A really simple solution would be to cap the amount of money a user can spend on a single game in a certain time period after the initial buy-in (so games could still charge hundreds of dollars for Premium/GOTY/etc editions). Even something like $50/mo would stop whales

Why is $50/month an acceptable amount to spend on alcohol or coffee but not on games? Does it only apply to these style of games or do games like league of legends need to limit purchases too?

(I don't have an answer, fwiw, but I'm not overly keen on this solution)

I'm of two minds about this solution (I like the "it'll immediately destroy the whole business model" approach), but I'll bite. There are couple of reasons:

1) Children are already restricted from consuming alcohol and coffee.

2) You can only drink so much coffee before your body asks you to stop, or gives up completely. It's not pleasant.

3) Coffee doesn't have this level of addictive properties (alcohol has, and as you'll note, alcoholism is a big problem, though see #5 and #6).

4) There are already "social antibodies" preventing most people from overconsumption of alcohol (and to some extent, coffee).

5) Alcohol prohibition didn't work because it unfairly punished the addiction-free majority, but what's proposed here isn't a restriction on video games, but on a particular aspect of a particular set of them. The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.

6) Nobody designs alcohol or coffee with the sole intent of causing addiction their users that can be exploited for money. Whereas these games absolutely are designed like this.

To try and shorten my response - I agree with you that the core issue is a predatory design, and that the addictions have differences to physical addictions.

However I still disagree that putting a $50 (for arguments sake) cap on the amount to be spent will even help. If that issue worked, it would work for alcohol too. Just because alcohol makes you ill doesn't stop people with an addiction from drinking themselves sick and waking up and immediately resuming drinking. Coffee may have been a bad example but tobacco is another reasonable comparison - limiting tobacco consumption to an arbitrary limit won't help people with a nicotine addiction.

There are many games out there (world of Warcraft for example) which impose weekly lockouts - no matter how much you play you can't progress past a certain point. What ends yo happening is people start at the lockout, burn through the allotted content as soon as possible, and then just wait a week and come back. Implementing a limit isn't going to stop people who are addicted to these games from finding 5-6-7 of them to make progress on to scratch that itch.

To address one of your claims directly:

> The proposal doesn't restrict the fun-giving part, only the addiction-inducing and addiction-exploiting parts.

Firstly how do you define which parts are fun giving and which parts are addiction inducing? There is a very fine line between engaging and enabling, and it's a fuzzy one. At their core, the majority of games are Skinner boxes, and everything else is dressing over that (even MP games). What is firmly in the camp of fun for many many people could easily be considered enabling for a large group of others. People enjoy progression systems in games, they are engaging and fun, and there are clear cases where these are abusive. I don't believe that saying "if you can get 20x more people addicted you can still earn the same" is the right way to punish those abuses though.

We should look at ways of reducing the reasons why people fall I to these traps, and look at regulating the monetisation methods of these games, otherwise they'll just change tack and appear in a slightly different form in 18 months time with creative workarounds (which have already been mentioned - multiple games with tie ins, gifting, streaks, external purchased to interact with the game)

Thanks for elaboration. I do agree with the concerns you brought up. I think the main point the $50 proposal has is this: the business model around alcohol/tobacco is targeting a normal distribution of sales. The business model of those predatory games is targeting a heavily skewed distribution, in which there's a long tail of people who just wasted a lot of their time and a bit of money, and a bunch of whales that dump disproportionate amount of cash into the games. The $50 proposal, even modified to $100 or $200, essentially cuts off 90+% of the earnings and destroys the reason for making these kinds of games in the first place.

As for the "fine line between engaging and enabling", two points. One, it's not just "enabling". Selling tobacco is "enabling", those games are actively designed to max out the addiction factor. Two, I agree the line is fuzzy, but I think the "you'll know it when you'll see it" argument does apply in this case. There is a meaningful difference between games optimized for being fun and an artistic expression - like most video games in 80s, 90s and 2000s - and skinner boxes thinly wrapped in a theme. It's hard to define what that difference is, because it ultimately is a difference of Colour[0], which is something hard to capture in laws. But I believe that we must try to discourage people from creating "games" of the "Skinner-box" colour.

To give random examples of games I spent ridiculous amount of time on as a kid: StarCraft and Fallout 1 and 2. They were "addictive" in the sense a good book or a good sports can be addictive. But they were first and foremost designed to be fun and tell a story, addictiveness was incidental. At no point they tried to use it to get more money from me/my parents.

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[0] - https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

I would add time and attention as an important distinction.

If it is a simple solution, then there likely is a simple work around.

In this case, large companies with multiple games can have cross game promotions. Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.

> Also, $50/game/month is still a very larger amount of money for many people and doesn't resolve the issue of kids being allowed to gamble.

