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So in your opinion there's nothing a gaming or marketing company can do that's legal now, but really shouldn't be? I'm also not buying that it's a slippery slo

• nostromo 11y ago
  Take a look at someone who spent $30k on ships in Star Citizen. http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on-star-citizen-ships/ http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on-sta... He seems like a reasonable person to me. He's not in financial ruin. He doesn't seem to regret his purchase. He's just putting money into his hobby, the same way a different 40 year old would buy an "unproductive" boat or an "unproductive" Rolex.
  • ethbro 11y ago
    I think both the original article's and your points are valid. Especially when you start to see games/virtual items as a "thing" (which probably started with UO/WoW) as opposed to a "fake thing". That said, as a thought experiment, I disagree with the fact that government and regulation have no place in the way a society consumes things like this. If you accept that our knowledge of psychology, biochemistry, and neuroscience are improving and likely to continue doing so, and that calibrated external actions are capable of influencing our behavior, and that progress in the former begets progress in the latter, then either: a) We will reach a point where we will stop making progress in those fields b) We overturn the majority of our current social psychology knowledge and realize that yes, people actually do have absolute free will c) We will develop techniques so sophisticated and reliable to influence behavior that it becomes unreasonable to expect an average person to resist them As I (and the original article seems to) see it, the current free-for-all that is "freemium"/casual gaming basically targets all of capitalism's motivation and resources on arriving at (c) as quickly as possible. And... we're getting pretty damn good at it. PS: Positech Games makes great stuff, btw! GSB had several free expansions just because Cliff Harris is cool [he == Positech]. He absolutely could have charged for the content if he'd felt like milking more money out of his users.
    • WalterBright 11y ago
      > we're getting pretty damn good at it I'm not so sure. I play a video game, and invariably get bored to tears within 30 seconds or so. It might have something to do with when I was a student, I had a job that involved play testing video games. It's also true that my old game Empire was well known to be addictive. I'd play it myself, but would rarely get too far into a game before I'd go back to tweaking the AI, which was where the real fun was.
      • ethbro 11y ago
        Ironic username, given the conversation topic. ;) While yours may be a true experience: statistics. I'm not sure a personal experience poll on an entrepreneurial technology news site is the best place for a representative sample of people with low willpower. And social psych findings have born out that are a lot of easily manipulated levers to reliably influence people's behavior in an intentional way. To me, it's not about the people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower. Say instead I'm born into the genetic/epigenetic/life lottery with a crappy ticket, what's fair? (And if you don't agree that that's possible, try volunteering at your local homeless shelter a few times) Is it fair that everyone else gets to leverage my vices to transfer my wealth and the profits of my work to themselves? Or is there something morally not right about that scenario? I agree it's easy to go overboard with regulation, but just because it's possible to addict babies to cocaine in utero doesn't mean that's the society we should build.
        • deleted 11y ago
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        • Pyxl101 11y ago
          What's ironic about his username? His name's Walter Bright.
          • ethbro 11y ago
            Ironic in the context of a discussion of vices and addiction, though now understandable (apologies for my lack of knowledge of 70s games & compiler names!) echo "WalterBright" | sed 's/Bright/White/'
  • zouhair 11y ago
    When you buy a boat or a Rolex, you own a boat or a Rolex. Now you can buy all Star Citizen's ship you will own nothing, if tomorrow they decide to close their servers you are pretty much screwed.
    • WalterBright 11y ago
      Owning a boat can be a real drag, though, once the novelty wears off.
      • gregimba 11y ago
        Literally a drag...
        • marvy 11y ago
          nice one!
    • JoshTriplett 11y ago
      When you buy a ticket to a movie, a concert, or a theme park, after you're done, you have "nothing" by the argument you're making. Want to ban movies, concerts, and theme parks? People get value from things that aren't tangible. Many of the most valuable things aren't tangible.
      • zouhair 11y ago
        That's not the same. Some people spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to level up in some games, they have no recourse if the company shut it down. For a movie you clearly know what you get into.
        • oldmanjay 11y ago
          your conclusion isn't supported by your premise, which seems to be that it matters how much a person spends. Where is the line?
