http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-a-fan-who-has-spent-30000-on-sta...
He seems like a reasonable person to me. He's not in financial ruin. He doesn't seem to regret his purchase. He's just putting money into his hobby, the same way a different 40 year old would buy an "unproductive" boat or an "unproductive" Rolex.
If you accept that our knowledge of psychology, biochemistry, and neuroscience are improving and likely to continue doing so, and that calibrated external actions are capable of influencing our behavior, and that progress in the former begets progress in the latter, then either:
a) We will reach a point where we will stop making progress in those fields
b) We overturn the majority of our current social psychology knowledge and realize that yes, people actually do have absolute free will
c) We will develop techniques so sophisticated and reliable to influence behavior that it becomes unreasonable to expect an average person to resist them
As I (and the original article seems to) see it, the current free-for-all that is "freemium"/casual gaming basically targets all of capitalism's motivation and resources on arriving at (c) as quickly as possible. And... we're getting pretty damn good at it.
PS: Positech Games makes great stuff, btw! GSB had several free expansions just because Cliff Harris is cool [he == Positech]. He absolutely could have charged for the content if he'd felt like milking more money out of his users.
I'm not so sure. I play a video game, and invariably get bored to tears within 30 seconds or so.
It might have something to do with when I was a student, I had a job that involved play testing video games.
It's also true that my old game Empire was well known to be addictive. I'd play it myself, but would rarely get too far into a game before I'd go back to tweaking the AI, which was where the real fun was.
While yours may be a true experience: statistics. I'm not sure a personal experience poll on an entrepreneurial technology news site is the best place for a representative sample of people with low willpower. And social psych findings have born out that are a lot of easily manipulated levers to reliably influence people's behavior in an intentional way.
To me, it's not about the people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower. Say instead I'm born into the genetic/epigenetic/life lottery with a crappy ticket, what's fair? (And if you don't agree that that's possible, try volunteering at your local homeless shelter a few times)
Is it fair that everyone else gets to leverage my vices to transfer my wealth and the profits of my work to themselves? Or is there something morally not right about that scenario?
I agree it's easy to go overboard with regulation, but just because it's possible to addict babies to cocaine in utero doesn't mean that's the society we should build.
echo "WalterBright" | sed 's/Bright/White/'
Prepare for enlightenment: http://www.classicempire.com
But you probably already know all that from on the extensive profile you built on me.
Thank you. :)
In my case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with willpower. It's that video games bore me.
You are just one of the costs of doing a freemium business. Like the alcohol industry, the game is really targeted towards the psychologically vulnerable who represent most of the revenues.
The game is boring by design. Actually its just barely interesting enough to keep the target audience playing, but not so interesting that it stops them from paying to get their psychological reward. These games are basically crack which you can legally sell to kids.
There is a great south park episode that illustrates this phenomenon. Its very well done. You should watch it.
http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s18e06-freemium-isnt-f...
Gee, I wonder why...
Err... All current research suggests that you have almost no free will and are little more than a complex set of reactions to external stimulus.
Free will is just a conceptual mistake based on metaphysics.
If you buy $30k worth of golf clubs, you have $30k worth of golf clubs.
If you put $30k into a kickstarter project for some digital assets exclusively in a piece of software that isn't even written yet, you don't own that.
That's not putting $30k into a hobby, but giving $30k to someone without even a contractual obligation for delivery. It's exactly why the SEC won't let non-accredited investing into crowdfunded equity projects, but the reality is that people already think they're buying something without getting equity.
A paternalist government is not compatible with a free society.
Consumer rights and protections are what creates scalable trade by enabling trust in our society.
As for who's going to enforce my $100k agreement, the same people that enforce any other contract, the courts.
There is a line that needs to be drawn somewhere in terms of what can and cannot be allowed in contracts, the question is where to draw it. The other obvious point is whether both parties are acting in good faith, which is why there are laws about fraud on the books (even if they aren't always enforced for some financial industries).
You had just said it's not appropriate for governments to insert itself between two informed, consenting parties, because it is paternalistic and not part of a free society.
Also what does market efficiency have to do with anything? There are always going to be asymmetrical distributions of power because information is asymmetrical.
A lot of what the SEC and FTC do is require appropriate information disclosure to protect consumers from deception. The SEC requires financial disclosures, auditing, etc. In the FTC's own words: "Federal Trade Commission has a broad mandate to protect consumers from fraud and deception in the marketplace". The idea is to make sure people have the information that they need to make informed decisions. Not to tell them what decisions they are and are not allowed to make once they have that information.
And to the contrary, both the SEC and the FTC dictate what types of transactions take place in respective domains - unless you're arguing that the prevention of MLMs and ponzi schemes infringes on your freedoms.
People get value from things that aren't tangible. Many of the most valuable things aren't tangible.
For a movie you clearly know what you get into.
Some guys spend $100k to go motor racing for a season in single-make cars. At the end of it, they don't own anything but any trophies they might have picked up.
If people want to spend money on digital goods, putting up walls to stop or make it harder is unlikely to be successful unless you outright ban it with heavy punishment for use.
That hasn't worked so well for other items in a similar category, and digital goods are completely victimless.
The article and others in the thread have given arguments that digital goods are not victimless. Most societies acknowledge that gambling is harmful; digital gambling with fake money or with time spent in-game is presumably harmful as well.
It's also not clear that destroying the entirety of marketing and advertising industries is an obviously bad idea if you take the long view on humanity. (It's also not an obviously good idea. It's worth thinking about.)
The point I'm trying to make is that it is impractical, costly, probably impossible and dangerous to attempt to limit the mechanics the OP is really pissed off about in a way that does not also impinge upon the freedom of the majority in order to protect those with poor impulse control.
I am capable of going to a casino and walking out of there without losing my shirt. I am equally as capable of going to have a few drinks at a bar without becoming an alcoholic, or to have sex with somebody and not turn into a raging sex addict. Should my ability to go to casinos, drink, or sleep with people be regulated too, just because some people's lives are ruined by these things?
You can project this argument into a thousand different things just because people like them. For example, I spend an absolute eternity on the Internet. The vast majority of my life is spent reading, writing code, or doing other coder-type things. Because of this, I have also had to eat the opportunity cost involved; I have missed out on some social gatherings, I have lost friends and also lost any and all experience I would get otherwise. It's safe to say, by some general decree, that I'm addicted to what I do. I'd argue I'm passionate. Should my work and passions be regulated because there is an opportunity cost to me doing so? Should I not be allowed to have the Internet at all because someone else has racked up inordinate amounts of debt at World of Warcraft?
I don't believe it is the fault of the mechanic that these people have poor impulse control, for some reason or another, and I also don't believe it's fair to limit the existence of these types of games because some people are incapable of walking away from them. If we should do anything regulatory down this path, it is building in proper harm reduction systems for these things versus taking a puritanical "ban it" approach to them.
PS: We can fantasize about people being rational, but reality disagrees.
I worry that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That the less you treat people as rational beings responsible for their own decisions, the less rational and responsible they will be. It might already be happening, with victimitis in American politics being one of the most visible outcomes.
I'm also not buying that it's a slippery slope and banning, say, cross compiling profiles on customers from different, unrelated platforms would "take down the entirety of marketing and advertising as an industry".
In capitalism, companies will do everything within the legal framework to make more money. That's their job. Ours is to set and adjust those bounds to keep the whole system productive.