I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. Either they understand the issue but it's their profits at stake, so they'll ignore the potential problems. Or have these stealth gambling mechanisms entered the games gradually and without the industry realising that what it's doing is actually gambling and there repercussions to that.
The idea that they are ignorant is repugnant, they know exactly what they are doing, and they have ALL the data that shows how the 'child whales' of their industry can be best exploited.
Indeed they know very well what they're doing. One could even say that they're openly spitting in the face of regulators' inability to do something about it, see for example a trailer for a new NBA game, where you mostly see literal casino-like gambling machines, and only a few seconds of actual gameplay on a basketball court: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGZQDOOU6Y
EDIT: The above link is not the trailer itself, but a video discussing the trailer, from an independent game critic who has been speaking out against gambling mechanics in computer games for many years, long before it became a big issue.
A while ago I noticed that a small child in my family had a jigsaw puzzle with a Disney princess on it and since that seemed unexpected, I asked how that came. The answer was that they didn't gift it to her but she wanted it herself. They were surprised themselves but argued that maybe it's really something that girls/kids like.
I couldn't help saying that it's hard for children to not like them when the other side is whole departments of grown-ups doing nothing but engineering the best ways to hack a child's brain :/
I'll clarify a little: I know basically nothing about the games industry, so my thinking was along the lines of...
Many years ago, when social media was just starting, maybe somebody thought "Wouldn't it be cool if we could share photos so that we knew what our friends were doing." At the time they might not have forseen all the negative outcomes, the social anxiety, addiction, body dysmorphia, bullying, etc... caused by our buggy psychological processes.
In a similar way I was wondering if the first developer that thought about adapting the normal random item drop in a game and instead making it a purchasable mystery box, actually realised that this fits the definition of gambling and the myriad legal and moral problems that introduced.
In the present day I'm sure there are plenty who know exactly what they're doing or are willfully ignoring the moral issues around loot boxes. But quite often how something is today doesn't fully explain how it started.
> I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue.
From the report:
"62.We were contacted by a member of the public whose adult son built up considerable debts, reported to be in excess of £50,000, through spending on microtransactions in British company Jagex’s online game RuneScape. For example, bank statements showed that in one day the individual spent £247.95 by making five separate payments to the company. The resulting debt caused significant financial harm for both the player and his parents, whose evidence attributed the situation to the fact that Jagex has no limits on the amount of time or money players can spend on the game.118 This demonstrated to us that even companies with good policies to support some aspects of player wellbeing can fall short in other areas."
You don't take £50,000 from a player without realising something's fucked up.
"I wonder if the reluctance of the gaming industry to tackle gambling is willful or due to ignorance of the issue. "
This must be sarcastic, the entire monetarization model depends on being gambling and -unregulated- gambling at that. No laws, no deposit/spending limits, no gameplay limits, no age restrictions, no regulatory reports, no compliance, no declared 'return to player' (save China), No Taxation. It's a loophole.
It's willful and there's seriously smart people and engineers that crunch the numbers and do customer testing to optimize these. It came from mobile and Facebook games (Zynga) and made the transition to console/PC games about ten years ago, in the west it was popularized by Team Fortress 2, followed by multiple games, e.g. FIFA and Mass Effect 3.
They know exactly what they are doing. If anyone wants proof, see Torulf Jernström's talk "Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play"[1]. He discusses strategies for building the perfect Skinner Box, and how to design your game around operant conditioning and other psychological tricks that help people become addicted.
