![]() Even if loot boxes don’t literally turn children into problem gamblers, they’re just tacky. Should it really be possible to spend thousands on Fifa player packs? Should randomised rewards, which have proven links to problematic gambling, be a part of gaming at all? Can the industry be trusted to regulate itself on loot boxes, as then-culture secretary Nadine Dorries concluded last year? I don’t believe that the immense profits these mechanisms sometimes generate justify the harm they can do to a minority of players. Meanwhile, there’s the debate over loot boxes, also mentioned in the weekend’s reporting, which has been rolling on for years. One gets the impression that they don’t really care. As with problem gamblers, there is no way for these companies to know if these gamers can actually afford the money they’re spending. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call,” said a former Zynga vice-president Gemma Doyle, who used to work at gambling company Sportingbet. “We’ve done so much experimenting at Zynga with VIP. They’ve boasted about them for years at game developer conferences such as San Francisco’s GDC – as this write-up from, which I’ve cited before in this newsletter, evidences. They have actively hired people from the gambling industry to maximise the gains they make from susceptible players. These companies aren’t shy about their tactics. It is, and always has been, an unethical business model – and yet it has become so normalised that, these days, finding a mobile game that isn’t either full of horrible ads or geared towards pestering you for money is quite difficult. Since the dawn of this kind of gaming, in the early days of the App Store, the idea has always been to squeeze the players who’ll pay for all they are worth while accepting that somewhere about 90% of your player base will never spend anything. Free-to-play mobile and “casual” game giants such as Zynga have long been unscrupulous in the way that they treat their players, and it is not the only company that specifically designs games to be addictive. None of this, however, absolves video game developers from behaving responsibly – and some of them don’t, as we well know. There is also ongoing debate among researchers and those who treat compulsive gaming that it may be a manifestation of underlying mental health issues, rather than an independent issue in itself – in other words, games aren’t causing addictive or self-isolating behaviour, but are an outlet for it. The World Health Organization, which classified video game addiction as a disorder in 2018, estimated that problematic gaming affects fewer than 1% of players (some studies in certain countries found prevalence of up to 3%). In that context, 227 referrals since 2020 does not seem like such an alarming number. It is important to keep in mind, however, that more than 80% of all under-18s in the UK play video games regularly – which is more than 11 million kids. ![]() For under-18s, the paucity of help available to families and young people struggling with social isolation or destructive behaviour at home, of which compulsive gaming can be a part, is one fact of a youth mental health crisis across the UK, where 250,000 young people are going without help.Īs always with reports about video game addiction, the numbers and stories are alarming. For adults, it is possible to exclude yourself from casinos and lock yourself out of online gambling accounts, should you request it no such possibility exists if you’re finding yourself dropping thousands on a free-to-play mobile game instead. They also highlight a need for mechanisms to help struggling people. These stories concern a problem that is certainly real, especially so for people affected by compulsive gaming behaviour, whose stories are no less affecting than those of gambling addicts. The third was by the director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders, calling for industry regulation to better protect young people. Another was on developers’ use of tactics from the gambling industry to keep people spending on games. One was about the 850 people referred to an NHS treatment clinic in the last three years (of whom 227 were under 18). Over the weekend, the Guardian published a trio of stories about video game addiction.
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