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This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-h

This is so disheartening. I work as an admin in a school that serves all grades, and the impact that this stuff has on kids is very real. I've witnessed first-hand a grown in sort of a "gambling" culture amongst kids, as early as elementary school. While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. Part of me, though, wonders if this is just me getting older and becoming one of those "grumps." It's painfully obvious that as a whole society is moving to becoming more and more accepting of things like this (for instance, the huge push towards gambling in organized sports in the US), that it has the feel of inevitability. My sense is this will be a net social negative, but perhaps experience will prove it to be not so bad.

falcolas 5y ago
One thing FIFA has that MTG never did: it effectively destroys you collection of cards every year. You can’t carry over cards between their yearly releases, and you can’t get updated rosters without getting the latest release. It is, at least for sports games, incomparable to MTG or Pokémon.
- stodor89 5y ago
  Hmm, aren't MTG releasing new sets every year? And don't they only allow cards from the last few years in tournaments?
  - frumper 5y ago
    I can still pull out my 20+ year old cards and play with friends. Some cards are reprinted and remain legal. Either way you aren’t playing your old fifa ones vs new ones
  - ayngg 5y ago
    They have different formats that people play with varying amounts of sets being legal, one of the most popular formats is a casual format where almost every card printed is legal. Sure a lot of it becomes chaff, but it is not unusual for cards you buy to appreciate in value, or even gain a substantial amount of value when they become viable and popularized in decks or are enabled by new cards that are released. The cards I played with decades ago when I was a kid in school have appreciated in value many multiples of times over.
icu 5y ago
I don't think you're way off the mark, or being a "grumps" on the subject. Young minds can be heavily influenced which is why many societies regulate experiences that may cause harm. I'm sure there are children who aren't impacted by EA lootboxes, as I'm sure there are children who are. It's the ones that are I'm concerned about, and the families that will end up dealing with the fallout. I don't see why it's not possible to gate it behind a proof of age... however it's obvious that there is no incentive for EA to do so.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  This is all really sad and I wonder how I'll ever protect my child from what these cooperations will come up with 10 years from now. I know probably every generation has lamented about this but I wonder if childhood these days is as fun as it used to be. Yesterday we overheard two kids, maybe 9 years old, discuss the local real estate market and how one house across the street went for a million bucks to which the other kid responded that it was probably because of their finished basement. WTH.
  - moltke 5y ago
    Just have a rule against closed software in the house. It works very well.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Could be a sign of good parenting if they are aware of their future costs and that they should start investing their allowance in index funds to afford a house, as opposed to wasting it by gambling on lootboxes or yu gi oh cards.
  - icu 5y ago
    I hear what you're saying but my conclusion was that I'm never going to be able to protect my son and all I can do was prepare him in stages as best as possible. Change is inevitable... and in the past I used nostalgia as a mental point of origin to judge situations today. However I've come to see that change creates both negative and positive opportunity but it's just a matter of perspective. I'm sure there are positive aspects to those 9 year olds discussing real estate, like an opportunity to discuss sustainable development or homelessness and charities like Habitat for Humanity. Who knows where those seeds will lead a 9 year old?
_fat_santa 5y ago
> While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. The more I think about it, the more I realize loot boxes to kids now are what trading card packs were to kids back in the day. When I was in elementary school, I was deep into Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Card packs ran ~$4 and carried the chance that you got a super powerful card. I spent probably close to $100 on cards over the years which, for a 8 year old kid, would be akeen to me dropping $3k on the new Mac Studio. But there were natural controls in place back then. I had to save up every week to get a new pack, and I only had one chance per week to buy a pack. Now with microtransaction, the biggest problem (in the context of kids), is how easily accessible it is. If I came home and opened my pack to find that it didn't have any good cards, I would have to wait another week to get another pack. Now a kid can just go and get another lootbox instantly.
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  But they still have to pay for it right? How is this different than say if you bought your game cards, opened them up outside the store and after you realized you didn't get the card you wanted, you went back inside and bought another one? I'm confused how this is different
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    I agree; is the premise here that audiovisual spectacle of opening the box in the video game somehow compounds the problem? Or that there's some manipulation of scarcity or something? The "core mechanic" seems exactly the same.
    - crayboff 5y ago
      I think the issue is the lower barrier of access. Every small step added to the process discourages the use: get driven to the store, walking to the counter, talking to the employee, physically pulling money out of your pocket, physically seeing how much money you have left. All of those contribute to making it more difficult to buy cards. Loot boxes, on the other hand, is much easier. Once you store your credit card info, all you have to do is press a button or two. This is the general idea Nudge Theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#:~:text=Nudge%20theory%20is%20a%20concept,making%20of%20groups%20or%20individuals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#:~:text=Nudge%2....) when shaping behavior.
mFixman 5y ago
I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokémon trading cards weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money. I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are different from trading cards marketed to children. My high school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm still mad that they took the fun away from school recess because of a dumb moral panic.
- BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
  This definitely isn't a universal experience and there are definitely a lot of trading card horror stories, but for me + friends growing up the purchase of trading cards had a different place in life. They were like one of life's small rewards you had a chance of rolling whenever going into a shop with a parent/guardian. Being at the checkout, putting on the little kid puppy-dog 'pleaseeeeeee' and the adult deciding if you've been 'good enough' and possibly giving you something for that. Acquisition was separate from their consumption and social role. With lootboxes, you're actively pursuing the purchase to immediately try to meet a goal. You want the purchase, make it, have the question answered of whether your roll was good or not and that's mostly it. Trading cards were taken home (or at least to the car), physically admired, stored, socially shared even if they weren't 'worth' sharing, and had a larger variance in subjective value for trading or gifting later.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    One small caveat: digital collections of lootbox items can be admired, organized, displayed, and in some games traded to other players. Of course, all these actions are dictated by the software for the most part, and can be arbitrarily restricted. I won't be able to seal a fancy digital hat and donate it to a local museum.
    - BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
      It's true, which is why I tried to caveat it with 'even if they aren't worth sharing'. If I got a Tangela and had it in my pocket I'm still going to show the neighbour friend, she might even like Tangela especially well as a preference (tried to get at this with 'subjective value'). But with the number of football players and how it's much more stat/goal-based and the collector aspects are skewed towards the higher level, kids probably aren't making Discord calls to show their friend John Smith from the English division 2 league because he has a cute nose :)
blockwriter 5y ago
I played Magic: the Gathering competitively growing up, and me and all of my contemporaries revered the idea of gambling. Loot boxes may be a different beast, which I would think would actually lead you more toward making simply bad financial decisions, like buying status items that you do not need and cannot afford with debt you will struggle to pay back. My adolescent milieu went on to have mixed results with regards to their participation in society. I think the gambling that Magic: the Gathering players revere is actually preferable to these items, which are a purchase and seem to discourage analysis of the value proposition or expected value of the act of purchase.
raxxorrax 5y ago
This is another level. Developers like EA know the potential of earnings and use psychologists to incentivize people to spend money. The barrier is much lower too. Sure, a smaller form with trading cards always existed, but it wasn't a billion dollar industry with support from specialists to maximize exploitation. You cannot really generalize the problem to loot boxes though. There are exceptions where it just provides a form of monetization that isn't necessarily predatory and it will not affect everyone negatively.

