Technology

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 don't want to be all old man yells at cloud, but back in my day popular games were played a lot because they were primarily enjoyable for the story, the achievement of completing a particular level or boss, playing against friends, etc. And sure, you'd have the odd bad parent trying to claim their kid was addicted to Counterstrike 1.6, but it was broadly speaking nonsense. The vast majority of games were offline, or had very limited online modes built around direct competition with other players (FPS, sports games, etc), and publishers would get all their money from the initial sale, with only a few games having expansion packs, most notable The Sims.

But in the early 2010s a few things changed:

• broadband internet became ubiquitous in markets with high levels of existing gamers
• distribution of games swapped from physical media to downloads
• 'everyone' had a pretty powerful computer in their pocket making it much more accessible
• a bunch of people in the industry started reading about positive psychology - the idea that you can create habits through rewards - and apply them to video games to increase playtime
• those mechanics turned out to be very powerful in driving particular user behaviours, and started to be targeted at monetisation models - and so we got loot boxes, etc

So we went from a situation where video games were fun for the same reasons traditional games, or sports, are fun, to one where many video games include a lot of gambling mechanics in their core gameplay loops - loot boxes being the obvious one, but any lottery-based mechanic where you spend real money counts - in an industry with no relevant regulation, nor age limitation.

It is definitely possible for people to get addicted to these mechanics, the same way people can get addicted to casino games, or betting on horse racing, especially when for some games that is literally what the developer wants.

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 do feel like it's kind of a bad thing that many large game devs employ psychologists specifically to come up with ways that psychologically addict players. They could be addicting even without being specifically designed that way, but going out of your way to ensure it is does, does not seem the least but ethical to me.

Yeah let's just disregard the prevalence of gambling mechanics deliberately intended to induce addiction in minors to juice them for their parents' cash.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Parents Sue Cigarette Companies Over 'Tobacco Addiction', Because That's Easier Than Parenting"

When a company makes a product they don't just KNOW is harmful, but BECAUSE it's harmful, and they've ENGINEERED it to be harmful, for the sake of profit, it ceases to be solely about parenting.

Purged by creator

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I love it when the title of an article tells me the opinion I'm supposed to have.

The fact is there's a lot of work that goes into designing games to drive behavior. The article details some of the work that game designers do to induce compulsive behavior, like occasional free gifts to keep people from getting frustrated with certain levels. The article then poopoos this idea by pointing out that heroin addicts never get free heroin from their dealers so this can't be a real addiction. Wanna learn a fun fact that I know as a recovering addict that y'all don't know? Your dope dealer will take a short. He'll sell you a ten dollar bag for five dollars. Not every time, but every once in a while, and for the exact same reason that these games do it: he wants you stuck in, he wants you in his debt in particular and he wants you coming back to him. A sick junkie doesn't make anyone any money, we mostly just lie in bed and sob. It keeps you in the reward loop, the same as free gifts to get you past frustrating parts of a video game.

The article also acknowledges that gaming addiction is in the DSM, but tries to dismiss that as well based on notes that say further research is needed. Further research is always needed for everything, especially to do with mental health. The fact that it's in the DSM at all means that, while they may not have found the fire, they can feel heat and smell smoke. The article even concedes that 13 hours of gaming/day indicates that "something is going on here on a psychological level" but because it's not at the level of an active heroin addiction it's not worth discussing despite the author's intuition that "something is going on here" combined with the opinion of the mental health community that, from the article about the DSM linked in this one, "There is neurological research showing similarities in changes in the brain between video gaming and addictive substances."

I get it. I grew up in the 90s, when video games were new and scary and were gonna make us all smoke crack and shoot up our schools. This harmless hobby of mine was scapegoated into being the cause of so many of society's ills, and it turned out to be 100% bullshit every time. But this is different. The people who design games are open about the fact that this compulsivity is what they're designing for. The people who study this sort of behavior have already given the phenomenon a name, they're studying it and they see it as a growing phenomenon. It's likely to end up like beer, where there are people who can enjoy it sometimes in a healthy manner and people who can't. From the psychiatry.org article linked in the OP's article, it seems to be about 1% of gamers who develop problematic behavior around gaming.

Just chiming in to say that this is a garbage take. Games that are successfully designed to be addicting to adults are fishing with dynamite when it comes to targeting kids whose pre-frontal cortexes are still developing and lack the judgement and self-control to know when enough is enough.

Putting the onus on the parent isn't fair, either. On one side there's a massive corporation who employs psychologists to make their product more addicting. On the other side is a parent (or parents) who, yes, at worst are absentee and use screens as babysitters, but a lot of parents I see who struggle with this mean well but just don't understand this world. They're younger gen X or older millennials who weren't into video games growing up, aren't tech-literate the same way that this writer is, and simply want to help their kids get involved in the same stuff their friends are. They accidentally expose their kids to this greedy machine that wants to consume their every waking moment and thought for profit.

I get the feeling that "Techdirt" may be a bit biased.

Okay I understand that kneejerk "Be a good parent" reaction. But IMO that ship has sailed. And the more we tell parents to "be good parents" the more they think that means attending the local book burning.

Also, no sympathy to game publishers that make their games into dopamine casinos. Back in the good old days, video games (like all other media) was an art form, and the profits came from being a good work of art. Now it's a fucking nightmare capitalist cash cow milking machine (like all other media).

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.

If only gaming companies could figure out how to get kids addicted to algebra.