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Look, this is just commerce at work. People are going to use whatever edge they can get to make more money. These edges only go so far. If you think the only re

Look, this is just commerce at work. People are going to use whatever edge they can get to make more money. These edges only go so far. If you think the only reason Game of War is popular because of the million dollar ads, then why isn't every single product, everywhere using these ads? These games fulfill more than just some need to mindlessly click on shit. Just because doesn't do anything for you, that doesn't make the people it does work for stupid or rubes. As soon as something better comes along, all of these games companies are going to be toast, way, way deader than disco. Assuming that any massive success is due to nefarious attention-gaming is pretty much categorically wrong. Video gaming, by the standards of global commerce, is a ridiculously tiny niche. There are billions of people who have never played a video game in their entire life. Game of War is the largest player in a sub-niche of this small niche. Big enough to buy ads on the Super Bowl, sure, but that says a lot more about the declining power of television and advertising in general than it does about the size of the gaming market. That this market needs political attention to curb abuse is utterly laughable. How about we fix oil drilling, or pharmaceutical production first?

Retra 11y ago
>Look, this is just commerce at work. And? Oil drilling and pharmaceutical production is just commerce at work. As is child labor, sex trafficking, drug trade, and slavery.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  So they are. Are you really equating them?
  - Retra 11y ago
    Nothing is "just" commerce at work. This is also a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because these things happen to be legal doesn't necessitate that they should be.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      When did I say they should be legal? The political process has limits. There's such a thing as political capital and there's only so much of it at any given time. Most people seem to think that shit is unlimited, that we could just fix everything all at once if the politicians just knew what it was. That's emphatically not the case. Issues all get their time in the sun, and the political fix is almost never perfect. The issues you compared social video games to, slavery et. al. all were banned, rightfully, a long time ago. When I say that this is "commerce as usual" I mean that the market will sort out the complained-about issues itself, without the need for a law. Legislation is a complicated, tortuous affair. Society needs many, many individual events to draw on in order to draft effective legislation. Someone has to study this stuff in order to write a law, someone has to convince others to vote for the law. None of this is free, it all comes at the expense of other issues needing attention at the moment. Votes get traded like horses. In this case, political attention isn't needed, at least not yet. There are way too many other issues that beg attention.

Retra 11y ago

>Look, this is just commerce at work. And? Oil drilling and pharmaceutical production is just commerce at work. As is child labor, sex trafficking, drug trade, and slavery.

vinceguidry 11y ago
So they are. Are you really equating them?
- Retra 11y ago
  Nothing is "just" commerce at work. This is also a prime example of the naturalistic fallacy. Just because these things happen to be legal doesn't necessitate that they should be.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    When did I say they should be legal? The political process has limits. There's such a thing as political capital and there's only so much of it at any given time. Most people seem to think that shit is unlimited, that we could just fix everything all at once if the politicians just knew what it was. That's emphatically not the case. Issues all get their time in the sun, and the political fix is almost never perfect. The issues you compared social video games to, slavery et. al. all were banned, rightfully, a long time ago. When I say that this is "commerce as usual" I mean that the market will sort out the complained-about issues itself, without the need for a law. Legislation is a complicated, tortuous affair. Society needs many, many individual events to draw on in order to draft effective legislation. Someone has to study this stuff in order to write a law, someone has to convince others to vote for the law. None of this is free, it all comes at the expense of other issues needing attention at the moment. Votes get traded like horses. In this case, political attention isn't needed, at least not yet. There are way too many other issues that beg attention.