This is intentional.
In many games, some things cost "gold" earned by playing the game, and others cost "gems" bought with real money. Or maybe "gold" is the one that costs real money. It's designed to be confusing and hide the distinction between in-game points and real money.
At some point the game companies should bear some of the responsibility for deceiving children.
I hope a reckoning is coming in this regard. Many games include mechanics that are hard to distinguish from video slot machines and should be regulated the same way gambling is (rated 18+, audited for "fairness").
My son is old enough that arcades are interesting to him now. I was pretty shocked to see how they have declined into shitty skinner boxes and games of chance to win tickets. That was always a factor, but is much more prominent today.
The casual acceptance of sports betting is another example of that shift. There’s probably some free marketeer who will opine that teaching children about gambling is a good thing!
Nah. Some people in it shifted, dragged a whole lot of fools with them, didn't experience a reckoning right away, and now think the air's clear. The main punishment for what they've become is being what they've become, that stigma remains whether they can see it or not. They might find themselves scratching at closed doors for undiseased sources of nourishment at some point.
I'd say that's stigma-free.
Letting kids gambling is a parental choice, but if you think it's teaching your kid a valuable lesson you are dead wrong.
I'm thinking more about games like roulette, poker, dice with chores money. maybe it would need to be in a more controlled environment, like family game night.
not exactly gambling, but I learned a great lesson from my father this way when I was about eleven or twelve. I really wanted some expensive Lego so I begged my dad to lend money to purchase it. at first he wouldn't do it, but eventually he decided it might be a good learning experience for me. I had a blast playing with that set for a month or two, but after a while it was just one more toy that I owned. it took a lot longer than that to pay him back, so I had ample time to reflect on how much it sucked to be in debt. I never asked my dad for another toy loan, and I've basically never considered borrowing money again for anything other than college.
I don't think calling it a slot machine is fair.
It is designed to be addictive with compulsion loops and reinforcement, exploiting brain mechanisms you are not aware of such as disproportionate feedback coming directly from slot machines. Candy crush is a sort of glorified skinner box.
Same as gambling machines, candy crush makes use of "illusion of control" by congratulating the player for being skilled for things that actually happened by chance (or were made to happen by the game itself).
The comparison does not stop here, similar to gambling machines candy crush makes money not on the vast majority of people but on a limited few that will spend lots of money the "whales". The fun thing with candy crush is that as long as you never pay the game plays fair but once you've become a paying customer the game starts to play tricks on you to nudge you into paying more, it will become harder or impossible to win without the use of bonus you have to pay to get. The game actually adapts to you to maximize profit it can squeeze out of you.
There was a detailed article about all this mechanism a few years back when I did not shaarlize[0] all my interesting findings so I can't link it here, but everything I just written comes from memory of what was described in this article.
So, in your opinion what makes something a slot machine is which psychological effects it tries to use?
Do you know where else all of these same psychological effects come up? Human interaction. Candy Crush is basically somebody trying to sweet talk you and wrap you around their finger. Do you consider that to be a slot machine too?
I'm not OP, but to me it's the triggered randomness with occasional wins that makes it a slot machine. The intentional psychological effects and engineering to persist the desire to subject oneself to those effects are how King and Zynga are evil companies and deserve to have their corporate charters dissolved. IMHO.
After providing such a payment token there should be no proof and dispute involved, just a single click in a web interface "I refuse to pay for that and I revoke the token". The user of the token should make sure I am happy so he can continue to charge the token.
This is in sharp contrast with user initiated payments for a fixed amount, that should be carefully secured, require strong authentication and should almost never be reversible, unless actual fraud can be proven by the payer.
The problem with cards on the internet and their high abuse and chargeback rates, for which we all pay, is that they conflate these fundamentally different use cases into a single set of static numbers.
A good payment system should require explicit authorisation through your own bank. That's how for example the Dutch iDeal system works. I never use a credit card for a site that accepts iDeal, and the only reason I have a credit card at all, is that many foreign sites don't specifically cater to Dutch customers, and therefore haven't implemented iDeal. I wish they did, or that there was a similar international payment standard that went through banks rather than merchants.
This would basically make sure I would almost never spend any money online, because going through a bank authorization is annoying enough that I'd rather just go do something else. Forget microtransactions, I wouldn't even buy most games.
