Comment by swiftcoder
8 hours ago
> I doubt that many people on here actually would want to ban adults from spending "too much" money on video games
The problem is not "spending too much" on videos games. It's the reward structure designed to incentivise one to spend unbounded amounts - just like a casino.
And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go. But we surely shouldn't let kids in the casino, or let casinos advertise to kids, etc.
>The problem is not "spending too much" on videos games. It's the reward structure designed to incentivise one to spend unbounded amounts - just like a casino.
I do not think you understand how these games work or how they incentivize spending. Lootboxes and gachas work very different to a Casino and equating their reward structure just makes no sense at all. Psychologically they work in very different ways.
I hate to be defending lootboxes and gachas, but the psychology behind those is very different to how a Casino works. Gambling addicts are at an especially high risk of suicide, because they expect some amount of returns on their gambling activity, if those returns fail to materialize the player can be in immense debt. This just can not happen with a gacha, where you know upfront that every euro you spend is a 100% loss. Again, this should not be a defense of lootboxes, but we have to be honest about these mechanics.
And the psychological mechanisms are also different, gachas and lootboxes appeal very much to a collector mindset, where people play until they get a certain rare digital good, but playing after that would be pointless. This is a different mechanism to gambling in a casino.
>And just like a casino, I don't know that making them fully illegal is the correct way to go.
I see no reason why either should be legal, to be honest. We exclude kids from casinos, because their ability to make informed decisions is limited, but the same is true for a gambling addict. Letting people just ruin their lives for whatever reason seems a pretty insane policy.
> Letting people just ruin their lives for whatever reason seems a pretty insane policy
We also have state-run lotteries, which are effectively a form of regressive taxation. Aligning regulations with well-being is an ongoing project
To be honst I think state run lotteries are a pretty good idea, if they would replace other forms of gambling, which apparently is becoming less and less true, especially with the rise of the completely under regulated prediction markets.
Regarding the subject at hand, I think a very obvious and necessary first step is banning children from participation. Obviously this is easily circumventable, but at will at least be some form of harm reduction.
I think another possibility as a first step is a forced limit on how much an account is allowed to spend in a given time, e.g. the company is only allowed to add digital goods not exceeding X euros to the owners account, together with restrictions on how these items are traded, this will make whaling impossible, which is apparently the most important demographic for developers. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 ]