Cold Take

Short video essays by Sebastian Ruiz, also known as Frost, a man with the voice like hot chocolate, made in the style of a Film Noir narration.

Originally from the Escapist, it has migrated to the Second Wind group alongside Design Delve and Zero Punctuation, now known as Fully Ramblomatic:

Edited by BrigadeiroSupremacist on Nov 17th 2023 at 9:29:35 AM

Does he always talk like a 1920s film noir detective who got transported to the 2020s and has taken on game criticism instead?

Yeah, it's pretty much his entire shtick with this series and his other one back on the escapist, The Stuff of Legends, where he covered famous feats in gaming like MMO players killing an unkillable boss or an EVE Online bank robbery

AAA studios sued for addictive games.

Honestly, if your 13 year old is spending thousands of dollars on video games, your first question should be: "where does he get all that money from?". If the answer is "his parents gave it to him", one should not wonder that said 13 year old is going to spend it on frivolous things like video games, and if you don't like that, you shouldn't give him thousands of dollars in allowance. Which you shouldn't do anyway.

If he stole your credit card, well... this is why credit cards should have PIN numbers. I never understood this nutty American idea of having a payment method where everyone who physically has the card can spend whatever and where-ever they like with it.

Online payments don't use the PIN. Only the number, expiration, and the three numbers in the back. Even if your card does have a pin.

Edited by Ghilz on Dec 6th 2023 at 3:35:23 PM

Yeah, true, but only for credit cards. Debit cards always require a PIN, even online.

Oh God, it’s the Smurfberries all over again.

I always have Internet Purchases and Overseas Purchases disabled on my card as standard. Is that a function that exists in the US, too?

Because it feels like it’d prevent situations like these, or at least make it harder for your kid to use your card this way.

Edited by MagmaTeaMerry on Dec 6th 2023 at 9:44:45 PM

In the Netherlands, we generally don't use credit cards, so it's less of an issue. It is a huge problem in a credit card culture like the US, though, where credit card companies have gotten the populace hooked on the idea of readily available money whenever you want it, without any barriers, even to the point where your credit score (the thing you need to get, say, a mortgage) is tied to your credit card spending habits (the idea being that if you can use a credit card responsibly, you can be trusted with a mortgage as well).

Honestly, the predatory system here is the credit card industry, with the video game industry capitalizing on that already existing vice.

Both industries are predatory.

Discussion often centers around children because children are the most vulnerable and sympathetic targets in society. It's easier to drum up support for "PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN" than it is for "PLEASE THINK OF ADULTS WITH POOR IMPULSE CONTROL". The latter brings out the arguments about personal responsibility and the like. But it is absolutely true that the same mechanisms video game companies use to take advantage of children are also used to take advantage of people with addictive personalities and neurodivergences.

I don't blame people for being taken advantage of like this, but I do blame the companies that build their business model around taking advantage of gambling mechanics and psychological pressures to swindle people out of their money. In much the same way that. Like.

If someone with poor internet literacy got bamboozled by a con artist into giving over their personal information and then had their bank account drained? Yeah, you can and probably should learn how to recognize an obvious scammer. But the scammer's still the bad guy here. They manipulated and robbed someone. The problem isn't poor internet literacy. The problem is that guy over there robbing people.

Game companies using predatory psychological tricks, skinner box tactics, and literal slot machines to "turn players into payers" as that one presentation eagerly bragged about are the problem. With enough gaming literacy, you can learn how to recognize predatory tactics and decide for yourself whether you or your kids should engage with it. But you shouldn't have to be constantly on the lookout for predators and scam artists when playing with a toy. And that's doubly true when the predators and scam artists are the people who manufactured the toy.

If a Barbie doll came with a button that kids could press to ship in new doll clothes on their parents' credit card without their parents' knowledge, Mattel would get in deep shit overnight. But we allow the video game industry to do shit like this uninhibited for some fucking reason.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 6th 2023 at 1:46:52 AM

That's all true, but in this case one can't help wonder at the parents apparently letting this go on for 8 months. They are perhaps not being entirely open about their parenting, and their assumed degree of helplessness in the situation isn't entirely credible. Any reasonable parent would have shut this kid down long before it became an 8000 dollar problem.

According to the lawsuit, they've tried. They'll have to continue trying whether they win or lose their suit; Ultimately, the outcome of this lawsuit will not change G.D.'s behavior. They're going to have to figure out what to do with their child at some point.

The point of the lawsuit is that it's very hard to pry their child away from these behaviors when the system of incentives being offered by these companies for misbehavior is so addictive and alluring. It's one thing to try and tell your child to stay away from the blackjack tables, but it gets a lot harder to do that when there's a casino in your living room.

There's a point to be made that they can just get rid of the video games. Throw out the Xbox. Sell the computer. Force their kid to go cold-turkey. But a) it's hard to say if simply nuking their kid's favorite hobby is really the best approach and b) that might just encourage him to get his fix outside of their awareness, which is the same problem but worse. But ultimately, how to do gaming rehab for G.D. is beside the point, as I noted earlier.

So far as the lawsuit goes, there's also a point to be made that these parents aren't the only ones having this problem. The casino's open to kids of all ages, all across the country. The purpose of the lawsuit isn't to change G.D.'s behavior. It's to change the video game industry's behavior. They're trying to close the casino. To monetarily punish video game developers into no longer doing the shit that they're doing. That is the goal of a lawsuit like this.

If legislators won't penalize the game industry for obvious bullshit then lawyers have to. If the lawsuit succeeds, it will encourage more such lawsuits to come out. If enough lawsuits come out, it will become too expensive to run video games as casinos. It alters the corporate cost-benefit analysis.

