sealed (as opposed to transparent packaging) and is
collectible (limited supplied of some specific items)
physical or not is prone to betting and thus addiction. We tend to ignore the thing we care about, because we are passionate or come up with explanations (not to say excuses or post-rationalization) but in practice it doesn’t matter if your MTG deck is super “powerful” or that you see yourself as a great strategist, in fine if you do buy or promote those your are promoting gambling.
Do you mean like a physically opaque package or one where the exact contents are obscured by randomization? There are some card games that have no randomization whatsoever in their packaging, like Fantasy Flights LCGs.
Well I do mean physically opaque but true that implies, as few persons did comment regarding e.g. Poker, that the content itself or the rules do not change the distribution to introduce artificial scarcity.
The point is that purchasing a package in itself should not be a bet.
I see people cracking mtg packs on YouTube all the time, and pokemon ane Yu-Gi-Oh packs, heck i watched some people open the $100k mtg alpha box.
100% addictive.
Heck back in the day they used to call it digital crack
I don’t think loot boxes are a thing anymore but Battle Passes are predatory. You pay for access to items but you aren’t guaranteed those if the timer runs out.
Lootboxes are sooo 2010s though. It‘s all about season passes and general FOMO. I doubt they will correctly identify and properly regulate „addictive features“ in a way that puts an end to that but I guess we‘ll see.
The companies doing them have a few hundred million reasons to skirt around the laws, so they will no doubt find a few ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make laws
Watch the end result be you can’t find random chests in Minecraft dungeons or Terraria caves cause it falls under the category of “lootbox” in games…
(May seem hyperbolic, but we are talking about 70 year old boomers trying to make regulations for video games. I’m not sure I have the most positive view of the potential outcome)
Uno can be gambling too if you start to bet on round. Anything can be gambling if you want it to but poker with non convertible tokens isn’t gambling. Betting on players also would be gambling. Anything can become gambling. If you think that’s an overstatement look at predictive markets to see how broad bettable events can be, it’s amazing scary.
AND there is a distribution of the content (namely some rare and non rare items)
then the purchase of that deck itself is gambling.
That does not imply anything about other situations, namely decks that are all the same can still be used for gambling when there are played with rules that do introduce randomness. A single coin for example can be used to bet.
I’m of the strong opinion that we control the media that we are exposed to and that the resolution for problematic or undesirable media is to simply turn it off.
However: advertising, LLM’s, social media, and the Internet have forced me to capitulate that certain forms of media constitute a legitimate memetic hazard, and are capable of fueling addiction, misinformation, and general misery on large enough scales. I hate this conclusion because while I still heavily err on the side of media liberty and self-control, I cannot square that value with the reality of poisonous, hostile mass media.
We should not be subjected to predatory practices to enjoy the products and services that we depend on, and the entertainment that is part of our shared experience and culture. Loot boxes, advertising, and financial scams are becoming nearly universal in popular gaming products, and even software in general. To me, this eventually constitutes a monopolistic behavior that becomes reasonably unavoidable and must be regulated.
To be fair, much of the memetic hazard posed by various technologies is not actually the fault of the technologies, but a fault of the person having no self-control, no accountability for their own actions, or having some form of undiagnosed medical issue they are unaware of.
Its like saying video games cause school shootings: the problem isnt the video games, its the person. The video games are an excuse to shift blame and accountability away from the person.
what you say has merit, however its akin to saying that the memetic hazard posed by heroin isnt the fault of heroin. like, sure. heroin is just a substance. certain software is similar, but its made to be a certain way (dark patterns in gaming etc) and should be regulated for harm reduction just like addictive substances
Okay, but if we take care of the problem that people have, legal regulation would not be necessary. We wouldn’t have to have a trillion laws stipulating all the various minutae of what we should or shouldn’t do because of how harmful it is or isn’t, people would be able to figure this out on their own. Less laws in general is better, when the population is intelligent enough to understand that you don’t drink bleach because a computer screen showed those words to you in that order.
