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You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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.