The Great Lootbox Incidents of 2017: What to do? | Level One Techs

Yeah, there is something to this – it goes back to educating the consumer base. Maybe what makes sense here is just clear labeling on the box like ESRB or FDA labels like “To unlock everything will take approximately 9,286 hours of game play or $2100 US in in-game transactions. Optional monthly subscription (or requires monthly subscription). Contains LootBoxes, known to the AG of California to Cause Cancer”

I think the FTC already requires clear labeling about the subscription bit. Other similar game labels might be sobering.

Maybe that’s what Level1 should do – call on games to be labeled like a food label. “Voluntary” but maybe if valve gets on board, that might be something. Maybe a website where the community generates such labels and commentary for games that parents can refer back to. Hmm…

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issue with this is a lot of these games that are big offenders are rated T or M… there shouldn’t be any protections for minors it would make literally no sense.

The ISP situation - there is already law to nuke all of that - the antitrust law. And no one to apply it. Consumer laws are there to make it possible to vote with your wallet.

The games situation - yes, here it is certainly possible to always vote with your wallet. Especially so if you can resist the whack-a-mole temptations and trends in general. Wait out each game a couple of years, and you can enjoy it for change. The people who can’t control themselves will always be prey to someone. I wish it were different, and I wish the world was rigged to not reward negative behaviour, but it isn’t.

I think it is up to parents to do the parenting on the minors. There is simply no way around it. You have to teach things to people, who gets it will get it, who won’t won’t, and we’ll have to live with it all the same.

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100% agree. I think the next generation will be less susceptible to this kind of BS because we, future parents (speaking to the general 20 YO demographic of the forum) will know whats going on in these games with there micro transactions and thus better teach our children.

That’s in the EU at least as far as I know (or at least every game with necessity for an online connection has it), don’t know about the US. I think back when Half Life 2 launched there was a case about this and since then they have to clearly label it on the box.

Doesn’t only affect minors though. I mean how many people are addicted to gambling in the casino… Those are restricted for minors too, no? Not sure about the US, but definitely germany.

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I don’t have anything constructive to add. BUT! I found this very funny. There’s already a Loot Mox Mod for Doom!!! :smiley: :smiley:

Check it out: http://www.pcgamer.com/this-classic-doom-mod-replaces-weapon-pickups-with-loot-boxes/

The way that political influence works in the US centers around financial support. Voting with wallets can only work if there is a significant number of consumers implementing it. This poses a problem as consent is as much a product of environmental influence as it is societal influence and more immediate upbringing. Environmental and societal influence are both targeted by parliaments and advertisers. There is a lot of study being leveraged toward societal influence these days.

The Rand Corporation has been conducting studies for the US government for decades. The great Daniel Ellsberg hails from the Rand Corporation. The basis of modern advertising is psychological manipulation.

There is much working against raising awareness in the youth. This is compounded by the fact that the homunculan perspective is so pervasive in human cognition. The most common notion of the level of human agency is that it is total. This is of course understandable as it appears to be the case barring study. Since natural distributions prevent ubiquitous study, the problem persists in its natural pervasiveness. This is another perspective that comes to light when zooming out a little. It’s particularly challenging with regard to raising awareness with the youth. It’s not so much supporting the existence of such challenges, but supporting the notion that it applies to all. The “it can happen; but it can’t happen to me” factor is a large factor in and of itself.

Whoa, what great response!

So if I might try and distill your point down on ISPs; the original generic data providers that we all want today evolved through natural competition under relatively light regulation. Regulation was then introduced that imbued ISPs with the money and legal power to consolidate the market further, solidifying the monopolies they already have, which in turn they used to rip the consumer off and were protected by title 1 regulation. The FCC then had to convert them to title 2 which is where we are now.

I think what you’re effectively saying is that the regulatory environment may have enabled the ISPs to wiggle their way into the position they have now and this may have been prevented by allowing free and open markets.

Just to disclose my biases; I’m a British expat (I left the UK before things started getting weird) - received free education from a top class university and free healthcare from the NHS all due to regulation. Where I grew up, big business didn’t have the ability to influence lawmakers like they do here. I think that the mere existence of lobbyists and has shaped US public opinion of regulation.