Opiates wouldn’t need to be illegal because people would be intelligent enough to know how harmful it is and thus wouldn’t use it. A law wouldn’t need to be created listing every known or unknown opiate derivative that is banned or for whatever use. People would just be smart enough to know.
Basically, too many people aren’t using their own brain. AI is definitely a helpful tool, but not if you’re an idiot and believe it to have any actual intelligence. Its not there to replace your doctor or teacher, it is there to help you with word processing, pattern recognition, or other such language based tasks. AI used as a tool is queried for things like “check this passage for overly repetitive terms and suggest improvements that keep the same meaning.” AI used by an idiot is queried for things like “what do my lab results say about my health?”
I suppose this is too far advanced for humanity at this point. Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.
Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.
Let me take a contrarian position on this. While I agree that in principle less laws are generally better, the way the world works makes it almost systematically impossible to lower the number of laws.
Let’s make a thought experiment; how many products and services were available to a given “middle class” individual in following years:
1500
1800
1900
1950
2000
2025
Now if we take this same breakdown, and modify it to show how many products and services de facto require the time, inclination and resources to evaluate associated “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy” documents (and some products have other supplemental legal docs). Not to mention tracking the changes in these legal documents and associated laws (which in some countries might not only be national, but also regional and even local).
Keep in mind that with TOS/PP was limited to software in say the 90s, now it also covered even something as “simple” as a washing machine.
Now also add the UI/UX complexity of managing these services to make them reflect your true preferences (try and look at LinkedIn’s privacy management dashboard or their notifications dashboard).
So perhaps rather talking about regulation, we need to talk about not requiring a legal degree to use a product and using common sense approach to TOS/PP validity (and legal/criminal penalties for those are knowingly contributing to this issue).
Not to mention the fact that “less regulation” polemics are often used in some countries to enable corruption, criminality and worse governance.
They won’t do it, and here’s why: AAA will lobby for the continuation because it will hurt their bottom line of that gets banned. They love to implement dark patterns galore, and modern games will certainly do that.
Don’t be surprised if this fails, as it will likely be more consumerism, considering the fact that the USD and bond bubble just burst recently.
Your tastes may change and you might have changed as a person as you aged but there’s nothing to “grow out of”. Games aren’t inherently childish. Certain ones can be, but games as a whole aren’t
There are still loot boxes in Belgium, they just work differently. You get to see what is inside before you start the transaction, allowing a person to only open the ones with contents they want.
That’s good news, but will the EU make it law for the entirety of it? I’d say no, but this is for sure promising. Us Americans need to get clocked for our dark pattern usage.
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Cool. Law when?
after the activion lobby gets tired
To learn why it matters Neuroexploitation by Design at 39c3 (with English dubbing) specifically 28min in.
“Study” meaning put it in committee so it can die in the web of bureaucracy
Ah yes, because the EU has never done anything before
And then I assume they’ll study a large packet of banknotes each and forget all about it.
YuGiHo, MTG, Pokemon cards, Labubu, etc basically
ANYTHING that comes
physical or not is prone to betting and thus addiction. We tend to ignore the thing we care about, because we are passionate or come up with explanations (not to say excuses or post-rationalization) but in practice it doesn’t matter if your MTG deck is super “powerful” or that you see yourself as a great strategist, in fine if you do buy or promote those your are promoting gambling.
Do you mean like a physically opaque package or one where the exact contents are obscured by randomization? There are some card games that have no randomization whatsoever in their packaging, like Fantasy Flights LCGs.
Well I do mean physically opaque but true that implies, as few persons did comment regarding e.g. Poker, that the content itself or the rules do not change the distribution to introduce artificial scarcity.
The point is that purchasing a package in itself should not be a bet.
Yeah in the boardgame community everyone know tcgs are predatory, at least there are usually communities for alternative formats.
