Item — HN Reader

> No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc.

> So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.

IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.

4 comments

Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.

These people are implementing Skinner boxes[1] for children.

There are literally "engagement" engineers actively doing A/B tests on children to see what makes them more addicted or gets them to spend more money or time on their platform.

There are humans literally doing experiments on children to figure out what stimulus results in more addicted behavior.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Who cares? My kids asked me for skins for years. As the one who owned a credit card and would be the one needed to pay for it I laughed them out of the room. Maybe parents should learn to parent and tell their kids no. My kid now older and with a job now tells me how he remembers when he used to ask for skins and I would say no damn way. He also says now that he makes his own money and buys things himself there is no way he would spend his own money on clothing for a video game while his own shoes are falling apart. It’s a waste of money and he said it not me. So parents need to parent. Typically kids until older have no readily access to money so if a parent acts like one they can tell the kid to forget it.

This is the root cause. I don't get the part about kids spending ceaselessly on skins, who is giving them the money?

Unethical parents. Parents who are so detached, themselves, that they cannot see the harm being done to their children.

That's the point with abusive techniques such as this - they become generationally intertwined.

Its about the kids. Those kids become parents. Those parents have kids. The abusive trauma transcends generations.

I get spending $20 on one skin to support the development of a game you enjoy.

Just don't see the point in having multiple.

Me and many of my friends were children when Fortnite came out. We still play, and we now have full time jobs. When fun new skins or dances come out, it’s not uncommon for us to get them.

They’re fun and entertaining. I hardly feel addicted or preyed on moreso than when I buy any other entertainment product.

It's fashion, to an extent. Do you only have a single outfit? Would you even if it was always the right weather for them, and was always clean? Kids often spend a lot of time in these environments, which makes them want variety of expression there.

It's not an issue from time immemorial. it's an issue from the late 19th century, if not post WWII. the child consumer class did not before that. Toys hardly existed before that. Even an adult consume class with disposable income had hardly existed. Kids spending hours every day zonked out at screens is a distinctly new phenomenon on top of that

Oh ok. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu

Not sure I follow. The letter is about clothes (not toys)... He talks about people (himself, others) having low single digits outfits (one set, two sets), not sure how this makes him a post industrial capitalism consumer. In 1800 BC, life expectancy was probably 25 and people worked from ages like 6 onwards. This guy was definitely not a commoner, and he only had one set of clothes, and wanted two good sets. I'm not saying that's good and that out kids are spoiled and should be happy with two sets of clothes, I just have no idea what you're trying to say.

I think the persistence of advertising is an issue overall. I think we are worse off today now that you get bombarded with targeted ads and there's usually a seamless buy now button displayed within them.

Preying on whales is exploiting psychological issues. New technology certainly does exist today to aid in this exploitation that didn't exist 30 yrs ago.

Well said. Streaming services are finally getting the kinds of commercial content we did in the 80s and 90s. It's refreshing as I feel those years were the golden era of toys. Many toys of the era didn't even have commercials but we still wanted them. X-Men toys for example. If I was a kid, I'd of loved to have seen weekly commercials of the newest line up of X-Men toys.

With the caveat that shows still have a massive amount product placement within them and ad-free streaming services cost more than double the price of ad-supported, meaning that the poor are far more likely to be viewing ads anyway.

I love me some Gabby’s Dollhouse but the show is literally about a toy dollhouse that you can go buy.

I feel like you're being disingenuous with your choice of franchise. 30 years ago there were much worse toys. There were capsule machines that randomized what toy your quarter would give you. There were toys that you could buy random assortments at the toy store (M.U.S.C.L.E was one if I remember correctly). You could buy trading cards too. It's not that kids are marketed to (which is arguably its own problem), it's that the randomization is really not good for creatures that utilize associative memories (not sure if other intelligence avenues will be as susceptible to near misses, but likely it's a feature of intelligence in general to be stupid about randomness). And this has only been ratcheted up in the last 30 years.

What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.

But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?

This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.

In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.

Isn't this true with collectable toys? My adult friends sure seem to be addicted to purchasing Pokemon cards. They talk about thousands of dollars spent when I am curious about numbers.

Yes, and?

ETA: Exploiting adult whales is bad too, if that's the angle you were going.

