The World Health Organization recognizes videogame addiction as a disorder, and the American Psychiatric Association says that the question of whether or not videogames can be addictive is “still being debated,” but that "early evidence suggests that videogames are one of the most addicting technologies around
Its clear that games can be addictive and the concept of „whale fishing“ is openly discussed in terms of game design. Obviously, the weakest of us in terms of addiction make the standard because its those who are harmed.
Obviously, cash shops should be banned in games immediately.
They try to make balantro a 18+ game because it resembles a card game. Meanwhile fifa is for 3+ year old and it's just a card oprning game where they fish money from some sad football fans and children. I have no faith in anyone in charge of that
I have to think part of this is just all the ancient representatives we have. They’ve lived long enough to know what gambling looks like, and what good ol’ sports ball looks like, and by golly nobody can tell 'em any different!
I think that there are better responses and more nuanced opinions to be considered, certainly teaching awareness and response to such stimulus is better than playing wack-a-mole with whatever people get addicted to.
The drug war demonstrated this very clearly, it’s basically impossible to ban things people want and this is even harder with internet services or downloaded software - focus on harm reduction and education for best results.
That said we should regulate against psychologically manipulative game mechanics being linked to real or purchased currencies, though education and offering alternatives must come first.
The drug war in the US - same as any other war - imo was profit seeking of the military industrial complex, incarceration industry and power shifting away from the people, nothing else.
It is not the drugs you need to outlaw, it is the living conditions. The reason nobody gets a handle on drugs is because there is homelessness and injustice galore. Countries around the world have very different approaches to this and they mostly work better than the US solution of mass incarceration.
Corporations designing things for user retention instead of fun is hard to see for people without professional background in marketing sometimes. These things are giving you a way of influencing the subconcious, avoiding the concious in the process. This manipulation is why gambling is outlawed for kids, not the money aspect.
Sure but the point it is didn’t help, likewise gambling is illegal in a lot of places and those places tend to have more of a problem with it because addicts can’t get help.
Treating game addiction generally involves people learning to recognize and respond to behavior cycles, just like with other addictions. We should take these things seriously and teach kids how to recognize and escape manipulative cycles, a lesson which would be useful their whole life in every walk of life.
I agree that it is important that addicts need help. But having unrestricted gambling is not that. Its why even in countries that allow gambling, it is highly restricted. Were moving in a circle now. Maybe we need to agree to disagree here.
That is a good point, I guess I might accept there should be carefully considered regulation in certain well defined situations - I already agree money or brought currencies shouldn’t be allowed which will limit real world damage but I don’t really see where it is needed beyond this.
You’re intentionally dumbing down the topic to make your point sound better. You’re simply describing the binary, whether addiction could be present or not. There are so many more obvious factors to consider. Addiction rate of users, personal and social impacts of that addiction, intensity of addictive behaviors, frequency of use in addicts, target demographic, marketing etc.
There’s a reason gambling has a minimum age requirement, and loot boxes are a way around that to make money by letting children gamble.
You do have a valid point there tbh, certain mechanics should be forbidden from being linked to real or purchasable money but I don’t really think they should be forbidden in general.
My argument for this is it’s too wide ranging and will limit positive elements in game design. I think it’s also important for people to be able to practice emotional response and regulation to such stimulus, if we don’t then advertisers and manipulators will walk all over us.
I agree with this, but we give them till the age of 21 to practice and develop those skills. The entire argument is not letting gaming companies introduce gambling to kids before their brains have fully developed.
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.
If you employ psychologists and other specialists to design something for maximum retention, you‘re not making something „entertaining“, you‘re tricking the brain into a loop.
We could discuss this endlessly but suffice it to say that there are techniques for retention that dont make an experience necessarily better but more captivating. Infinite scrolling is a very simple example. i bet some game designers could shine a pretty bright light on this if they stumble across this thread.
I could abstract this to the real world like so: two people can speak exactly the same text but one cares if their audience is getting tired and stops, the other one speaks a little louder and turns on some more lights. I‘m pretty sure you will get a significantly longer retention despite the quality being the exact same.
And this is why methods for retention need to be carefully screened and regulated.
Have to strongly disagree. Having to constantly reload entire pages of content is incredibly annoying. The only reason it makes people want to quit is because it’s annoying.