I see people cracking mtg packs on YouTube all the time, and pokemon ane Yu-Gi-Oh packs, heck i watched some people open the $100k mtg alpha box. 100% addictive. Heck back in the day they used to call it digital crack
You might enjoy Loot box content is associated with increased user engagement for YouTube gaming videos (2023) then.
😡
I don’t think loot boxes are a thing anymore but Battle Passes are predatory. You pay for access to items but you aren’t guaranteed those if the timer runs out.
Loot box are still a thing, in a big way. Look at CS2 or the yearly soccer games.
And gacha games on mobile are a plague.
Lootbox is the first step, battlepass close second.
Lootboxes are sooo 2010s though. It‘s all about season passes and general FOMO. I doubt they will correctly identify and properly regulate „addictive features“ in a way that puts an end to that but I guess we‘ll see.
The companies doing them have a few hundred million reasons to skirt around the laws, so they will no doubt find a few ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make laws
Season passes and FOMO aren’t gambling, you get what you buy and although I don’t like them they are not the issue.
Lootbox systems are designed to be addictive as it’s paying money to recieve a prize with very bad odds. Glad my country banned them a while ago.
The problem with a battle pass is that you pay for the chance to maybe get something.
If you can’t play or don’t pay well enough, it’s wasted money
With a loot box you get something right now. It might be shit but at least it’s on your account
I’m drawing the line at paying for a thing that might be good or bad, mechanics like that are addictive especially to children
my nephews are all about the limited edition skins
Watch the end result be you can’t find random chests in Minecraft dungeons or Terraria caves cause it falls under the category of “lootbox” in games…
(May seem hyperbolic, but we are talking about 70 year old boomers trying to make regulations for video games. I’m not sure I have the most positive view of the potential outcome)
uh, on one side of my family my 70 year old boomers were helping Ken and Dennis write UNIX. I listen when they talk.
What about the other side?
The ate paint chips and crayons
Close, they caused mine collapses
the average age of elected leaders across the world is in the 45-50 range for most of the western world, US is the oldest at 60-70 range
Money, gambling is (even if obfuscated via tokens) about money.
Monopoly is not gambling because there is no (real) money involved. Uno is not gambling because there is no money involved.
Uno is not gambling because all decks are the same. There is no artificial scarcity to monetize, it’s literally just a game and that’s good.
What about poker?
Uno can be gambling too if you start to bet on round. Anything can be gambling if you want it to but poker with non convertible tokens isn’t gambling. Betting on players also would be gambling. Anything can become gambling. If you think that’s an overstatement look at predictive markets to see how broad bettable events can be, it’s
amazingscary.So it’s not about all decks being the same.
What I tried to express is that when decks are
then the purchase of that deck itself is gambling.
That does not imply anything about other situations, namely decks that are all the same can still be used for gambling when there are played with rules that do introduce randomness. A single coin for example can be used to bet.
I’m of the strong opinion that we control the media that we are exposed to and that the resolution for problematic or undesirable media is to simply turn it off.
However: advertising, LLM’s, social media, and the Internet have forced me to capitulate that certain forms of media constitute a legitimate memetic hazard, and are capable of fueling addiction, misinformation, and general misery on large enough scales. I hate this conclusion because while I still heavily err on the side of media liberty and self-control, I cannot square that value with the reality of poisonous, hostile mass media.
We should not be subjected to predatory practices to enjoy the products and services that we depend on, and the entertainment that is part of our shared experience and culture. Loot boxes, advertising, and financial scams are becoming nearly universal in popular gaming products, and even software in general. To me, this eventually constitutes a monopolistic behavior that becomes reasonably unavoidable and must be regulated.
To be fair, much of the memetic hazard posed by various technologies is not actually the fault of the technologies, but a fault of the person having no self-control, no accountability for their own actions, or having some form of undiagnosed medical issue they are unaware of.
