Addictive and entertaining are synonyms now?
Gaming
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
- 1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- 2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy "anti-woke" energy, you probably shouldn't be posting it here.
- 3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
Wanna try some super entertaining pills, or would you prefer a syringe so you can pump entertainment straight into your veins? First round is free, don't you want to be entertained?
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.
Right: nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
If we allow that to continue, there will be nothing else.
I feel like this is much too rare of a statement. No idea why people dont get this. It's like talking to children sometimes.
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.
What is UPS besides United Postal Service?
My best contextual guess, me having no tech background, is something like Universal Protocol Server? I dunno
UPS is never United Postal Service. You might have meant UPS as United Parcel Service, or you might have mistaken USPS (United States Postal Service).
In this context they are using UPS as Uninterruptable Power Supply.
Ah! Yes thank you for straightening me out on all those details there.
Username suspiciously relevant
Uninterruptible power supply is the common use.
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.
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.
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 can't get into the whole debate because I'm not knowledgeable enough to articulate the difference between a genuinely good game and games using skinnerbox mechanics to force operant conditioning. However, I have an anecdote.
I used to play a mobile game that was mid level fun, but a very obvious skinnerbox with time based turns (energy? Mana stones? Hell, I don't remember), daily and weekly battles, sporadic new releases where you had a chance to get some kind of cool stuff, and clan activities. I had to put it down for a couple of weeks due to real life and just never picked it back up. I still talk to some of the guys on discord but after not being on every day I stopped caring about the game entirely.
This is a pretty complicated topic that touches video games, gambling sites, social media algorithms, and marketing in general. It also touches fundamental philosophical questions like the existence of free will.
We have lots of established law on which sort of "mind tricks" are fair play and which aren't, but we have not advanced those laws to keep pace with the science. Currently, lying is really the only thing off limits and is covered by fraud statutes. We also have some limits on marketing to children. But one could argue that there are several "persuasion" tactics that can be just as effective as outright lies in manipulating the behavior of others. In fact, licensed therapists are ethically barred from using these tactics, yet we allow salesmen, marketers, etc to use them at will.
I don't really have an opinion on this lawsuit, nor do I feel qualified to offer a solution. But let me give you an example of how the human mind works which underpins addiction to gambling.
Dopamine is a signaling molecule that regulates a lot of our reward responses. If I find honey in a honeycomb, dopamine gets released and now I am more likely to seek out honeycombs in the future. You can see how this is evolutionarily beneficial. Dopamine release reinforces behavior that increases survival. But let's say that only about 1/3 of all honeycombs have honey. Now I have a lower chance at a reward, so does that mean the dopamine release is likewise diminished? No, the opposite is true. Dopamine release skyrockets. Evolutionarily this makes sense, we do not want to miss out on a reward simply because the probability is diminished, so the high dopamine release counterbalances the diminished probability such that reward seeking behavior is reinforced so long as the probability of reward is reasonable (it peaks at about 1/4). In fact, dopamine is released even when the honeycomb has no honey. You can draw a direct line between this physical phenomenon and gambling addiction. What people don't appreciate is that this physiological response is very similar to addictive drugs in effectiveness. It can be hard to acknowledge that one of the reasons you are not a gambling addict is simply that you didn't start gambling to begin with, not that you are somehow superior to those that are addicted.
We have lots of behavioral quirks like this that can be exploited. At what point does this manipulation cross the line? That is a hard question. For me, gacha games cross that line. But if we want to enact meaningful regulations we need to acknowledge that these mind exploits exist and confront the fact that free will may not be as free as we hope.
Dopamine is a signal substance that is present in several places in the brain, and animals, doing different things in different places. It is not as simple as an exploitable chemical that is enabling this or even involved in the behavioral studies targeted and implemented by gambling companies.
Many things in life is exploitative. The plastic in almost all your utility is designed to break so you have to buy new products. The insurers are purposefully hiding clauses to steal from actual people in distress, at the moment where they lost everything. Oil companies astroturf and lobby to keep the transportation and air quality at this unsustainable level just to make even more money when they already have most of the money in the world, enough to buy whole continents, just lying around in Panama.
Music, film, and other forms of art are the few places where the consumer is more actively engaged and sensitive to being exploited, yet it is also the space where that just doesn't fly. The gambling area is the most interesting place to view these moral questions in. Why is it okay that their entire business model is to work around regulation as much as possible to reach those most vulnerable in society to take their money?
Games with exploitative practices are going hard out of fashion. The people that engage with those systems unhealthily is the same people that are gambling addicts.
To me it's just very easy and obviously best to use policy involving support networks and social safety nets to protect people rather than using prohibitive regulation and hope that soulless corporations will ever grow artificial moral spines. These psychopathic global machines will never be human or act human ever
There's a difference between addictive and entertaining.
I wouldn't call nicotine entertaining.
Opening lootboxes you paid $5 each for is not entertaining.
I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.
For a long time I've argued that there needs to be stronger language differences between physiological addiction and psychological addiction, especially in non-academic discourse. Academic papers usually define their terms pretty well, and often use terms like "habit forming" or "dependency" instead of addiction.
A lot of work has been done to remove the stigma of addiction to shift the blame from the individual to the product, and I have no objections at all to that for physiological addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.
The problem is that zealots have co-opted that model to try to ban anything they don't want other people to be able to enjoy. Comic books, television, videogames, marijuana, pornography- all of these have had the word "addiction" attached in news media without solid scientific evidence of physiological addiction. At the same time, you can find case studies of individuals with mental health disorders who get addicted to literally anything.. I'm not saying there are not individuals who don't have problems with these things, but a lot of the effort into stigmatizing and restricting these seems to have ulterior motives. It's parents who don't want to teach their children about responsibility and discipline. It's religious zealots trying to push their worldviews on others. It's large corporations trying to gain market share by attacking competing industries. In some cases like "sex addiction" it's used to try to excuse or justify criminal behavior and portray abusers as victims. It's notable that efforts usually go to just banning and shaming these things rather than helping the alleged "victims". At the same time, efforts at harm reduction for physiological addiction seems to be constantly undermined.
With all of that being said, there is a separate issue that applies to this case- consumer protection. History has clearly demonstrated that without regulation and enforcement, corporations will engage in all manner of activity to screw over every stakeholder (consumers, vendors, employees, lenders, etc) in order to enrich ownership.
Looking at videogames in particular, there are definitely marketing practices and pricing structures that need to be banned. I just hate this idea that "videogames = bad" when the real issue is corporate greed, and a lot of these issues apply to other industries too.
In counseling, we call those process addictions. Internet gaming, sexual addictions, gambling, shopping etc. are all process addictions. Psychological addiction isn't precise enough as any chemical addiction could have a strong psychological component as well, and almost always does because addictions create habits of use and habits are difficult to break. Also, for instance, we might have to ditch our drinking buddies when we have alcoholism because being around them triggers our urge to drink psychologically.
Loot boxes (for real money directly or indirectly) arent video games and those absolutely fucking should be banned.
That argument doesn't fly for companies that employ psychologists specifically to make their games as unhealthy as possible.
Well, apparently we can
And now explain to me, what psychological tricks Minecraft uses that make you addicted to it.
At first I thought it had to do with lootbox mechanics and scheduling and reward system gaming, but nope, this one was straight up just "he played vidja too much and I'm afraid of him when I take away his games"
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
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.
People don't drink because vodka tastes good, assholes. "You're still playing!" is not proof of enjoyment.
This is really a thing?
Where do I line up to give my victim impact statement on the quality and longevity of games?