I don’t think abstination and education is a viable method of self regulation, in this case, or in many others. Would you trust consumers not to purchase leaded petrol on account of it’s toxicity? Would you let the public to decide whether cars should have, or they should be obligated to wear, seat belts?

Regulation should exist for cases where there is sufficient gap between expert knowledge and public knowledge that the public (which includes lawmakers) cannot make a well informed decision.

I know this is not currently the case, but I think we would all agree that we would prefer a nuclear physicist set safety regulations for the construction and running of nuclear power plants rather than rely on the market to regulate itself.

The above examples may appear like straw man arguments; the stakes are too high and that doesn’t relate to the current situation in gaming and these lootboxes.

Well, a better comparison is the opioid crisis. Due to lack of regulation and private interest funded research to appease the FDA, synthetic opioids were prescribed en mass to the US public under the guise that they were not addictive. The US consumes astounding proportions of the worlds opioids (opioid stats) and has measurable and a tangible negative effect on the US public. The opioid crisis in the US is a pretty perfect example of where a lack of regulation coupled with complete misalignment of interest; positive healthcare outcomes are not desirable for pharmacy companies - repeat business is.

Ok, but what does this have to do with lootboxes? The positive response feedback in the brain is remarkably similar for drug addiction as it is for gambling addiction (I think this was cited in the papers you linked to). Research has uncovered that if you allow animals to bypass the food consumption requirement for biological positive reinforcement, they will die from starvation, choosing instead to activate the positive reinforcement signals directly. Technicalities aside, the lootboxes within these games are gambling in the sense that they illicit the same neurological response - they are designed to, and it’s clear that their only purpose is to generate additional income for the corporation, but that’s not even the big issue.

Like it or not, games are consumed by younger age groups and putting these mechanics in a star wars game is a clear choice to target children whose neurological framework has not yet fully developed. Doing so can harm children in the sense that it will reinforce addictive behaviors, strengthening these pathways and impulses in developing humans - this results in structural changes in the brain. This is a good business decision because it potentially creates more “whales” for future revenue streams.

It’s this angle, not necessarily the pure cash cow angle, that is necessitating regulation. We don’t want broad ambiguous regulation that can be used as a tool to screw the consumer, I think everyone would be happy with the scalpel approach which prevents games being designed as games of chance which specifically target biological weaknesses in the biology of the brain.

I won’t go into the economics of these mechanisms, but simply ignoring MTX in games is also not a viable option; it takes an incredibly small percentage of the playerbase to partake in this functionality for it to become incredibly profitable - it’s one of those situations where the minority dictate the experience for the whole.

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To know the timing of each law coming in effect, and to perhaps even influence this timing is one of the most important goals in the lobby business. Quite accurately put, it allows the companies “in the know” to wiggle through before a gap is closed, or just in time to be first out when another gap is opened, ending each move in a position of advantage.

For the same reason as I would agree to limiting use of legal and illegal drugs, and gambling - when something changes the chemistry of your mind far enough you may need someone to force you to break it off so you can recuperate, or avoid the experience altogether. This is an important argument to keep in mind, even if you anyway choose to reject it in the end.

This is a matter of debate on whether a society needs more positive liberty, or more negative liberty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty ). Each of these are aligned with several ideologies. My personal opinion is it needs to sway between the two over time, as the times change, adjusting to find the best balance for the present time, because nothing in the world is static, and thus should not be treated as static. I simply think both types of liberties are corruptible if left stale for too long. Mind you, there are very strong arguments supporting either way. There is no clear winner in that debate, as proven by so many people still fully supporting either, and with a perfectly good reason to do so. That being the case I also believe the importance of negotiation between these two paths, as opposed to alienation and fragmentation into echo chambers to be crucial to satisfactory law-, regulation-, or policy-making even for this simple topic. Mental health of a population should be an important matter to consider.

Is lootboxing really “mental health” bad on its own though, or are we just using lootboxing as a euphemism for other, more pressing, matters?

My wallet voting / just let it be has not been showing any results, so… I have resorted to purging :man_shrugging:

What does that even mean? Well, basically

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Just found this video on the topic, specifically about EA and how they actually made lootboxes a thing in games.

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