falcolas 5y ago

One thing FIFA has that MTG never did: it effectively destroys you collection of cards every year. You can’t carry over cards between their yearly releases, and you can’t get updated rosters without getting the latest release. It is, at least for sports games, incomparable to MTG or Pokémon.

stodor89 5y ago
Hmm, aren't MTG releasing new sets every year? And don't they only allow cards from the last few years in tournaments?
- frumper 5y ago
  I can still pull out my 20+ year old cards and play with friends. Some cards are reprinted and remain legal. Either way you aren’t playing your old fifa ones vs new ones
- ayngg 5y ago
  They have different formats that people play with varying amounts of sets being legal, one of the most popular formats is a casual format where almost every card printed is legal. Sure a lot of it becomes chaff, but it is not unusual for cards you buy to appreciate in value, or even gain a substantial amount of value when they become viable and popularized in decks or are enabled by new cards that are released. The cards I played with decades ago when I was a kid in school have appreciated in value many multiples of times over.

icu 5y ago

I don't think you're way off the mark, or being a "grumps" on the subject. Young minds can be heavily influenced which is why many societies regulate experiences that may cause harm. I'm sure there are children who aren't impacted by EA lootboxes, as I'm sure there are children who are. It's the ones that are I'm concerned about, and the families that will end up dealing with the fallout. I don't see why it's not possible to gate it behind a proof of age... however it's obvious that there is no incentive for EA to do so.

barbazoo 5y ago
This is all really sad and I wonder how I'll ever protect my child from what these cooperations will come up with 10 years from now. I know probably every generation has lamented about this but I wonder if childhood these days is as fun as it used to be. Yesterday we overheard two kids, maybe 9 years old, discuss the local real estate market and how one house across the street went for a million bucks to which the other kid responded that it was probably because of their finished basement. WTH.
- moltke 5y ago
  Just have a rule against closed software in the house. It works very well.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Could be a sign of good parenting if they are aware of their future costs and that they should start investing their allowance in index funds to afford a house, as opposed to wasting it by gambling on lootboxes or yu gi oh cards.
- icu 5y ago
  I hear what you're saying but my conclusion was that I'm never going to be able to protect my son and all I can do was prepare him in stages as best as possible. Change is inevitable... and in the past I used nostalgia as a mental point of origin to judge situations today. However I've come to see that change creates both negative and positive opportunity but it's just a matter of perspective. I'm sure there are positive aspects to those 9 year olds discussing real estate, like an opportunity to discuss sustainable development or homelessness and charities like Habitat for Humanity. Who knows where those seeds will lead a 9 year old?

