I think both the original article's and your points are valid. Especially when you start to see games/virtual items as a "thing" (which probably started with UO/WoW) as opposed to a "fake thing". That said, as a thought experiment, I disagree with the fact that government and regulation have no place in the way a society consumes things like this.

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.

> we're getting pretty damn good at it

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.

Ironic username, given the conversation topic. ;)

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.

What's ironic about his username? His name's Walter Bright.

Ironic in the context of a discussion of vices and addiction, though now understandable (apologies for my lack of knowledge of 70s games & compiler names!)

echo "WalterBright" | sed 's/Bright/White/'

> my lack of knowledge of 70s games

Prepare for enlightenment: http://www.classicempire.com

Speaking of destructive social manipulation, your game destroyed my grade in LISP (or was it C++?) when I discovered Empire on a (Sun?) workstation in the computer lab.

But you probably already know all that from on the extensive profile you built on me.

Thank you. :)

And source available too! Thanks for the link.

>people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower

In my case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with willpower. It's that video games bore me.

You. Are. Not. The. Audience.

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...

Funny that they didn't make this particular episode available online.

Gee, I wonder why...

>b) We overturn the majority of our current social psychology knowledge and realize that yes, people actually do have absolute free will

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.

Hence his comment. He's replying to people who claim all/most transactions in capitalism are willful actions by free, rational actors.

So there is no unexplained variance in behaviour and we have models that explain and predict it as good as let's say classical mechanics?

Free will is just a conceptual mistake based on metaphysics.

He is not putting money into his hobby.

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.

If I want to spend $100,000 on ephemeral virtual items in a video game that might never actually be released, that's my problem, not the government's. I'm the one that earned the money, so I'm the one that decides how to spend it. It's totally inappropriate for the government to insert itself between two informed and consenting parties.

A paternalist government is not compatible with a free society.

The reason we have "paternalistic" organizations like the FTC and SEC is because many parties make informed, consenting agreements, and don't obligate them. How are you going to enforce your $100k agreement without a "paternalistic" organization?

Consumer rights and protections are what creates scalable trade by enabling trust in our society.

Laws that arm people with more information are great. I'm a big fan. I'm not a fan of laws that prohibit certain contracts no matter how informed both parties are. It's sometimes necessary when there's a huge asymmetry in power, like in landlord-tenant relationships and in standard-form contracts that waive all liability (interestingly, this is something courts have recognized as a matter of common law, even in the absence of legislative protections). I don't think video game pre-orders, in-game purchases, and Kickstarter pledges by informed adults should one of the exceptions.

As for who's going to enforce my $100k agreement, the same people that enforce any other contract, the courts.

Except, you know slavery is illegal even if both parties are informed adults who could agree to such a contract. Same for indentured servitude, or selling organs. And these are just the most obvious examples.

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).

> Civil court enforcement

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.

Courts enforce consensual contracts between two people. That's a basic function of government and doesn't restrict your rights, except that you must abide by your word. What this discussion is about is legal constraints on the contents of those contracts.

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.

Which is still paternalistic intervention by the government as you defined it. Don't go no-true-scotsman on me by trying to redefine "true" intervention.

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.

Actually, a free society is impossible without a paternalistic government. The government does a lot of work to craft the free and open society we all enjoy, and enforce certain norms of acceptable behavior; primarily to prevent abuse and exploitation in one sided asymmetric power relationships. Like the relationship between a consumer and a team of trained psychologists using everything they know about the human brain to maliciously manipulate people with mental illnesses into parting with their money against their best interests.

There is at least an implied contract on Kickstarter. They say as much in their TOS:

https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use#section4

Star Citizen isn't through Kickstarter, though. At this point it's through themselves.

Has this ever been held as legally binding in civil court?

When you buy a boat or a Rolex, you own a boat or a Rolex. Now you can buy all Star Citizen's ship you will own nothing, if tomorrow they decide to close their servers you are pretty much screwed.

When you buy a ticket to a movie, a concert, or a theme park, after you're done, you have "nothing" by the argument you're making. Want to ban movies, concerts, and theme parks?

People get value from things that aren't tangible. Many of the most valuable things aren't tangible.

That's not the same. Some people spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to level up in some games, they have no recourse if the company shut it down.

For a movie you clearly know what you get into.

your conclusion isn't supported by your premise, which seems to be that it matters how much a person spends. Where is the line?

With a boat, you might spend thousands on consumables. All that you have left is the memories of driving the boat around.

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.

I don't really buy into this argument. Regulating the sale digital goods works. Companies that wish to remain legal will refrain from the sale of digital goods in an illegal manner; mandatory company audits will be a vector governments use to enforce that.

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.

Owning a boat can be a real drag, though, once the novelty wears off.

Literally a drag...

nice one!