Maybe if it were just that the success rate is bad (>10%, generally), but there’s also that the nature of such programs have very negative effects on a lot of people who try them. They still tend to stick to the foundation laid by AA’s founder, who believed that alcoholism (and addiction in general) is a personal moral failing more than anything else, and his 12 step program often induces self-loathing in those who follow it, which plays a role in them relapsing.
The problem isn’t just the lack of acknowledgment of the chemical aspect of addiction, it’s the attempt to do a one-size-fits-all approach that necessarily cannot work for the majority of people, never trying to understand why people get addicted in the first place, and putting an emphasis on moralizing within mere semblances of advice. There is a statistical handful of AA groups that diverge from the rest and can be vastly more helpful, but they are so few and far between that to go so far as to recommend AA is irresponsible. I don’t know how many medical professionals are able to help with something like a gambling addiction, let alone what the article describes, but seeking an actual expert is a much better alternative.
I would actually put Jim Sterling on the “bad” side of the discourse because as I mentioned earlier, his position is very much one of “it’s okay when free games use abusive money-making tactics but don’t you dare put it in my $60 games” and only brings up the actual gambling concerns as a moral underpinning to a very consumer-framed perspective.
The blind box systems in TF2 and Dota 2 were, to me, always way worse because the odds are absurdly bad for finding rare items, and those items have an actual monetary value due to the player trading economy around them. That doesn’t excuse the tamer version in Overwatch, but when your efforts are seemingly only against retail games such as that, it strikes me as coming not from a place of actual moral concern but of pure outrage for having been deprived of some form of “value” in your game purchase.
He’s also talked about how he himself has almost fell for these tricks before, so a lot of this is personal for him as well. I get tired of his consumerist framing as well (remember when he said it was okay to expect a refund after playing a game for 50 hours), but loot boxes have definitely been the one thing he’s almost been entirely right on constantly.
As for mobile games, he doesn’t defend, rather just pointing out that it’s at least expected there because those games don’t have an initial cost. Shitty, but not used in the same way. Honestly, I wish he was better at clarifying his points, because his whole persona has become an increasingly annoying problem in mixing up his message and giving a lot of his audience the wrong ideas on so, so much.
I can’t really put him on the bad side, but he was close to it for awhile there, only now starting to edge away.
Now Extra Credits is starting to annoy me.
I loved the article! I hadn’t considered most of this and I really appreciate all the research, and I dug all the expert interviews. However there’s one thing I was pretty confused about.
I’ve since looked into it myself, but while I was reading the article I found myself wondering what “skin gambling” is, I’d never encountered the term before. The first thing that sprang to mind was like, bets where the loser would have to get a tattoo or some sort of cyberpunk body horror.
I’m glad to find out it’s just character skins, but now I’m a bit lost as to how that’s in any way different from more traditional gambling beyond using digital cosmetics instead of poker chips or vouchers. Is there not a way to “cash out?”
It might be a bit outside the scope of your focus here, but I’d love to hear anything more about that topic you came across.
This is usually for games made by Valve that have items that can be sold in community markets. What this means is that actual economies have been created by Steam’s various collectable extras, and they’re all predatory as hell. Steam gets a small percentage from transactions, so they benefit directly when people make gambling sites for these items.
This also lead to the influx of assist flips and the current trend of no effort assist flips filled to the brim with achievements to abuse Steam’s system and make easy money from the promise of cards, achievements, and so on and so forth. It truly is astounding that all this random pointlessness has basically ruined entire communities.
In my experience the fact physical CCGs are a social hobby, frequently played with and against the same groups of people reduces a lot of the negative behaviours you’d typically associate with buying loot boxes (and competitive games in general, but that’s a whole other thing). It’s a lot rarer for people to get genuinely angry or frustrated in that sort of environment where you’re playing, often more casually, against people you know. The lack of a ladder removes a lot of pressure during normal play.
Physical cards, and flesh and blood players, open up multiple options for mitigating negativity from losing streaks, repeated bad matchups and not having access to new cards: from asking your opponent to play a different deck or borrowing one yourself, or using proxies. Even without getting into trading, the secondary market, and so on.
Not to say that physical CCGs aren’t necessarily addictive, but there is a larger barrier to get over and a bit less incentive. They’re set up in such a way that an impulsive purchase probably isn’t going to make your deck significantly better on its own because you need multiple rare cards, odds are you’re going to have to trade - contrast to games where every individual loot box might have the only thing you want in it and so encourage you to keep opening one more box.
Rather, CCGs aim to be habit-forming through the use of a regular release cycle and constant expansions, much like MMOs and games that have evolved from them. They want players to engage repeatedly, spend regularly, and without thinking too much about it.
And I find that model extremely uncomfortable in its own right, even as I willingly engage with it.
Oh wow, this was a great (yet sad) article. I was in the camp as others who thought about this issue somewhat previously, but only really thought it was an issue from a “how it affects gameplay” perspective. This article, especially with the numerous personal accounts, was a real eye-opener for me, and now I feel pretty dirty thinking about defending (or just being okay with) loot boxes in any kind of way. I even saved the article and will recommend it for others to read for future times I get into a discussion on this topic.
Side Note: I know this post is about this particular article written by Ellen McGrody, but I recommend checking out the other article written by Heather Alexandra that was referenced in this piece. Damn, I feel bad now…but I think it’s another good read.
There are many gamers who are still convinced that these loot boxes somehow subsidize the game itself, or are unable to see it as gambling because of the abstraction of game items instead of money.
Here’s why I think it’s way more dangerous than slot machines or even CCGs.
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The ability of game developers to iterate quickly over a lot of collected data. It costs very little for somebody to push out something like a holiday event, and developers will know within a week or so what got you to spend. Maybe they’ll a/b test the colors of the buttons, how shiny the cards are, etc. The games ability to exploit you can evolve faster. It’s harder for a company to create and deploy hardware, or new card expansions.