_fat_santa 5y ago

> While loads of us may have had fun experiences trading cards and whatnot, this all still happens with kids but with a much more overt monetary component. The more I think about it, the more I realize loot boxes to kids now are what trading card packs were to kids back in the day. When I was in elementary school, I was deep into Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Card packs ran ~$4 and carried the chance that you got a super powerful card. I spent probably close to $100 on cards over the years which, for a 8 year old kid, would be akeen to me dropping $3k on the new Mac Studio. But there were natural controls in place back then. I had to save up every week to get a new pack, and I only had one chance per week to buy a pack. Now with microtransaction, the biggest problem (in the context of kids), is how easily accessible it is. If I came home and opened my pack to find that it didn't have any good cards, I would have to wait another week to get another pack. Now a kid can just go and get another lootbox instantly.

animal_spirits 5y ago
But they still have to pay for it right? How is this different than say if you bought your game cards, opened them up outside the store and after you realized you didn't get the card you wanted, you went back inside and bought another one? I'm confused how this is different
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  I agree; is the premise here that audiovisual spectacle of opening the box in the video game somehow compounds the problem? Or that there's some manipulation of scarcity or something? The "core mechanic" seems exactly the same.
  - crayboff 5y ago
    I think the issue is the lower barrier of access. Every small step added to the process discourages the use: get driven to the store, walking to the counter, talking to the employee, physically pulling money out of your pocket, physically seeing how much money you have left. All of those contribute to making it more difficult to buy cards. Loot boxes, on the other hand, is much easier. Once you store your credit card info, all you have to do is press a button or two. This is the general idea Nudge Theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#:~:text=Nudge%20theory%20is%20a%20concept,making%20of%20groups%20or%20individuals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory#:~:text=Nudge%2....) when shaping behavior.

mFixman 5y ago

I'm sure my parents would disagree that Pokémon trading cards weren't a giant money sink designed to take their money. I can see a lot of problems with giving children access to credit cards, but I honestly fail to see how loot boxes are different from trading cards marketed to children. My high school enacted and enforced a ban on all card and board games because some parents were worried about child gambling; I'm still mad that they took the fun away from school recess because of a dumb moral panic.

BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
This definitely isn't a universal experience and there are definitely a lot of trading card horror stories, but for me + friends growing up the purchase of trading cards had a different place in life. They were like one of life's small rewards you had a chance of rolling whenever going into a shop with a parent/guardian. Being at the checkout, putting on the little kid puppy-dog 'pleaseeeeeee' and the adult deciding if you've been 'good enough' and possibly giving you something for that. Acquisition was separate from their consumption and social role. With lootboxes, you're actively pursuing the purchase to immediately try to meet a goal. You want the purchase, make it, have the question answered of whether your roll was good or not and that's mostly it. Trading cards were taken home (or at least to the car), physically admired, stored, socially shared even if they weren't 'worth' sharing, and had a larger variance in subjective value for trading or gifting later.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  One small caveat: digital collections of lootbox items can be admired, organized, displayed, and in some games traded to other players. Of course, all these actions are dictated by the software for the most part, and can be arbitrarily restricted. I won't be able to seal a fancy digital hat and donate it to a local museum.
  - BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
    It's true, which is why I tried to caveat it with 'even if they aren't worth sharing'. If I got a Tangela and had it in my pocket I'm still going to show the neighbour friend, she might even like Tangela especially well as a preference (tried to get at this with 'subjective value'). But with the number of football players and how it's much more stat/goal-based and the collector aspects are skewed towards the higher level, kids probably aren't making Discord calls to show their friend John Smith from the English division 2 league because he has a cute nose :)

blockwriter 5y ago

I played Magic: the Gathering competitively growing up, and me and all of my contemporaries revered the idea of gambling. Loot boxes may be a different beast, which I would think would actually lead you more toward making simply bad financial decisions, like buying status items that you do not need and cannot afford with debt you will struggle to pay back. My adolescent milieu went on to have mixed results with regards to their participation in society. I think the gambling that Magic: the Gathering players revere is actually preferable to these items, which are a purchase and seem to discourage analysis of the value proposition or expected value of the act of purchase.

raxxorrax 5y ago

This is another level. Developers like EA know the potential of earnings and use psychologists to incentivize people to spend money. The barrier is much lower too. Sure, a smaller form with trading cards always existed, but it wasn't a billion dollar industry with support from specialists to maximize exploitation. You cannot really generalize the problem to loot boxes though. There are exceptions where it just provides a form of monetization that isn't necessarily predatory and it will not affect everyone negatively.