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 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.