As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick

Re:As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick by jerf on Thursday June 23, 2022 @12:22PM (#31851328)

It is brought up with other things. Perhaps you are extra sensitive about the weed topic for your own personal reasons. "Video games" is a particularly bad counter example, there's a lot of chatter around video game addictiveness and what it can do to vulnerable minds. There's always been some low-key discussion of it but the increasing prevalence of "loot boxes" and their corresponding mechanics have not just increased the volume of the hand-wringing but actually risen up to the level of being banned in certain countries. It's early days on that and I expect to see more regulation of video games over time. As a parent, I can and do directly control my children's access to video games. (My children for various reasons I'm not sharing on the internet are extra sensitive to the issues.)

For example: "The Immoral Design of Diablo Immortal" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o17lBUZgjTs

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Re:As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick by jamal-kumar on Thursday June 23, 2022 @12:49PM (#31851774)

That's a gambling addiction you're mentioning here, something I feel is a LOT more insidious than smoking a joint on occasion

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Re:As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick by slg on Thursday June 23, 2022 @12:29PM (#31851454)

You are debating a different aspect of video games. The complaint against loot boxes is not that they prevent video game players from reaching their true productive potential. They don't do that. The problem with loot boxes is that they are exploitative.

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Re:As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick by wincy on Thursday June 23, 2022 @02:15PM (#31853078)

Before loot boxes existed you had Diablo 2, which instead of your money you were trading your time to get the best items. I wasted thousands of hours of my prime years trying to gamble my way to the “perfect build”. World of Warcraft was the same way, only writ large and perfected with raids. I’ve spent literal years of my life playing Blizzard games and hate myself for wasting so much time.

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Re:As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick by jerf on Thursday June 23, 2022 @02:25PM (#31853229)

I'm not "debating" anything. I'm pointing out that people have been complaining about video games for a while, and that the loot boxes in particular have amped that debate up. But they did not create it. Video games have been accused of rotting brains (the favored rhetorical formulation of this accusation for whatever reason) for my entire life. I'm pointing to the existing debates as evidence of this.

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Re:As weed gets more potent, teens are getting sick by slg on Thursday June 23, 2022 @03:47PM (#31854278)

"Weed is bad" is not what I am arguing against and therefore a generic "video games are bad" complaint is not equivalent. The question is whether we should care that weed makes you a less productive member of society. Loot boxes have no impact on a gamers level of production so it is an irrelevant argument.

Also isn't the "video games rotting people's brain" complaint always laughed at in circles like HN? Is that really the parallel you want to make? Plus people generally only say that in relation to kids. I'm not advocating for kids (or anyone) to use pot. I am saying the personal productivity angle is a weak line of argument and is usually masking some other objection to pot since the same argument is not used in other discussions in which it is equally applicable.

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