The fact that you chose that specific example, one that I think is plainly wrong, just goes to show that the discussion is not as simple as you or other people make it out to be, and that any regulation around this will most certainly ensure that future games are shittier.
I dont like you stating things as if they were an objective truth. It is your opinion that infinite scrolling is “good” or whatever you wanted to say. But it is a retention method and not just a QoL feature. There are articles explaining this and some websites have expressly disabled it because it leads to problems for people who are vulnerable.
That’s putting it a bit strongly. But it does induce people to spend money. Personally I don’t spend extra money on games. I can go to Vegas if I want to gamble for money.
It started in “free” mobile trash and is now in $70 single-player games. This shit costs almost nothing to add. The backlash doesn’t outweigh the extra money squeezed out. This is the dominant strategy. It is half the industry’s revenue. What else needs to happen, to tell you everything else is in trouble?
‘Just don’t buy it!’ I’m not, and yet: it keeps getting worse. It’s half the industry by revenue. And growing.
‘You just don’t like it!’ It monetizes human misery… inside entertainment. It makes gaming objectively worse.
‘Don’t legislate content!’ This is about the bus-i-ness mod-el. Sell whatever sex and violence you want. Just sell it.
‘There’s no exploitation here!’ Games make you value arbitrary worthless goals. That’s what makes them games.
One genius argued ‘other studios make several games over the decade these wallet-siphons have been dragged out, so they’d have to cost hundreds of dollars on release!’ Or. And this is just wild speculation about the cutting edge of computer science. Or they could make several games? Over time? And sell them for normal prices, less than a decade apart?
These people act like the just-sell-games model is unproven and hypothetical, in the same breath they insist it’s unaffected by this alternative of tricking people into tolerating endless fees. They’re not arguing. They’re just shuffling cards.
I agree fully. Its disgusting. People literally drinking the cool aid. Can I ask you something weird? I feel like making a counterweight (like political movements, eg the fedipact) would actually help.
Like a movement with a name and a written agenda so we dont have to repeat ourselves all the time. The idea is that we identify games with exploitative mechanics, dont buy them and call out the makers.
Its incredibly easy to put a link in a comment under a post hyping such a game to counter it. The more we push this, the more people will follow. We could then start sending open letters (per email) to game studios where people sign this.
We might he able to change this shit. Would you like to help? I‘d draft up something and we can make posts to gather an initial group of people.
Those are just ideas but it works wonders in other topics so why not try? Feel free to dm me if you want to discuss this.
Meh, at least as far as the games industry goes, we’ve been here before. Really the past few years have been incredible for games, now it’s time to settle into another stretch of mediocrity as companies learn the same lessons over again. Super sucks for the devs, though, seems they always get the shortest end of the stick.
If they use the blockchain as designed, there will be no central server to switch off - it’s just running in a bunch of basements. They rarely do, though.
The person who stated this a while ago deleted their comment so the reply may not have made sense:
The blockchain does not contain the digital assets. it is just a ledger saying who owns the assets.
If the place the blockchain ledger points to no longer exists, the ledger is useless.
Same with NFT's, they are digital receipts that point to a web address, If the web address closes down, the NFT is useless.
For a real world analogy.
A deed (blockchain ledger) proves you own a house (digital asset stored on the game server). If the house burns down (game server is switched off), the deed still exists but it is useless as the asset it describes no longer does.
An NFT doesn’t need to point to a web address - the ape picture can be stored on the blockchain too.
So on the case of a game, everyone can be running their own server, using a blockchain to keep the shared world in sync. There’s no physical product to begin with.
It seems he wasn’t banned from Fortnite, just from participating in tournaments. So he may very well cheat in fortnite again, as his account wasn’t banned.
Being said, nice of them to donate the winnings to charity, half expected them to just keep the money.
It would definitely take some creative interpretation IMHO. That is if you’re using the gameplay of Eternal, you’ll want to make changes to the original maps structure and encounter design. Would be an intensely interesting project to take on… Even just an episode, or a level or two…
I’m already thinking about how to “gate” different sections in episode 1 to work with Eternal’s arena based gameplay. Later episodes and Doom 2 gets easier, though.
The only thing about the level design I think would get broken is the fact you can jump and other traversal methods. The original maps weren’t designed around that, and even Brutal Doom breaks them with the addition of jumping. But what’s broken is the intended progression and access to secrets and is also an easy fix. Just make the barriers higher or gaps further, etc.
