4 ms·

Some stores would only have one box of baseball cards. You would literally run out after 24 packs were sold. It wasn't like baseball card stores were ubiquitous

Some stores would only have one box of baseball cards. You would literally run out after 24 packs were sold. It wasn't like baseball card stores were ubiquitous, like they are today. There were natural bottlenecks in place, where as today, people can literally blast through 24 packs with a tap of a screen. its the scalability of these loot boxes that are a problem now.

Bartweiss 7y ago
I mostly wanted to point out that baseball cards are a natural and historical point of comparison, but I agree that loot boxes are have moved past their predecessors. They've rolled together the tactics of CCGs, MMOs, and casinos into something thoroughly unholy. From CCGs and even baseball cards, we obviously get artificial rarity and the basic Skinner box experience. From MMOs, we get scheduled rewards to draw players back, player-bound prizes that can't go to an aftermarket like cards, and unconstrained on-screen purchasing. From gambling, we get secondary currencies for fluid spending, the lights-and-sounds opening experience designed to make bad outcomes feel rewarding, almost-got-it visuals like a one-off reel, and banned-in-casinos tactics like scheduling wins based on money spent. The results are genuinely alarming. I used to think these fears were overblown and 'whales' were mostly people with spare cash, but then I started to see kids interacting with freemium games. It's a distillation of decades of cash-extraction tactics, aimed at children or at distracted adults, and delivered by a vector that's constantly accessible. Honestly, it's one of the best arguments I've seen that people can be systematically harmed by access to products even without physical addiction or health damage.
- taurath 7y ago
  Its very serious, and it IS a problem and its not just "suckers". At the very minimum, they're preying on children who don't have the capacity to understand the depths of addiction - but in this case I'd say its extremely common in adults to lack the antibodies for this type of reward system. Its predatory pure and simple, in ways that we have legislated against in the past (think of the literal snake oil salespeople - the FDA was created to combat hucksters looking to make a buck).
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    It's always fascinating to watch modern individuals rediscover wisdom that is centuries old, whenever modern people rediscover vices that are centuries old.
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    >At the very minimum, they're preying on children who don't have the capacity to understand the depths of addiction I hear this kind of thing all the time, but how many of them are actually preying on children? Let alone preying on children, how many of them even have a substantial amount of children as collatoral damage? This is not some kind of rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious as to the numbers here. I'm only really familiar with Asian "gachapon" style games that do this kind of thing and I don't think childen are genuinely a large part of that demographic.
    - Bartweiss 7y ago
      This is a great question, and depends on lot on how you define 'preying'. For a brief period this was unambiguously happening; we had those news stories about kids running up thousands of dollars in freemium charges, and even a few accusations of games actively avoiding password locks (e.g. by prompting for new payment just before the lock timer). But barring parent's phones, kids mostly don't have money. So the question becomes... If a kid is asking to have their allowance deposited into Fortnite, and trying to sneak downstairs after bed to play more Fortnite, are they being preyed on? (If it's because they want to play alongside their friends who are still on, does that change the answer?) If a kid is constantly begging their parent to let them spend money in a mobile game, are they being preyed on? (Is their parent?) Anecdotally, I've seen plenty of younger kids (5-10, maybe) who get freemium games from app stores, and then end up begging their parents to pay for various unlocks and boosts (e.g. the $1 level skips from Angry Birds, or extra lives in Candy Crush). I've also seen quite a few kids (9-14, maybe?) with relationships to Fortnite that seem disturbingly fixated and dependent, but that's much harder to judge against the simple and innocent aspect of kids getting extremely engaged with whatever they currently like playing.

Bartweiss 7y ago

I mostly wanted to point out that baseball cards are a natural and historical point of comparison, but I agree that loot boxes are have moved past their predecessors. They've rolled together the tactics of CCGs, MMOs, and casinos into something thoroughly unholy. From CCGs and even baseball cards, we obviously get artificial rarity and the basic Skinner box experience. From MMOs, we get scheduled rewards to draw players back, player-bound prizes that can't go to an aftermarket like cards, and unconstrained on-screen purchasing. From gambling, we get secondary currencies for fluid spending, the lights-and-sounds opening experience designed to make bad outcomes feel rewarding, almost-got-it visuals like a one-off reel, and banned-in-casinos tactics like scheduling wins based on money spent. The results are genuinely alarming. I used to think these fears were overblown and 'whales' were mostly people with spare cash, but then I started to see kids interacting with freemium games. It's a distillation of decades of cash-extraction tactics, aimed at children or at distracted adults, and delivered by a vector that's constantly accessible. Honestly, it's one of the best arguments I've seen that people can be systematically harmed by access to products even without physical addiction or health damage.

taurath 7y ago
Its very serious, and it IS a problem and its not just "suckers". At the very minimum, they're preying on children who don't have the capacity to understand the depths of addiction - but in this case I'd say its extremely common in adults to lack the antibodies for this type of reward system. Its predatory pure and simple, in ways that we have legislated against in the past (think of the literal snake oil salespeople - the FDA was created to combat hucksters looking to make a buck).
- lonelappde 7y ago
  It's always fascinating to watch modern individuals rediscover wisdom that is centuries old, whenever modern people rediscover vices that are centuries old.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  >At the very minimum, they're preying on children who don't have the capacity to understand the depths of addiction I hear this kind of thing all the time, but how many of them are actually preying on children? Let alone preying on children, how many of them even have a substantial amount of children as collatoral damage? This is not some kind of rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious as to the numbers here. I'm only really familiar with Asian "gachapon" style games that do this kind of thing and I don't think childen are genuinely a large part of that demographic.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    This is a great question, and depends on lot on how you define 'preying'. For a brief period this was unambiguously happening; we had those news stories about kids running up thousands of dollars in freemium charges, and even a few accusations of games actively avoiding password locks (e.g. by prompting for new payment just before the lock timer). But barring parent's phones, kids mostly don't have money. So the question becomes... If a kid is asking to have their allowance deposited into Fortnite, and trying to sneak downstairs after bed to play more Fortnite, are they being preyed on? (If it's because they want to play alongside their friends who are still on, does that change the answer?) If a kid is constantly begging their parent to let them spend money in a mobile game, are they being preyed on? (Is their parent?) Anecdotally, I've seen plenty of younger kids (5-10, maybe) who get freemium games from app stores, and then end up begging their parents to pay for various unlocks and boosts (e.g. the $1 level skips from Angry Birds, or extra lives in Candy Crush). I've also seen quite a few kids (9-14, maybe?) with relationships to Fortnite that seem disturbingly fixated and dependent, but that's much harder to judge against the simple and innocent aspect of kids getting extremely engaged with whatever they currently like playing.