I’d be shocked if that was possible. Though I wouldn’t hate being able to do crafting/gathering from my phone.

Yes it was. And if I remember right, there were two of them. I don’t know how I managed to actually do it.

I did when I was a kid. Took a long time.

Yeah, support for it was cut for my TV sadly. I’ve got the device, but apps are convenient and don’t involve running wires.

Love me some sources, thank you.

I was bringing it up in the context of “McDonald’s definitely did something wrong”, though I didn’t state that well.

I agree, specific damage is iffy, but the widespread is more alarming. The snippet that someone posted from the court documents shove this into parental neglect territory in my head, but we’ll see what happens. I’m neither a lawyer nor a parent so I’m strictly in the armchair on this.

There’s something to be said for some kind of regulation in regards to known addictive mechanisms and that corporations have proven time and again they can’t be trusted to handle it themselves (in every industry). This just might not be the case to drive it home

Ooof. Yeah, that is real bad. I’ll happily pitchfork a big company, but that’s firmly in parental neglect territory.

I’d hazard it’s both. There are plenty of microtransaction models that explicitly exploit addictive behaviors (see gatcha).

On top of that, some companies handle more benign models better. Grinding Gear Games will lock your account from buying things if you ask them to without question, to help people that struggle with that sort of thing. Many other companies (I want to say Blizzard, but I don’t have a source) will throw up their hands and say “the system can’t do that”, when it’s not hard to implement. One enable flag is all you need (I’m aware implementation takes more, but just one variable can control a users ability to make purchases)

And some parents are also more than happy to have kids out of their hair by any means necessary.

This smells like the McDonald’s coffee story to me. A headline can make it sound absurd, but I suspect a deeper look isn’t a bad thing.

Edit: as for non money based addiction, yeah that ball can go back to the parents court imo

Very personal. I personally find it less satisfying when I do use those. But I’ll also call a spectre in Lies of P for most boss fights because I don’t want to run this 50 times (I do try it solo a few times before I do that).

Honestly, try it for an hour or two and see if it makes it more or less fun.

I mean, FFXIV has just as much and manages it.

Assuming, in the case of online games, it does not affect the game for others, I agree.