this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Manipulation is when the game gives you the illusion that you can get something if you work hard enough on it without paying. Similar to how battlefront did with their characters when you pretty much can't unlock the characters without paying unless you grind like a million hours. It's similar in games where you use real money for stuff that give you an advantage and you can pretty much guarantee a loss if you don't buy their shit.
There is no illusion here. You just play the game and get everything the others are getting without paying. You only pay for the cosmetic skin. How is that manipulation?
Manipulation is the game making you want to work for it. And that's fine - that's what games are. Video games necessarily make you value arbitrary nonsense which they can hand out at any time. The illusion is that there's anything special about selecting how your guy looks.
But there's no ethical form of monetizing that that invented desire. Any value beyond a knee-jerk "neat" is created and controlled by the game. It's made-up. There is no real-world price for flags captured, or murlocs skinned, or goals scored. A conversion rate between dollars and scoreboard points is a category error. They cannot have value, in the sense that money has value.
The clearest proof of this is that working hard usually works. Items allegedly worth real-world money - some priced higher than the whole game! - will be given to you, if you play a bunch. As if dicking around in Blood Gulch is productive economic activity. Like it's labor. When the game rewards you some obscenely-priced cosmetic guff, how high would you have to be to ask for cash instead?
Sure acheivements don't have inherent value, but the skins do. The idea of a captured flag or whatever is how good you are at the game and the fact that you had fun doing it. Skins are the same as clothes. You don't have to get the best, but people pay obscene amounts of money to get some bullshit they think looks good and shows off status. It's the same here. But you don't see people advocating for the shutting down of LV or Gucci or whatever.
Not even the game itself has inherent value. Why would I pay $60 for a Mario game that I don't like and it lasts like 50 hours when I can play the $20 Binding of Isaac (masterpiece) that could easily last me hundreds of hours. Other people would say the opposite.
Every sentence in that comment is a distinct kind of wrong. I'd be impressed if it wasn't just depressing.
In reverse order: games are products. They have utility-value, for you, a human person. Even if you think they suck. A bad pizza is still a pizza, and a perishable good which can be manufactured and sold, as a textbook example of commerce.
Veblen goods like Gucci products are priced primarily for sign-value, where the cost is high to show off how much you can afford. But they still function. A Gucci purse only has the same utility as any other purse, but both purses are obviously products.
Exclusionary bullshit like paid skins are nothing but sign-value. You pay money to say you paid money. That is a scam. You are goaded into desiring some empty peacocking nonsense versus everyone else, where the only practical mechanism is to throw money at the people who let you say you have a skin. It's not a product - you already have the content, on your hard drive. You must, to see other people using it. It's not a service - can only see other people using it because you're already on the server. It's a completely made-up money sink.
That bullshit is becoming the entire industry.
Scams like this are so lucrative, companies can give games away, just to sucker in more peacocking chumps.
Exploitation like this takes unlimited quantities of money from an arbitrary number of people, for the same fucking game they already paid full price to play. No kidding every company's shoving that into every game. The actual part where you play the game is just bait on that hook. The high-level goal of every company doing this becomes addiction to keep you from leaving, frustration to keep you forking over thousands of dollars, and just enough socialization to make you feel superior to the idiots who only forked over hundreds of dollars.
The only consistent argument for this infection is 'but it makes money, so it must be ethical.'
Why is this a scam and Gucci isn't? You just said it, they both have sign value which is just people trying to show off that they have money.
What frustration are you talking about there? We're talking about cosmetic shit.
Did I not also say, overpriced purses are still purses? Sign-value alone is not enough. Paying to say you paid, is a scam.
We're talking about being manipulated to want cosmetic shit. Did you not just say, people pay obscene amounts to show off status? Hello, and welcome to the problem. Publishers have directly monetized a zero-sum game of giving them more money.
No not a scam. You're just salty. And that's not how zero sum game works.
Comparative peacocking is absolutely a zero-sum game. Other people doing better reduces how well you're doing. You are objectively less special, and the social pressure that creates is exactly what this abusive bullshit exploits.
Veblen goods require exclusion. That is their sign-value. And these companies can effortlessly produce ever-more-expensive crap for people to flaunt. From their perspective - running that con is the best thing that could possibly happen.
I have negative patience for the dishonest sneering of 'you just don't like it.' I'm barely paraphrasing issues you, yourself, have described, today. You understand how this grift works. You know some extra hats in a pew-pew-lasers video game aren't worth a thousand dollars. You can see this trend creeping into every game, including full-price, flagship-franchise titles. Yet you refuse to say an unkind word about it - like it's fine that everyone's being prepped to throw unlimited cash at one-upping each other's virtual pew-pew laser mans.