I do hate 2FA. I like it, but I hate using it. I've stopped posting on some forums/using services. I didn't actively quit them, but when the service had logged me out and it asked me for the 2FA code, I winced and went to go do something else. Over time this happened enough that at some point I just didn't visit the site anymore.
Personally, I find this system a lot less painful than having to type in my credit card number. And it's a lot safer.
Not enough! My account activation is incomplete until I link my privacy.com account to my Facebook account!!! I thought this is so funny in the context of this privacy/Facebook spying thread.
Quote from my privacy.com account page: "Sometimes, the information provided at signup isn’t enough to verify someone’s identity, and activate their Privacy account. Connecting your Facebook account is a quick and easy way to provide extra identity verification. Okay"
P.S. I am now feeling uneasy about the whole thing. I have changed my bank login password and I am trying to cancel/delete the privacy.com account -- but there is no such option in the website menus.
If you're in (certain parts of) Europe, Revolut will offer you one-time use virtual debit cards if you're on one of their paid plans. However, I have no personal experience with them. Being limited to one transaction each makes them a lot less interesting in my opinion, since I can't set up my subscriptions through different cards.
The service that privacy.com offers is different in that it allows you to control very precisely what kind of charges are allowed on any of your virtual cards (and allows you to have more than five). If I used a particular card only for Spotify, I could put a $10/month limit on it, for example. This is more akin to the one-time card offering, but it's not quite the same since it doesn't support recurring payments.
On that note: if anyone is aware of a service like privacy.com available to users in mainland Europe, I'd be very interested to hear about it.
There is a cost to using credit cards. One of the main reasons to use them is this protection against bad actors, and punishment of those actors by fines.
...why is this ethical?
My web banking platform has options for almost everything, but not much credit card related. Do I contact my bank, or do I go straight to VISA?
I have never needed a chargeback, but I had a peek at MasterCard's policy just now and it looks like you need to contact the issuing bank. I would assume it works the same for other four-party schemes such as Visa.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2140066/how-to-get-an-app-s...
Kids don't stand a chance.
So, I'm not telling anyone else how to raise their children... but the fact that society has attitudes like this contributed to my own personal decision to not have any children of my own.
Playing every game your child plays seems... really excessive. I know when I was a child in the '80s and '90s, I had a lot of alone time on the computer, and got to explore a lot of things without my parents; I think it was good for me? I mean, unquestionably, it contributed to my income later on, but I think it might have been good for me in other ways, too?
I think it was probably good for my parents, too.
But then, I super want to reiterate that I am not telling others how to raise kids; I've worked with a few people who kept their kid with them almost 24x7, and that was what they wanted. And it seemed to work out ok? I've totally opted out of that whole thing. I'm just saying, I don't expect anyone to be with their kid 24x7.
None of it. You can try it. You can have a million parents leave a million children alone for most of the day, and not even a bitmap image of one cartoon coin or anything will magically be created, much less the code and distribution channels for a whole game. It doesn't make existing "wholesome" games automatically devolve into other games either, the code and assets don't change at all.
The people who actually do make these things, who do exploit some parents having a lot on their plate: where were their parents then, and where are their peers now? The crime of "not paying enough attention to what your child is doing, which results in a person you love being harmed, and you paying money", is tiny versus the crime of "ruthlessly preying on children for financial gain". Looking away when your child plays such a game is nothing compared to looking away when people make and distribute them.
I don't have children so I'm hesitant to point fingers at parents. I have the ability to make derpy things to sell to children, and I'm not doing that also because in my mind, only a.) children and b.) very careful, well trained and aware adults should make entertainment for children. So unlike parents, I judge those "creators" mercilessly. I cannot even stand the overly "hyped" streamers and youtubers who makes sure they don't swear to be "family-friendly" and not get "demonetized", but otherwise talk crap 24/365 that is fit to turn any brain to mush... but apps and games pushed onto kids directly is yet another level of depraved.
Where is society making an effort to warn parents, that you get to call them lazy for maybe not even considering some people would be so sick and morally bankrupt? What effort was made since Elsagate to warn anything about that stuff? That there's millions of dollars on the line has nothing to do with it, just lazy parents?
Lazy, deplorable society, is what I'd call it.