Its like saying video games cause school shootings: the problem isnt the video games, its the person. The video games are an excuse to shift blame and accountability away from the person.
what you say has merit, however its akin to saying that the memetic hazard posed by heroin isnt the fault of heroin. like, sure. heroin is just a substance. certain software is similar, but its made to be a certain way (dark patterns in gaming etc) and should be regulated for harm reduction just like addictive substances
Okay, but if we take care of the problem that people have, legal regulation would not be necessary. We wouldn’t have to have a trillion laws stipulating all the various minutae of what we should or shouldn’t do because of how harmful it is or isn’t, people would be able to figure this out on their own. Less laws in general is better, when the population is intelligent enough to understand that you don’t drink bleach because a computer screen showed those words to you in that order.
Opiates wouldn’t need to be illegal because people would be intelligent enough to know how harmful it is and thus wouldn’t use it. A law wouldn’t need to be created listing every known or unknown opiate derivative that is banned or for whatever use. People would just be smart enough to know.
Basically, too many people aren’t using their own brain. AI is definitely a helpful tool, but not if you’re an idiot and believe it to have any actual intelligence. Its not there to replace your doctor or teacher, it is there to help you with word processing, pattern recognition, or other such language based tasks. AI used as a tool is queried for things like “check this passage for overly repetitive terms and suggest improvements that keep the same meaning.” AI used by an idiot is queried for things like “what do my lab results say about my health?”
I suppose this is too far advanced for humanity at this point. Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.
even the most intelligent people on the planet can become addicted to something. what youre asking for is utopia and not rooted in the real world
Let me take a contrarian position on this. While I agree that in principle less laws are generally better, the way the world works makes it almost systematically impossible to lower the number of laws.
Let’s make a thought experiment; how many products and services were available to a given “middle class” individual in following years:
Now if we take this same breakdown, and modify it to show how many products and services de facto require the time, inclination and resources to evaluate associated “Terms of Service” and “Privacy Policy” documents (and some products have other supplemental legal docs). Not to mention tracking the changes in these legal documents and associated laws (which in some countries might not only be national, but also regional and even local).
Keep in mind that with TOS/PP was limited to software in say the 90s, now it also covered even something as “simple” as a washing machine.
Now also add the UI/UX complexity of managing these services to make them reflect your true preferences (try and look at LinkedIn’s privacy management dashboard or their notifications dashboard).
So perhaps rather talking about regulation, we need to talk about not requiring a legal degree to use a product and using common sense approach to TOS/PP validity (and legal/criminal penalties for those are knowingly contributing to this issue).
Not to mention the fact that “less regulation” polemics are often used in some countries to enable corruption, criminality and worse governance.
Aren’t there already regulations for casinos and the like?
Might as well apply the same to these. Then all lootbox games will become adult only.
They won’t do it, and here’s why: AAA will lobby for the continuation because it will hurt their bottom line of that gets banned. They love to implement dark patterns galore, and modern games will certainly do that.
Don’t be surprised if this fails, as it will likely be more consumerism, considering the fact that the USD and bond bubble just burst recently.
Loot boxes and microtransactions made me hate playing videogames.
Even the benign psychological manipulation away from just starting a game and enjoying it that is achievements is annoying
Yeah. I think part of it is just that I’ve grown out of them. But part of it is enshittification.
Your tastes may change and you might have changed as a person as you aged but there’s nothing to “grow out of”. Games aren’t inherently childish. Certain ones can be, but games as a whole aren’t
Luckily for you, there’s more games without any loot boxes or micro transactions than you can play in your lifetime.
Some European countries have banned them already. Belgium and the Netherlands as an example.
There are still loot boxes in Belgium, they just work differently. You get to see what is inside before you start the transaction, allowing a person to only open the ones with contents they want.
That’s good news, but will the EU make it law for the entirety of it? I’d say no, but this is for sure promising. Us Americans need to get clocked for our dark pattern usage.
The EU is one of the few institutions that will stand up to large companies. Not quickly and not enough but they have