For someone else, maybe they do have value.

They literally cannot have the form of value in question. They’re not real. However much you desire a goal in soccer, it’s just a ball going through some posts. In some sense the entire concept is imaginary. We don’t count when the ball goes back out. We could - we don’t. It’s arbitrary. All games work this way.

Any sense of pride and accomplishment, or whatever other justification you can name for how hard you enjoy your shelf of digital geegaws, is a product of the game exploiting your psychology. That’s why affixing a price tag is immoral. You can be made to val-- to want, any damn thing. The more intrinsically worthless, the better… from the seller’s perspective. You don’t print a deed for the Brooklyn Bridge on the good paper.

True, but isn’t that true of pretty much everything if we zoom out enough?

My guy, the key word in that sentence was “novel.” The point is that these abuses you now recognize as abuses will just be laundered into different forms. Like how we finally got rid of lootboxes, and the same problems ramped up under different gimmicks.

And now lootboxes are back. The only form of this bullshit that everyone recognized as bullshit, and they’re just bringin’ it right back, because hey guess what, your choices don’t matter. They can tell you the stick gives you cancer and enough people will still buy it because they were tricked into forming an addiction.

Only legislation will fix this.

(often subjective)

As if describing a hat with a timer as violence is obvious and rational.

You’re trying to mesh the ideology you consider an identity with conclusions that feel undeniable. One of these things will not survive. In this thread, you’ve described retired cosmetics as a violation of people’s rights - and justifying that is a stretch, when informed consent is the only tool in your bag.

That’s still shuffling unrelated definitions of “value.”

You understand Achievements have no intrinsic worth. The fact you’ve been made to care about them anyway, is what I am talking about. You were made to care about collecting a thousand unicorn skulls, because the game dangled a cleverly-named merit badge for doing so. Dollar value: zilch. Totally arbitrary nonsense, could’ve been anything else.

at a certain point, manipulation constitutes an initiation of force against a user.

Kinda weird to frame it with the non-aggression principle, but sure, yes, good. These systems exploit cognitive vulnerabilities to shortcut our decision-making and trick people out of real money. Generally for things that cost the seller nothing… like editing your own character on your own computer. Any game taking real money is inevitably a collection of these abusive antipatterns, for that kind of manufactured desire.

Nitpicking individual cases is letting the trees obscure the forest - these are game studios. Finding novel ways to manipulate customers is their job. Only a sweeping solution could possibly work.

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

‘Playing games is healthy’ will not counter the fact that points aren’t real. Games make you… care about… arbitrary worthless crap. No general defense of the benefits of play will make the made-up goals… real. It’s a game.

It’s about power imbalance.

Oh, so you’re actually fine with legal consequences for manipulative antipatterns; you’re just struggling to maintain a prior conclusion as the slow realization undermines any consistent rationale. Good. Keep thinking about it. Hey, you know which other mobile-trash gimmicks inflate the price of frivolous nonsense with zero marginal cost? All of them.

Variations on a scam.

“Generated sexual abuse” is explicitly being equated to actual child rape.

These 25 people were not charged with thinkin’ real hard about the possibility of murder. The sting is described like they were caught doing some murder.

That doesn’t mean anybody was killed.

Or that any child was “explored.”

I’m fucking disappointed that anyone professionally engaged in this wants to equate damning evidence of physical abuse with generic representation of the concept - for the exact reasons already described.

There is an insurmountable difference between any depiction of a sex crime involving fictional children - and the actual sexual abuse of real living children. Fuck entirely off about throwing aspersions for why this distinction matters. If you don’t think child rape is fundamentally worse than some imagined depiction of same - fuck you.

“The professionals are also full of shit” is not much of an argument.

The best punchline would be if you manually Photoshopped this together circa 2012.

And the only clear thing to suggest it’s not that, is the middle left tentacle.

I’m not talking about how they got addicted, but what they choose to manage that addiction.

Because addressing systemic problems would require you to examine your trivial worldview. Why would all these people choose an expensive problem that slowly kills them? Oh well, must be their own choice. The morons.