I absolutely agree with the thrust of your post, but this strikes me as a little extreme. I don't believe J.K. Rowling, for instance, had any specific training on child psychology or the like when she began writing Harry Potter.
Creating non-exploitive content targeted at children is not rocket science.
Maybe we were weird, but from my childhood, I remember how even kids 2 years older or younger might as well have lived in an entirely different world, much less adults or parents. Now I can't find a let's play for a game I'm interested in without coming across what is basically 20-40+ people showing off to 10+ people. This wouldn't be possible without the distortion of "virtual reality" I think. Imagine a 25 year old person coming by a bunch of 13 year olds and lifting a trash can or doing $any_other_stupid_shit, so the kids can be their "fans" and "supporters", and maybe sneak them some cents out of mommy's wallet. That's what I see when I look at a lot of youtube.
I agree that those who make these apps are worse than the parents who are too busy to catch/prevent such incidents before they happen, but those sorts of people have been with humanity for a looong time and aren't going anywhere any time soon. I have been somewhat surprised and saddened to see comments suggesting so in this thread turn gray.
I'm not saying we should give up on improving society and trying to eliminate this sort of crap, but this is always what parenting has been about. If you have the attitude that everyone else needs to responsible for preventing these issues and it's okay for parents not to take any of that responsibility, I'm sorry but you are wrong. We need to do both.
I agree completely with that.
Kids don't earn their own money. If kids are spending real money in a game then the parents had to okay it.
All that said. It's your kid, your card and your money. Kids a mischievous, but the blame isn't entirely on games companies.
Then, after being learned at an early age, it is reinforced time and time again in the stories of entrepreneurs who make billions immorally and similarly suffer zero consequences.
Seems a way to create the best consumer ever: someone who gets the benefits while having no connection with the costs. It may seem stretched, but I see some parallels with military drone pilots.
The scheme described in this article is akin to the multiple techniques used by facebook to acquire users, they used and abused the whole black book of dirty tricks, dark patterns and such.
Heck there's even one dark pattern named after the ceo and founder of facebook.
The remaining digits have an error check built in so you can’t “guess” them.
Back in the offline transaction days, use of fake (generated) credit card numbers as prevalent in computer BBS to get an account for 1 day. Not that I ever did that sort of thing.
The first six digits will identify an issuing bank and card type. All Chase Debit Visas will start with the same six digits (unless they've further broken it down), but no Citibank one will use them. It's still plenty guessable-- try the most popular prefixes and you'll probably hit a few percent of the time.
It might be based in PCI regulations. They might be allowed to store or display the first six/last four in plain text, but probably have to encrypt the whole number or store a token in lieu of the actual full card number.
I agree.
The most basic implement to prevent this behavior is for parents to limit their children's access to Facebook. The consequence for that lack of supervision is spent money. Who should we feel sorry for?
If you know parents without tech education or a comfortable economic position and lifestyle, try asking them how the deal with all this stuff.
Another one would be not to store payment information on Facebook. Even if my child was able to get onto my facebook account, they wouldn't be able to buy anything because I've never stored my payment information on that service.
It's not just that this whole scenario is slimy. It's that Facebook was fully aware of it, had a nice in-house term for it ("friendly fraud"), and not only chose not to approve refunds but also chose not to implement the most basic measures to prevent it.
[edit: as a commenter pointed out, the term “friendly fraud” predated Facebook]
This is symptomatic of a corporate culture that is toxic to to the core.
The money quotes are in the 2 paragraphs below:
"In 2011, Tara Stewart, a risk analyst for Facebook, studied the issue and suggested that the company begin requiring users to enter the first six digits of a credit card used for payments on certain games. Stewart ran a survey of Facebook users and found that many parents were not aware that Facebook stored their payment information after entering it one time. They also found that the kids weren’t aware of what they were doing. “It doesn’t necessarily look like ‘real’ money to a minor,” Stewart wrote.
She ran a test to see if the entering the cards first six-digits would reduce these unwanted charges and the results were encouraging. She also said it would “make sense to start refunding for blatant FF-minor.” The abbreviation “FF” stood for “Friendly Fraud,” the term Facebook used to refer to these fraudulent purchases which were made without malicious intent. Despite this obvious solution, Facebook decided that it would harm revenue and elected to continue fighting refund requests for the foreseeable future, the documents show."