Watch the end result be you can’t find random chests in Minecraft dungeons or Terraria caves cause it falls under the category of “lootbox” in games…
(May seem hyperbolic, but we are talking about 70 year old boomers trying to make regulations for video games. I’m not sure I have the most positive view of the potential outcome)
uh, on one side of my family my 70 year old boomers were helping Ken and Dennis write UNIX. I listen when they talk.
the average age of elected leaders across the world is in the 45-50 range for most of the western world, US is the oldest at 60-70 range
Lootboxes are sooo 2010s though. It‘s all about season passes and general FOMO. I doubt they will correctly identify and properly regulate „addictive features“ in a way that puts an end to that but I guess we‘ll see.
The companies doing them have a few hundred million reasons to skirt around the laws, so they will no doubt find a few ways. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make laws
my nephews are all about the limited edition skins
Hey nice, finally regulating gambling for children
China has been doing it for a long while, but when they do it, it’s an authoritarian overstepping of the Government, unlike when the EU does the same but slowly, which is amazing and beautiful and celebrated.
I’m of the strong opinion that we control the media that we are exposed to and that the resolution for problematic or undesirable media is to simply turn it off.
However: advertising, LLM’s, social media, and the Internet have forced me to capitulate that certain forms of media constitute a legitimate memetic hazard, and are capable of fueling addiction, misinformation, and general misery on large enough scales. I hate this conclusion because while I still heavily err on the side of media liberty and self-control, I cannot square that value with the reality of poisonous, hostile mass media.
We should not be subjected to predatory practices to enjoy the products and services that we depend on, and the entertainment that is part of our shared experience and culture. Loot boxes, advertising, and financial scams are becoming nearly universal in popular gaming products, and even software in general. To me, this eventually constitutes a monopolistic behavior that becomes reasonably unavoidable and must be regulated.
To be fair, much of the memetic hazard posed by various technologies is not actually the fault of the technologies, but a fault of the person having no self-control, no accountability for their own actions, or having some form of undiagnosed medical issue they are unaware of.
Its like saying video games cause school shootings: the problem isnt the video games, its the person. The video games are an excuse to shift blame and accountability away from the person.
what you say has merit, however its akin to saying that the memetic hazard posed by heroin isnt the fault of heroin. like, sure. heroin is just a substance. certain software is similar, but its made to be a certain way (dark patterns in gaming etc) and should be regulated for harm reduction just like addictive substances
Okay, but if we take care of the problem that people have, legal regulation would not be necessary. We wouldn’t have to have a trillion laws stipulating all the various minutae of what we should or shouldn’t do because of how harmful it is or isn’t, people would be able to figure this out on their own. Less laws in general is better, when the population is intelligent enough to understand that you don’t drink bleach because a computer screen showed those words to you in that order.
Opiates wouldn’t need to be illegal because people would be intelligent enough to know how harmful it is and thus wouldn’t use it. A law wouldn’t need to be created listing every known or unknown opiate derivative that is banned or for whatever use. People would just be smart enough to know.
Basically, too many people aren’t using their own brain. AI is definitely a helpful tool, but not if you’re an idiot and believe it to have any actual intelligence. Its not there to replace your doctor or teacher, it is there to help you with word processing, pattern recognition, or other such language based tasks. AI used as a tool is queried for things like “check this passage for overly repetitive terms and suggest improvements that keep the same meaning.” AI used by an idiot is queried for things like “what do my lab results say about my health?”
I suppose this is too far advanced for humanity at this point. Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.
They won’t do it, and here’s why: AAA will lobby for the continuation because it will hurt their bottom line of that gets banned. They love to implement dark patterns galore, and modern games will certainly do that.
Don’t be surprised if this fails, as it will likely be more consumerism, considering the fact that the USD and bond bubble just burst recently.
Loot boxes and microtransactions made me hate playing videogames.
Luckily for you, there’s more games without any loot boxes or micro transactions than you can play in your lifetime.
Even the benign psychological manipulation away from just starting a game and enjoying it that is achievements is annoying
Yeah. I think part of it is just that I’ve grown out of them. But part of it is enshittification.
Your tastes may change and you might have changed as a person as you aged but there’s nothing to “grow out of”. Games aren’t inherently childish. Certain ones can be, but games as a whole aren’t
The EU is one of the few institutions that will stand up to large companies. Not quickly and not enough but they have
Some European countries have banned them already. Belgium and the Netherlands as an example.
There are still loot boxes in Belgium, they just work differently. You get to see what is inside before you start the transaction, allowing a person to only open the ones with contents they want.
That’s good news, but will the EU make it law for the entirety of it? I’d say no, but this is for sure promising. Us Americans need to get clocked for our dark pattern usage.