  • bduerst 11y ago
    He is not putting money into his hobby. If you buy $30k worth of golf clubs, you have $30k worth of golf clubs. If you put $30k into a kickstarter project for some digital assets exclusively in a piece of software that isn't even written yet, you don't own that. That's not putting $30k into a hobby, but giving $30k to someone without even a contractual obligation for delivery. It's exactly why the SEC won't let non-accredited investing into crowdfunded equity projects, but the reality is that people already think they're buying something without getting equity.
    • maxerickson 11y ago
      There is at least an implied contract on Kickstarter. They say as much in their TOS: https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4 https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4
      • mcphage 11y ago
        Star Citizen isn't through Kickstarter, though. At this point it's through themselves.
      • bduerst 11y ago
        Has this ever been held as legally binding in civil court?
      • deleted 11y ago
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    • marcoperaza 11y ago
      If I want to spend $100,000 on ephemeral virtual items in a video game that might never actually be released, that's my problem, not the government's. I'm the one that earned the money, so I'm the one that decides how to spend it. It's totally inappropriate for the government to insert itself between two informed and consenting parties. A paternalist government is not compatible with a free society.
      • deleted 11y ago
• adrtessier 11y ago
  I don't believe that the original author is making the argument that "marketers sometimes do shady things with data." From its title and lede to the end, I read it as "some of these games are manipulative and use manipulative tactics and mechanics to suck money out of people, sometimes to their own demise. The government needs to regulate this industry to protect people from themselves and ban these mechanics." This is roughly as simple to regulate and ban as it is to ban any other type of mechanic. It is what leads to weird laws such as some of California's casinos having weird bingo-based slot machines, or pachinko machines in Japan needing you to trade a pseudocurrency for goods. The point I'm trying to make is that it is impractical, costly, probably impossible and dangerous to attempt to limit the mechanics the OP is really pissed off about in a way that does not also impinge upon the freedom of the majority in order to protect those with poor impulse control. I am capable of going to a casino and walking out of there without losing my shirt. I am equally as capable of going to have a few drinks at a bar without becoming an alcoholic, or to have sex with somebody and not turn into a raging sex addict. Should my ability to go to casinos, drink, or sleep with people be regulated too, just because some people's lives are ruined by these things? You can project this argument into a thousand different things just because people like them. For example, I spend an absolute eternity on the Internet. The vast majority of my life is spent reading, writing code, or doing other coder-type things. Because of this, I have also had to eat the opportunity cost involved; I have missed out on some social gatherings, I have lost friends and also lost any and all experience I would get otherwise. It's safe to say, by some general decree, that I'm addicted to what I do. I'd argue I'm passionate. Should my work and passions be regulated because there is an opportunity cost to me doing so? Should I not be allowed to have the Internet at all because someone else has racked up inordinate amounts of debt at World of Warcraft? I don't believe it is the fault of the mechanic that these people have poor impulse control, for some reason or another, and I also don't believe it's fair to limit the existence of these types of games because some people are incapable of walking away from them. If we should do anything regulatory down this path, it is building in proper harm reduction systems for these things versus taking a puritanical "ban it" approach to them.
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• coffeemug 11y ago
  > I'm also not buying that it's a slippery slope and banning, say, cross compiling profiles on customers from different, unrelated platforms would "take down the entirety of marketing and advertising as an industry". It's also not clear that destroying the entirety of marketing and advertising industries is an obviously bad idea if you take the long view on humanity. (It's also not an obviously good idea. It's worth thinking about.)
  • marvy 11y ago
    How long a view are we talking about? On a time scale of decades, it sounds like a bad idea, and on a time scale of centuries I tend to distrust all forecasts. Care to present any argument in favor?
• Retric 11y ago
  Society already had this discussion and gambling is highly regulated for a large number of reasons. Some games have destroyed lives, and enabling that is not in society's best interst. PS: We can fantasize about people being rational, but reality disagrees.
  • marcoperaza 11y ago
    > PS: We can fantasize about people being rational, but reality disagrees. I worry that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That the less you treat people as rational beings responsible for their own decisions, the less rational and responsible they will be. It might already be happening, with victimitis in American politics being one of the most visible outcomes.
    • s73v3r 11y ago
      Worry all you want, but people have never been rational, even when governments didn't do anything about anything. And nothing will change that. Taking away the government regulations will only result in parasitic companies preying on others.