You know, I went into this article kind of on the side of the game publishers, but this argumentation just had me rolling:
major developers like Microsoft, Sony, and Epic Games are pushing back, arguing their creations are protected forms of artistic expression, not addictive products.
Their CEOs do nothing but respond to stakeholders all year long, but now all of a sudden, they put on their beret hats and go excusez-moi, this is artistique.
These loot boxes are merely a highly artistic statement on the uncertainties in life and a run away capalitalistic society! We are as shocked as anyone that people have got addicted and lost thousands of dollars to our uhhhhh art, yeah.
The big issue to me is that the pricing of digital items is completely unrelated to the cost of creation. And it targets children who don’t know better.
“Officer, this meth I’m making is just artistic cooking! It’s not MY fault it’s addictive”
Just tell all your customers that it’s “for entertainment purposes only.”
“The loot boxes are an… evocative display of the perils of hmmm… taxation, so they need to cost 9.99 for… uhhh… reasons.”
It’s well known that Epic and Blizzard hired psychologists specifically to make their games more addictive. I would be very surprised to find out that Microsoft and Sony didn’t.
The white paper about creating addictive games that I read years ago while addicted to wow was written by someone at Microsoft.
Against age verification: Beer brewers say you can’t limit us for making drinking beer too entertaining.
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They don’t have to keep a copy. There are even services you can use to verify a user is over a target age without getting the age.
Second they already have you financial data. We are bot talking about people playing Darkest Dungeon too long. We are talking Fifa.
It’s definitely a question for our times though. I don’t want the government to know every time I need age verification but I also don’t want companies to have all my private data.
It seems like the government would need to provide a form of id which also includes digital proof and proof of ownership. Something like a yubikey.
Passports already have something sorta like this but it’s inaccessible to a standard user. You need to read the MRZ off the passport then use that to unlock the NFC chip on the back page to get biometrics off it.
A public read-only repository of public keys for every citizen could then be hosted where signatures from this theoretical id could be validated.
The signing id would contain basic biometric information that would be uploaded depending on what the company legally needs to know.
Scan this id with an NFC reader and enter in some piece of private information to unlock the NFC chip, send it the requests and receive back a signed package of the data.
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I get it: but that’s a minority opinion unfortunately.
Proof of personhood will be a major requirement in the future. Age verification will only be part of the combat against llm chat bots and malicious actors.
If the government is going to do it eventually we might as well weigh in on the right way to do it. As private and easy as possible.
Or we could just emphatically say no. Do you think governments exist in a vacuum? They exist to serve the peoples interests, not the other way around.
Of course they don’t.
But you have to contend with the fact that the overwhelming majority of people are apathetic or in favor of these kind of measures.
The morality police of the Christian right are campaigning for this. Many moderates don’t care.
If it’s coming, and it is, we should be sure to be part of a solution that makes it at least somewhat private.
But you have to contend with the fact that the overwhelming majority of people are apathetic or in favor of these kind of measures.
That’s not even true.
Sure, you can make games as entertaining as possible!
But no in game money or data harvesting. Very, very simple rule to enforce for single player games: no online connection needed.
I feel like if I was a subject matter expect in these law suites it would be over in a week.
I really miss the pre-internet days when I’d buy a game, never worrying that the company’s server would be offline, that they’d sunset support rendering the game unplayable, harvest my data, or engineer the game to coerce me into buying extras.
If Nintendo doesn’t do something silly like brick switches when they retire the platform, at least we should be good there when it comes to physical releases. Diablo 2 resurrected, while digital only and requiring an internet connection, has an offline mode but only on nintendo switch. Also GOG.com has a bunch of stuff.
We are definitely not as well off as we once were in this regard though. Ah… The good ol’ days…
Dark patterns are bad, and I think they should be discouraged somehow. It has nothing to do with entertainment.
Let’s see if we can get a legal precedent that addictive = entertaining. That could have “interesting” ramifications. (For the record, I don’t agree at all that they’re the same thing)
By entertaining do they really mean manipulative and addicting like drugs but don’t want to say it like that because it sounds bad?
I’ve seen the story come up a few times and it seems like the accusers are being way too broad. They need to specify how specifically the games are being predatory and how it’s affecting people. But it just seems like they’re saying, “Kids play them a lot!”