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The accessibility of the game itself. I think we underestimate how much more we are willing to do things if the friction of doing them is just a step or two lower. If you play a CCG, you’ll have to go out to buy cards. Even buying it online, you have to wait for the cards to arrive. Being able to get instant gratification makes us purchase more.
It’s scary to think that you can be manipulated by a game, and I think most people don’t want to admit it because it somehow implies they weren’t clever enough to avoid being tricked. I don’t harbor any fantasies that I’m immune to vice. Given the right opportunity, I could end up addicted to drugs, and I feel the same way about games. I’ve felt the twinge to spend many times, and I know given the right game with the right urge to play, I could end up addicted to some gacha system too.
Whenever I read about loot boxes, I feel like I’m in some kind of 1984 bizarro world. As a (non-clinical) psychologist and neuroscientist, it’s abundantly obvious to me that the loot box loop is literally gambling. Just because it escapes the legal definition of gambling doesn’t mean it’s not actually gambling. It just means that the reward for “winning” at loot boxes is not monetary tender, which is arguably worse since you can’t even financially benefit if you do win! That’s why I’m constantly baffled at normal neurotypical adults who look at loot boxes and dare to call it not gambling, as if refraining from naming it might make it true.
The games industry has a choice, just like it had a choice during the Senate hearings in 1992: does the industry want the blunt instrument of regulation to bear down on it? The ESRB was a result of the choice to self-regulate via a body of people who purport to understand video games (the extent to which can be debated) and were able to avert legislation crafted by laypeople which might overreach and cause a chilling effect on games expression. Do they want to try the other option this time? The ESA seems to want to…
I mean, to be fair, I don’t think most people who haven’t had a reason to study gambling (whether through their job or due to personal experience) think of gambling as a psychological loop; they think of it as betting (a lot of) money to win (a lot of) money. It’s the “win money” part that most people think of. If you flip a coin with your sibling with your lunch money on the line, that feels more like gambling than flipping a coin over, say, who has to do the dishes, but most people probably wouldn’t call either gambling. If you flip a coin with 50,000 dollars on the line, nobody would say that’s not gambling. I’m not saying that that feeling is right, but that IS the gut feeling. In the same vein, lootboxes (which are what, maybe a dollar a box?) do not at first blush feel like gambling – it’s a very small amount of money to win not-money. This is why almost every thread about lootboxes has questions like, but what about CCGs? What about the actual gacha machines that are in front of any supermarket ever (you know, the ones that are like 50 cents to get a shitty plastic toy)? Because none of the previous iterations of gambling-but-not-legally felt like much of a problem.
I will admit that I never thought of lootboxes as an gambling/addiction problem before reading recent articles and the discussion here. I’ve now changed my mind, but I do think getting people to change their minds enough to generate real pressure on government/industry to regulate/self-regulate is going to be an uphill battle.
ETA: To add on the previous paragraph; I feel that it will be difficult because I think a majority of the current backlash against lootboxes in this space is based on consumerism (this makes the game a worse product – e.g., Star Wars using grind to induce P2W purchases or that racing game that has a slot machine to get “parts” which upgrade your car, whose name I’ve forgotten) and not on the gambling aspect. It’s pretty easy to find people say things like “EA did it wrong; but look at Overwatch, Overwatch is DOING IT RIGHT.” The industry appears to be backing off of the former quickly, but the latter, not so much.
I was not aware that 12 step programs were controversial at all. Having read the liuture though the process of going through the process i can’t exactly argue with the critisisms given about them. But whatever the thinking about the program. It can work. One thing i experenced is that not every meeting is a good meeting and that people in real distress should go to some form of rehab first. in my case. what worked for me was going cold turkey for a few months. gave away my consoles (My roommate uses my Xbox as a BluRay player) and then re evaluated what i could handle. Im down to retro games and single player RPGS without DLC for now. as i had obsessive behavior towards any games as service games like destiny as well. The fact that Destiny 2 introduced loot boxes made it one to avoid. I appreciate that people feel that AA isn’t the best option for people. but if what do people with addictive personalities do if not that? What i did worked to me but what would you suggest for others. GameQuiters isn’t a bad start i suppose but local support is what i needed and a internet forum might not have done the trick. Let’s share some Ideas!
I don’t know why i didn’t mention it before but my therapist i was already seeing had previously worked in addiction recovery. that might have made all the difference with my situation. so I guess all my comments could be boiled down to “see a professional!” sorry I obviously had an emotional reaction to this article as it hit close to home.
I can sympathize with the anecdote about the writer’s nephews. I myself have two, and I was always anxiously looking forward to the day they’d start playing video games and I could actually, you know, contribute something meaningful to their lives. And already one of them found out that he can’t get the things he wants in Forza because he needs to get them from loot boxes, and in another instance, we found out he actually bought microtransactions on a mobile game on my dad’s phone.
I used to be a lot more blase about microtransactions and loot boxes because, being an obnoxious indie game snob, they do very little to affect me. But few of us start out playing obscure little games, and the presence of these terrible business models isn’t just bad for our games - it also poisons the well for the next generation. Their entire perception of what games are and what they’re for is heavily colored by the meritocratic, pay-to-win (or at least, pay-to-have-more) nature of modern AAA games. And that’s a shame.
As for Jim Sterling, he’s been pretty outspoken about predatory practices even in free-to-play games - there’s been a fairly recent Jimquisition episode, Turning Players Into Payers, on this very subject. Sterling does come from a very consumer-based perspective, and his perspective on what an industry can and can’t do under modern capitalism leaves a lot to be desired. But he’s often argued against people who only complain about microtransactions when they effect the games they like.