And you are calling them morons, by consistently saying it’s a stupid decision. Why would rational people make irrational choices, by the millions? Shut up is why. Shut up and never ask questions, because only individual choices matter, and large scale individual choices can’t have systemic implications.

There’s no objective measure of value for something like this.

You’re defending cancer sticks.

Oh, sorry, in context, you’re also talking about games, which fundamentally make you value worthless nonsense. THAT’S WHAT MAKES THEM GAMES. Any sane definition of video games must conclude that they make you value objectively worthless arbitrary goals.

That said, I do draw a line at psychological tricks, like artificial scarcity or other types of FOMO.

Why.

How.

On what basis.

How the fuck do you split hairs about these specific things, versus your libertarian insistence that only overt lying could possibly be wrong?

the company does its best to keep things sanitary.

There’s nothing sanitary about unsanitized goods. That’s… do you speak English? Some things will kill people. Some things are just plain bad, actually. Some things are a risk to millions of people, for no reward whatsoever, and only confused cranks insist otherwise. Living in a complex modern society requires acknowledging that driving too fast is dangerous, and botulism kills people.

Calling victims stupid is blaming victims. Cigarette smokers aren’t morons - they were given a chemical dependency by forces that didn’t lie, exactly, but nonetheless fucking obviously tricked them into a chemical dependency. If your standard is “misrepresentation” then every smoker ever was duped by misrepresenting smoking as safe or cool or sexy or whateverthefuck lever got them to fork over their money to huff carcinogens.

Every game that charges money inside the game is misrepresenting the value of whatever bullshit it’s selling. Games make you value arbitrary bullshit! That’s what makes them games! The entire fucking point is made-up rules for arbitrary rewards! Attaching a dollar value to that is inherently abusive. There is no ethical version of that exploitation of human shortcomings.

I don’t want to live in a nanny state where the government decides what’s good for me.

Will this sandwich kill you? Who knows! Cherish the mystery. It’s your god-given right to guzzle unpasteurized milk.

Drink up, and good fucking luck.

Sudden-- fuck off! Like this was all fine, until just now!

Then don’t fucking post it!

We fried ranch.

Ranch.

A scam is when you pay money for bullshit. If someone convinces you to want bullshit, it’s still bullshit.

You recognize a threat to children and their parents… and your entire response is limited to people you know, personally.

Systemic problems are not about you.

It’s still a threat, to millions of people. It’s half the god-damned industry. You know it’s your place to say “this is bullshit,” because you’re telling other parents how to raise their damn wiener kids, and you’re warning your own kids that it’s bullshit!

But god forbid we use any sort of collective action to stop greedy assholes from monetizing innate human shortcomings. People know it’s bullshit, but do it anyway, therefore… it’s not bullshit. They’re not victims, somehow. They’re not addicted to oh my fucking god you used cigarettes as a positive example what is wrong with your entire worldview. Every interaction with you is like a fascinating glimpse of an alternate universe where harm is made-up. How dare we try to prevent it!

Those stupid little pips around the Dreamcast lid are a Keith Haring version of the US SNES’s Memphis-ass fluted undercarriage. Such perfectly subtle moments captured in time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zfs5s-VQA0

The tower of power!

It’s an oblate cuboid.

This is just ‘it makes money so it can’t be wrong.’ People chose to get scammed, ergo, not a scam. Zero concern for how they were manipulated into it. In fact, you’ve explicitly told me, any manipulation is 100% fine, unless it’s overt lying. Hooray for the unlimited right to coax money from rubes!

You don’t have to care, because you’re immune to propaganda.

Surely that abusive source of easy cash won’t affect the options available to you! It’s only half the goddamn industry, so far! So long as a game exists, where you can just own it and not be hassled to keep tipping the robot, it’s fine. It’s fine! Who gives one solitary shit about this hundred-billion-dollar behemoth convincing your kids that addiction and frustration are what video games are for?

Who I am, to say someone is being taken advantage of, is an empathetic human being with working eyeballs. Calling people stupid for being taken advantage of blaming the victim.