The business model for these games is that 99% of players spend negligible amounts, and 1% spend hundreds or thousands; the minnows are a loss leader to get to the whales. Restricting spending to $50 or $100/month would destroy games like this entirely. (Which I'm fine with, personally.)

It would destroy the current whale business model, but it might still result in going after big spenders in other fashions by getting more games for them to play a shorter time each and it might result in them modifying the feedback loop to get more people spending the maximum allowed.

Also, are the minnows really loss leaders or just not as profitable?

Sure, Blizzard does this a lot with their games. The idea behind it is more that it prevents whales, destroying the business model... the kids spending $100/mo are nothing compared to the people who spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on these games every month. That's who they're targeting.

$50/mo would stop CCGs in their tracks. I know enough grown-ups with enough money who drop a few hundreds when a new set releases in MtG: Arena or Hearthstone (and those amounts don't count as whales)

I'm happy to be a whale. I can afford it. Why do you want to stop me? I get a lot of joy from spending money on mobile games. I think it should be regulated somehow but not like that.

More legislation? While I agree that many of these games are fundamentally indistinguishable from gambling, gambling laws themselves are a complete overreach by the state. In general, when it comes to regulation, the role of the government should be to interfere at negative third-party externalities. When individuals are impacted by things they didn't consent to or take part in, there is a case for the protection of their interests to not be impeded upon. But if all parties involved consent to a behavior, as is the case with gambling, that is not a behavior for the government to control. Just because people can make poor decisions doesn't mean that we need to criminalize them.

Gambling has negative externalities suffered by families and friends of the addicts (and more people, if addiction drives the victim to crime). That's in addition to the fact that IMO at some point in addiction, you aren't really in a state of mind to give informed consent.

My current point of view is that once a problem becomes large-scale and systemic, to the point you can actually model it at population-scale, it needs top-down attention and top-down solutions. That usually means regulation - either new, modified, or existing but better enforced. In other words, once something grows to the point it wouldn't be out of place on a SimCity/Civilizations-style game dashboard, it needs SimCity/Civilization-style solutions. In yet different words, there ain't such thing as free will and informed consent if I can reliably predict that a population under influence X will have Y% incidence of $bad-thing.

See also: vaccines, smoking, air pollution, climate change, overfishing, and countless other things where people left to their own devices and their own local, small-scale perspective reliably and fully predictably end up doing stupid things.

What would you define as the third party in cigarettes? Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition, yet I find it pretty hard to accept that the current legislation against cigarette companies hasn't done a world of good for humanity.

> Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition

Sure they do. If rates of lung cancer go up because more people smoke, insurance rates for the populace at large will also go up, thereby driving down expendable income for many consumers and depressing economic growth. All of society is the third party when it comes to people making poor decisions about their health.

As an aside, I realize this reasoning can certainly be abused as a justification to make any number of questionable but possibly legitimate behaviors illegal, but it doesn't make it less true in specific cases.

I don't think that the role of the government is to do good for humanity. The role of the government, at least in a liberal democracy like the US, is to preserve liberty. In a state where the primary mandate is to pursue actions on behalf of the "good," the obvious problem is to do with how we define "good." There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether, and there have been periods where this has been democratically felt to be for the good of the nation. Many people advocate for the banning of pornography. Prostitution. Drugs. Fast food. Violent video games. There are all kinds of things that people regulate for people's purported best interest. The problem is that, as stated, people's interests vary. People's capabilities to control themselves vary. People's senses of morality vary.

But the illusory nature of "good" isn't even the primary problem. The real problem is tyranny. Government is force, no matter what, and even democracy is tyranny of a thin majority. Unless the powers of the state are limited in terms of its objective capabilities, then what is subjectively being enforced by its authoritative capacity is necessarily tyrannical to the minority.

> There are plenty of cases to be made for the prohibition of alcohol and cigarettes altogether,

Prohibition of alcohol wasn't a problem because mitigating social issues caused by its abuse is a bad idea. Prohibition was a problem because it was a bad tool for the job; it didn't solve the issues it was meant to, and caused many more of its own.

Drugs, pornography, prostitution and violent video games aren't the problem (except for people who don't think much). Drug abuse-related crime and health issues are the problem. Sexual abuse and crimes are the problem. Human trafficking and forcing people into sex work are the problem. Violence is the problem. I agree that bans are a wrong idea, but I also disagree about the role of the government. It's absolutely a responsibility of governments to deal with these issues - because really, no one else can.

> Government is force, no matter what, and even democracy is tyranny of a thin majority.

If democracy is a tyranny, then so is the "free" market. A tyranny of those who have more, who rule over those who have less. The tyranny of the economy that forces most people to make bad choice after bad choice, because the alternative is starvation. Truth is, there is no absolute freedom to find anywhere. Not in a world with so many people, not when the "minimum viable reproductive unit" of human species is a village. It's a game of finding the balance that ensures most freedom and most happiness.

