this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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“Parents like me often mistakenly think it is a failure on their part when their child becomes addicted, but through this litigation we hope to shine a light on these companies’ reprehensible actions, deceit, and manipulation of our children for their own financial gain.”
Yep, blame someone else like every other parent.
I'd hazard it's both. There are plenty of microtransaction models that explicitly exploit addictive behaviors (see gatcha).
On top of that, some companies handle more benign models better. Grinding Gear Games will lock your account from buying things if you ask them to without question, to help people that struggle with that sort of thing. Many other companies (I want to say Blizzard, but I don't have a source) will throw up their hands and say "the system can't do that", when it's not hard to implement. One enable flag is all you need (I'm aware implementation takes more, but just one variable can control a users ability to make purchases)
And some parents are also more than happy to have kids out of their hair by any means necessary.
This smells like the McDonald's coffee story to me. A headline can make it sound absurd, but I suspect a deeper look isn't a bad thing.
Edit: as for non money based addiction, yeah that ball can go back to the parents court imo
The McDonald's coffee story is kinda interesting to bring up here, as it may not make the point you think you are making. It's important to remember that, at the time, it was standard policy for McDonald's to be serving hot coffee at ~190 °F. Far hotter than people would serve themselves, and dangerously hot to be handling in general. If I spill my coffee on me at work, I don't end up with third-degree burns - just a stained shirt.
Not only, in that decade prior McDonald's had received ~700 reports of people being burned this way.
The lawsuit determined that McDonalds was knowingly serving to people a dangerous product that had the capacity to cause significant, material harm and gave no warning to its inherent danger.
So, to circle back to the comparison here, are video companies creating products they know are addictive to the degree that material harm is caused and no reasonable person would have the wherewithal to foresee those addictive properties unless they were prominently displayed on packaging material prior to their purchase? I don't think it's quite like the McDonald's coffee suit in terms of the intensity of [alleged]harm, but maybe in terms of how [allegedly] widespread it is? There's more than sufficient academic material that sheds light on the addictive properties of some aspects of implementation of lootboxes and modern gaming rewards.
That being said, it's foolish the leave this problem to be solved only from the industry or regulation. Shouldn't it be enough for companies that include lootboxes or whatever somewhat addictive reward system just put a disclaimer or something? Parents shouldn't be expected to keep up-to-date on reward mechanisms that encourage replay and enable additional monetization, but it should be more apparent if such mechanisms are used so parents can stop and say "Probably don't want little Timmy playing this game...I remember what happened with the PokeMon cards" etc. etc.
McDonald's Sources:
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/resources/mcdonalds-hot-coffee-lawsuit/ https://www.rd.com/article/hot-coffee-lawsuit/ https://www.morrisdewett.com/personal-injury-blog/2022/march/mcdonald-s-hot-coffee-case-the-real-story-why-it/ https://www.thedailymeal.com/1393392/infamous-mcdonalds-coffee-story-explained/
EU Commission Report:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/652727/IPOL_STU(2020)652727_EN.pdf
Love me some sources, thank you.
I was bringing it up in the context of "McDonald's definitely did something wrong", though I didn't state that well.
I agree, specific damage is iffy, but the widespread is more alarming. The snippet that someone posted from the court documents shove this into parental neglect territory in my head, but we'll see what happens. I'm neither a lawyer nor a parent so I'm strictly in the armchair on this.
There's something to be said for some kind of regulation in regards to known addictive mechanisms and that corporations have proven time and again they can't be trusted to handle it themselves (in every industry). This just might not be the case to drive it home