this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

What is UPS besides United Postal Service?

My best contextual guess, me having no tech background, is something like Universal Protocol Server? I dunno

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ah! Yes thank you for straightening me out on all those details there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Username suspiciously relevant

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Uninterruptible power supply is the common use.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it's sort of fine, because they don't benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.

It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.