Human trafficking violates consent. Violence violates consent. Sexual abuse violates consent. The government has a role in preserving consent in transactions. The third-party negative externalities I mentioned fall within the purview of government responsibilities precisely because they have an impact on those who have not consented.

Gambling does not violate consent. Drug usage does not violate consent. Prostitution does not violate consent, or in the cases that do, those independent instances are where enforcement needs to occur.

Would you change your position if at some point there exist a technology that modifies consent with a certain success rate so a bad actor in a free market can reliably make a significant number of people act against their interests but out of their own "free will".

Is this a matter of competence or a matter of principle?

If I can talk to some people and without threats or deceit convince a good number of them to hand me over all their savings (using a zeroday in wetware for example), does the government has a right / responsibility to stop me?

I expect ad-tech and other persuasion techniques will only become more effective. At what point do we declare regular people unable to consent similar to the way we say children and few other groups can't legally consent?

While I agree with your views here, it is incredibly important to understand that "consent" is not as black and white as you are painting it above. In many ways it suffers from the same problems as attempting to define what is "good" -- in that what qualifies an individual to be able to give consent or what consent even looks like can be arbitrary and subjective.

The role of the government is to solve problems that the market cannot. There's tons of market failures described in the literature (e.g. information asymmetries, principal–agent problems, or negative externalities), and others that the government can simply solve more efficiently (e.g. nationalized infrastructure prevents each private player from building their own, ultimately redundant, infrastructure, and lowers cost to entry for new players).

In my opinion, governments overreach is when governments starts to control the population's choices (e.g. prohibition or ban of illegal & experimental drugs). Government influencing the population's choices (guiding them towards "good" choices, e.g. by limiting gambling, taxing alcohol, enforcing true labels on food) can be a very good thing, [edit:] especially in situations when humans tend to behave irrationally (i.e. because our psychology / evolutionary mechanisms are hijacked).

If what you want is a "Warning, this game may be addictive" every time you load the game, then fine.

But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point.

I don't think it's the government's job to control the populace. They can force companies to make risks clear, but if the consumer accepts the risk, that should be that.

> They can force companies to make risks clear, but if the consumer accepts the risk, that should be that.

It doesn't solve anything when the problem is with externalities and prisoner's dilemmas.

Taxes on sugar and smoking can be argued on the grounds of increased load on national heathcare, at least in countries with publicly-funded healthcare. Taxes (or rather, pulling back on subsidies) on meat can be pretty strongly argued as effective means of reducing emissions and slowing down/mitigating climate change. Almost all situations where externalities are the problem share the exact same pattern: "it would be better if nobody did X, but since everyone does X, why should I stop and deprive myself of the value X gives me?".

Personally, I came to believe that the job - perhaps the main job - of the government should in fact be to act as a central coordinator, to prevent citizens from falling into emergent prisonner's dilemma-like traps.

As for regulating gambling and smoking and many other things you can see as "limiting freedom" - it's not like an individual decision leading to self-harm is always, or usually, an unique situation. Gambling isn't a random event, it's an exploitation scheme perpetrated fully intentionally by other people, who have literal textbooks describing the best way to fuck their fellow men and women over. It would be a pretty inhumane government that didn't take an interest in curtailing this.

You giving justifications for banning food really just proves my point. Tyranny of the majority, if that faction should ever become the majority.

With gambling there exists the chance you can bet your last $20 and make enough to pay off your debt. I don't think anyone is planning on getting rich off Idle Heroes.

> People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar

Where is sugar being regulated as tightly as tobacco?

I'm talking about the hate tax. It's not nationwide yet, but you see more and more people pushing for one every year.

A tax is hardly comparable to heavily restricting sales and making it completely illegal to buy or consume for under-18s.

("Sin tax" is the popular dysphemism, BTW.)

In my post I agreed with basic regulation, but against hate taxes.

>But I do not think the government should be passing hate taxes on things they don't want you to do. People mostly agreed when it came to cigarettes, now they're coming for sugar, and they're very likely to be going for animal based products at some point.

I'm just confused what you're arguing (and why it led to this post being downvoted). I didn't compare tax to consumption under 18.

I used to be a pretty hardcore libertarian. The standard libertarian arguments only really work when you have a mostly libertarian system already however. They tend to have problems when you have some form of a welfare state such that individuals who for whatever reasons are unable to support themselves end up being supported by the state. That in itself is a classic libertarian argument - the logic of welfare inevitably leads to government overreach in all areas of life because the state has established a financial interest in preventing people from engaging in "harmful" behaviors.