Wow that was a really in-depth article on the gaming addiction issue. As always with these things, clinical trials are important so that we can get a most accurate and scientific viewpoint on the issue. I am blessed to not have this addiction since games haven't ever appealed to me past my teenage years.
However, I am well aware that Corporate companies employ Consumer Psychology and Product Design techniques that create "hooks" and "loops" which thrive on human flaws and coerce people into spending money on their freemium games. Especially children and adults with gambling addiction are an easy target and fall victim to this monetization scheme. It's disgusting.
Video games, largely, were created originally by people with psych degrees and programming/comp-sci degrees teaming up - especially online games. In the case of Verant Interactive, who created EverQuest, the original dev team was made up of people with just those degrees initially. So even back before freemium was a model, psychology was at play in games, though not nearly to the degree it's being employed today. No one I ever met working at SOE from the original EQ team was at all into the kind of things the modern game market is using - while they wanted people to be engaged with their games, they truly wanted people to enjoy their work; the addiction thing was horrifying to them, and made them wonder if they'd done too good of work on immersive techniques (much like some of the people from Facebook and other social media are now "out" of social media).
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Yes, I imagine this is how it works now. The psychology could be used for good but instead it is turned against us just to squeeze some more profit out of us.
I was happy to see the gaming community unite against the shit SW:BF2 tried to pull of.
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The way the community was uniting against SW:BF2 was one of the reasons I didn't cancel my pre-order - I was pretty sure Disney wasn't going to put up with the bad press, and they really didn't; I don't think that if EA was on their own or if Lucas was still over the whole thing that EA would have bowed as quickly. Disney doesn't like bad press, they don't like unhappy people (not at that level, anyway), and as much as EA is saying they will be keeping the lootbox system and will re-add the premium currency again...Disney won't put up with it if the system isn't something the community is agreeable to.
I just saw a piece today in one of Rhykker's round-ups about how the whole thing dropped EA annual projections. In relation, Apple made it so that any sort of gambling system in a game on their app store has to put projections about chances right there on the app listing. The storm that SW:BF2 create is more than likely going to change how gatcha and lootboxes work from here on out - in both their games and in other games.
And I don't think it's over. I'm expecting that their reintroduction of Crystal currency will bring another chapter to the story. One I'm really hoping loses them their exclusivity contract (which was made under Lucas, and was inherited by Disney, that I don't think Disney likes one bit at this point).
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Thank you for the follow-up. I do hope we can see an overall change in this bullshit freemium games landscape. BTW I wrote a post on the whole SW:BF2 thing a while back.
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