I hope not. Jennifer Hale is amazing. She’s the reason I’ve never played as male Shepard in mass effect. She also voiced Bastila in knights of the old republic. Incredible skill/talent.
Mark Meer is great, and definitely worth playing thru to experience. Not quite at the same level as Jennifer Hale’s performance, but it was still absolutely brilliant.
Still, I hear this every time I hear Shepard talk to Dr. Chakwas.
I really enjoyed the characters. When I think about Mass Effect 3, for example, I think of how I felt when making peace between the Quarians and the Geth, because of how I had gotten to know the characters of Tali and Legion. Or Wrex enthusiastically greeting Shepard as an old friend, something that’s only possible if you talk him down in the first game.
I was as disappointed as everyone else at the actual ending to Mass Effect 3, and I do think the plot goes a bit weird even before that (the ending boss fight of mass effect 2 is a bit weird, but again, I think more of the personal stakes that had been set up by good character writing (plus Jack Wall’s “Suicide Mission” makes what could’ve been overly cheesy instead feel grand and epic)), but I found the smaller, interpersonal stories that Mass Effect tells to be quite compelling.
Because you don't play it for a harsh challenge, the story is pretty decent, but I played it for worldbuilding, art style, ensemble cast, feeling of adventure and journey across a galaxy. That sort of broad feeling stuff.
I’m not really a gamer, but I listen to a lot of audiobooks.
AI isn’t anywhere close to being able to replace “good” narrators. Maybe a bit like self driving cars - the first 90% was achieved rapidly, the next 5% took some doing but ok, now though the final 5% seems kinda unachievable on any timescale.
That said, automation (and yes, AI) tends to approach industries incrementally. A headline voice actor isn’t going to be replaced tomorrow, but maybe some low level roles are. Fewer voice actors just means less demand for the really good ones. Def not good for the industry but… time marches on I guess.
Sony learned nothing from the Helldivers 2 shitshow
Well they learned to announce that it would require an account before releasing the game rather than after people had already bought it, which was the complaint with Helldivers, right?
While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.
What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.
Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.
Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.
Larian is the new CDProjectktRed. And by that I mean they are projected to be a perfect, infallible, manifestation of developer perfection that gamers will worship and praise blindly until Larian proves themselves to be mere mortals by making a mistake.
In what bizzaro world did the witcher series fail to live up to expectations? The first one was a masterclass of atmosphere and had zero expectations, the second were just fine and the third one still is the gold standard for quest design in open world games.
Buggy like most ambitious open world games, but still perfectly playable. It certainly lived up to expectations, it was one of the most praised games of its time, more than what I’ve seen about BG3. Granted I don’t follow the industry as closely as I did back then.
Just because you didn’t like 1 and 2 doesn’t mean they didn’t live up to expectations. CDPR was nobody before witcher 1 and a small studio before 2, so I really don’t get how they didn’t live up to expectations for those two games.
I‘m starting to get the impression people build them up precisely to watch them fall and kick them down. It‘s in our DNA, I‘m afraid. I mean the praise they get for the most mundane claims (and often they are just that) is ridiculous to the point they‘re becoming the developer version of the life of Brian. And deep down we‘re already anticipating to watch them bleed out at a cross.
“I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don’t have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
Is it just me or does this not exist on Steam anymore? This SteamDB page just redirects me to the Steam homepage when I click on the game’s store page.
Yes, I was curious enough to click for more information. 😒
No they have not. If they dumped their own cartridge or had the ROM somewhere in their archives, it would be identical to one downloaded from the Internet. The whole controversy happened because someone saw the iNES headers in whatever release of Super Mario Bros was new at the time. Those headers are added by all NES cartridge dumpers, and the creator of this format developed the NES emulator used by Nintendo in Animal Crossing for the GameCube.
Rom pirates usually trim and sign their releases, specially if they have to break or decode any encryption. These pirate’s signatures have been found in official Nintendo releases. Some of their own emulators have also been found to run piracy emulation software. They are pretty much hypocrites.
Throwback to the NES Classic ROM having a ripper/uploader’s signature in the game code. Because Nintendo didn’t ever bother archiving their own games, and just downloaded ROMs from the same sites they were trying to shut down.
All that talk about how Xbox is investing in the Japanese market and then they close the one prominent Japanese studio that they own. The same one that, as the article points out, made Hi-Fi Rush which was “a break out hit”. What the hell, Microsoft.
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