If it becomes legal precedent that you can sue game developers over microtransactions and make a mint doing it, game developers will become a lot more shy about including microtransactions in their games.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 6th 2023 at 6:43:16 AM

Just to get this off the cuff right at the beginning: I'm in no way defending the industry; some of its' practices are beyond predatory and downright revolting when you dig into the marrow of it. There should be regulation in regards to microtransations, especially in games that can be and often are aimed at younger audiences.

Having said that though.

It is wild to me that the parents have such little control over their child. Without knowing all the details it's quite difficult to make any judgments, but there wasn't a point where it was becoming an obvious problem that needed intervention? As mentioned: a child does not spend thousands of dollars over the span of months without notice. More bluntly a child also does not become morbidly obese overnight. It's possible he was never in the best shape, but considering that the lawsuit specifically cites the weight as something the gaming is responsible for. Likewise with the suit claiming that the child got ADHD from the game; something which is not possible as far as I'm aware. Certainly ADHD can be exacerbated by gaming, but it's not something gaming can cause.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that this lawsuit seems to be at least in part because the parents can't or won't take measures to control their child. This is a shame for the health and wellbeing of the kid himself of course, but it's also a shame because if their claims cause the case to be thrown out or them to lose in court, then like Frost says it's going to be that much more difficult for a suit to be successful.

Edited by Grahf on Dec 6th 2023 at 11:10:18 AM

Better parental control also just creates a landmine. Even if you limit a kid to a reasonable amount of dollars per month, they are still experiencing the addiction-creating mechanics of the games. They are still getting manipulated into wanting to spend more. And that would all be happening stealthily, without notice, without anybody knowing to fix it. And when that kids gets their own money? That would easily go straight into addictions again. The gaming industry is farming casino addicts of the future.

Edited by Adannor on Dec 6th 2023 at 8:49:46 PM

Part of this is just the nature of a civil lawsuit: the parents have to demonstrate actual harm done. It is not enough to show that the video game industry (which may be overly broad too, by the way) has harmful practices: they have to prove that those harmful practices actually did damage to their child. Hence the linking of obesity and ADHD to those games.

It's too bad the whole thing comes off more like a case of terrible parents refusing to take responsibility for their failure to raise their kid and the" all video games are for children" mentality that led them to buying several M rated games for their definitely not 17 year old, because they do have SOME points. As the burnt out detective pointed out their lack of research is only gonna make future legitimate cases harder to prove.

Edit: Welll that's Two people that more or less said the same thing

Edited by CryoJNik on Dec 7th 2023 at 8:25:21 AM

Exactly this. You might just as well ask, "Why can't the parents just tell the kid to stop doing drugs?" when there's a full-time drug dealer in their living room. They can tell him whatever he wants. But when the bad behavior is so readily available, when the incentives to misbehave are right there and are actively counter-influencing the person he's becoming, it makes parenting much harder.

The key point of contention here is the video game companies' complicity in creating a system of predatory incentives designed to play psychological tricks on their consumers and coerce them into gambling addictions. But, as noted here:

In order to have your case heard, you need to be able to prove that harm is being committed. "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" is the popular go-to sympathy bid; Everyone agrees that children are the most innocent and unsuspecting of possible victims in any given scenario. Hence bringing out a child who's been influenced by these predatory incentives.

Now, I'm not a lawyer. To my knowledge, neither is Frost of Rivia. The only person involved in this discussion at this time who is a lawyer is the attorney who looked at the Dunn family's case and went, "Yep, this is good. I can win this in court. Give me some time to write up the legal filing and get it submitted."

I'm not sure having a lawyer who is willing to bring your case is an automatic endorsement of your case. You can find a lawyer to bring any number of frivolous suits, it doesn't mean the suit has any merit. Not to say that this case doesn't, but a lawyer looking at it and going "sure, I'll do it" isn't proof that it does.

And the drug dealer comparison is ridiculous, for the same reason the casino one is: you can kick the drug dealer out of your house, and you can take the kid out of the casino, and you can prevent a kid from playing a game. It is really not that hard.

Any parent who's tried to keep a determined kid away from drugs, alcohol, or internet porn will disagree with you on how hard it is to just take the thing away. When your child is addicted to something, the damage is already done. You can try to limit or even cut off their exposure to it, but children are not obedient automatons. Once they're incentivized to pursue a particular form of stimulation, they will continue to seek it outside of your control.

That's why those things have full-on rehabilitation clinics, rather than finger-wagging doctors telling people, "Just stop. It's that easy!"

The problem isn't that he has video games in front of him. The problem is that Activision, EA, etc. have purposefully wired his brain to pursue a predatory form of stimulation so they can bilk money out of his parents and, when he gets older, him. Their business model is corrupt and it's ruining children whose parents just thought they were buying them a cool toy.

The best case scenario for everyone is that this winds up settled out-of-court, but also gets reported on. The parents get their payout. The company gets to avoid a lawsuit, which companies like to avoid whenever possible. But the societal precedent is set that you can make a fuckton of money suing over microtransactions, encouraging an eager pool of hungry sharks to begin swarming around these companies.

If it becomes profitable to rake EA over the coals for gambling mechanics, it will become less profitable for EA to include gambling mechanics in video games.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 7th 2023 at 7:55:16 AM

Yeah, but it is a lot easier to cut a kid off from games. Where else is he going to play those games? Where else is going to get that money? And that latter part goes for drug and alcohol addiction too. You can cut a 13 year old off from addiction because they simply don't have access to an independent income, and they have no way of getting that amount of money otherwise.