. Fault on both parties.
Who’s educating the parents on what’s going on in the games? The casinos? The slot machines? The sports betting apps?
Where do the average learn about these things?
All well and good if you are fairly well educated and know about some of the psychology going on. But damn I do not have any hope for the next generation raised on tick tocks as the GOP dismantle public education.
It’s going to quickly get like Idiocracy in here all the while bystanders will say, but the parents working two minimum wage jobs to put food on the table and a roof over their head should have taken responsibility for their child!
People fall through the cracks and we all as society benefit when we are responsible enough to try to make sure the cracks can’t just swallow you whole.
Shit, I’ve got 3 university degrees and top certifications for my specify IT field and wouldn’t know much about this topic if it weren’t for Sout Park Freemium Isn’t Free.
We can’t depend on being educated or involved with children to protect them from 24/7 365 always online dopamine addiction to compulsion loops.
The fact that most modern AAA games have some sort of “loot box” (aka actual gambling) mechanic, and those mechanics are literally identical to the design patterns for slot machines, seems to be completely missed by the author of this article. Gambling addition is a real thing, and pushing that psychological behavior pattern onto impressionable youths should be illegal. As a citizen of the US, I can’t legally go online and gamble with real money directly, but I can get the same “fix” by playing most of the big titles from EA (with real money, just one layer deeper, and with no way to get my winnings back into the real world), says a lot.
Absolutely. This isn’t just that kids like games and that’s bad, it’s that games are literally being made with conditioning tactics to get people playing them as a habit and paying. Not only they have loot boxes that are psychologically identical to a slot machine, but games as a service have mission and reward structures designed to get people returning as a habit, not because it’s fun. Look how many games have players going “I need to do my daily missions”, not because that’s fun, but because of a sense of obligation and Fear of Missing Out over trickling rewards.
It’s also worth noting microtransactions and other player-directed revenue-enhancement schemes have been featured in games while still not being noted (even as gambling mechanics — Looking at you, EA lootboxes) by the ESRB, belying its funtion to protect children from adult content.
To this day, AAA games are offered in bad faith as adversarial to the player with the interest of exploiting them.
I’m not sure if the parents angle is the way to address these issues, but then out legal system really gives no fucks about the good of the public, case in point, SCOTUS stripping people of rights while giving corporations extended privileges.
I mean, the gambling industry uses some mobile games as learning material in how to snare players and trigger “that next button press” (source, I used to work for a large gambling company).
So, there are grounds to argue addiction on the same level as gambling addiction for some games.
Never get your mental health advice from a “technology consultant” especially one that quotes things like the DSM-5 without the required knowledge on how to apply it.
The DSM moves at a glacial pace as does many academic publications as it takes an extremely conservative approach to declaring new disorders. Most of the time it tries to classify things like “gaming addiction” under the general addiction category rather than make a new separate category for a specific form of it. Being addicted to anything including gaming is still a form of addiction and the lack of a specific category for it in the DSM doesn’t mean it magically doesn’t exist.
Tldr: this technology consultant is clueless about stuff outside of his field. Just because it beeps and boops doesn’t make him a mental health expert on the use of it.
Good! Hit them in the wallet for their abhorrent behavior.
As a disabled adult latchkey kid, we’ve given up on actual parenting (that is, letting the US public actually have the time and energy to parent) for half a century now. In the 1970s it took all adults working to support a houshold (contast one working adult and a homemaker in the 1950s) yet the quality of life didn’t improve. We passed parenting on to teachers, and then gave them larger classes.
I get the feeling that “Techdirt” may be a bit biased.
Perhaps a tad.
Personally, I don’t much like being told what my conclusion should be from a report. Annoying headline. Unsurprisingly, Timmy goes on to be insufferable throughout the rest of the article too.