Is it exploiting if they participate under their own volition?

Is Auto Zone exploiting people who like working on their cars?

I've said this before and I'll say it a hundred times more - choice isn't binary. There isn't no choice and then free choice. There's infinite levels of choice. Some things are very choosy. Like me cutting off my arm right now - very choosy, I get a lot of control in that. Some things are not very choosy. Like a heroine addict deciding to shoot up or not today.

I won't make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite in particular. However, we should all be aware it is certainly engineered in some ways to capture as much attention and time as possible, and this is intentional. Not unlike in nature to the engineering behind cigarettes, although again no claims on efficacy.

The point being, we really need to be doing analysis further than "well they chose to do it". It's not that simple, and it's really never been that simple. Companies are dedicating billions of dollars on solving this problem. We should, in response, at least try to analyze it deeper than that.

I agree. While I do think the skin issue is a parenting thing and a good time to teach a lesson about advertising and fomo*, there's more too it.

We protect people(arguably not enough) from gambling and alcohol which are basically banking on a portion of the population becoming addicted.(tho I also do not make any claims on the addictiveness of fortnite or say, gacha games)

At what point is the level of manipulation from these companies messing with psychology too much? It's an open secret they are researching how to farm attention. Don't people that are susceptible to this stuff deserve some warnings like booze and slots? I'm all for personal responsibility but we've created lines with other things where people lose control. Idk why this should be treated different.

No idea if anything needs regulated or what exactly needs to change, but as you said, at least more analysis.

To be clear, the definition of "exploit" I'm using in this case is like: "use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way." The point is game companies are exploiting people who can't control themselves.

You might be interested to read about whales as it relates to loot boxes (in particular sections 1.E-F): https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

I don't know what autozone has to do with this particular discussion, but I'm not familiar with their business practices, so I'm not going to venture a guess.

I heard they make whole cartoons to feature a specific toy character and put them in kids happy meals and have limited collectors editions. Will the manipulative horrors of marketing to children ever cease or will we all be coerced into a life time sentence at Disney land by a clever cereal tie in.

They do, and that is bad. Growing up surrounded by toy adverts that make kids despondent if they don't have the toys is not good.

I feel like people with tour stance aren’t considering that skins and emotes are fun to have without fomo or addiction.

Similarly, toys are fun to have for their own sake.

I was under the impression that we all knew this was bad and are actively disgusted by it.

That is also true of action figures, trading cards, comic books etc.

That’s the same for the Tomica Blackhawk X3 Transformable Robot. Unless you find it somewhere on ebay second hand, after it leaves store shelves you will never see it again.

They also charge like $20 just to play as whatever licensed character in their game.

If you wanna be able to play as Batman or Mr Meseeks or the dog from Adventure Time, that's $60 already.

They give a lot of characters/vbucks away for free. I have a whole list of skins (including the 3 you mentioned) and have never spent any actual money on fortnite.

I can't deny they've made a crazy amount of money from convincing teenage boys that it's cool to buy outfits and play virtual dress-up. But compared to the must-have items of my youth at least you aren't excluded if you have no money.

Yes it is evil, considering how the advertisements are made in ways that makes it difficult for parents to escape them.

The only way to escape kids TV shows that have advertisements between shows and advertisements within the shows themselves as product placements is to only watch public television (which is generally funded way less and has way fewer programs than commercial television).

Hell, shows like Transfomers have the toys as the stars of the show.

So now all your kids have the peer pressure of all their friends consuming popular media and owning toys and now you have to be the bad guy saying no to literally everything to escape.

You go to any store and the toys and sugary cereals are right here at eye height of your kids with cartoon characters and promises of prizes, toys, and sweepstakes.

So you’re basically between a rock and a hard place, either you are the “weird kid with the weird parents” or you buy into at least some of that consumerism, trying to approach it with some level of moderation.

What about a company that controls exclusive access to this "addictive spending by an underage audience" on the computers they sell, _after purchase_, for a 24% cut of the spoils.

Roblox entered the chat.

Apple is currently profiting quite handsomely off gambling games marketed to children. They deliberately limit the App Store to encourage games like Clash of Clans and shitty Farmville clones because letting you emulate Yoshi's Cookie wouldn't make them money.

They're both unprincipled. Sweeney just happens to be correct.