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Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously, many parents avoid these conflicts altogether by simply banning such games altogether. While I sympathize with that sentiments, to me it seems extreme; fun and gaming strategies are legitimate pursuits for a child.

That's one hell of a false dichotomy. Why not just ban games with in-app purchases?

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I would love to limit games to those with no IAPs and a fixed up front cost, no advertising, and no dial-home advertising toolkit integration.

It's almost impossible to do in any practical sense, and that's extremely frustrating.

What do you mean? Pretty much all console games are like that. And Nintendo has a huge offering of good kid-friendly games on 3DS/Wii/WiiU.

True, I'd been assuming a context of mobile apps. Though IAPs in console games are on the rise as well, so I don't expect that to last much longer. So far still clear of tracking adverts (far as I know) so they would be good on that front - for a while yet, anyway.

FWIW I have been avoiding mobile games almost entirely since they all started going the freemium route, and I will definitely point my daughter toward non skinner box games (as well as never paying for consumable or "cheat" IAP). If this limits her to mostly non-mobile games, I'm OK with that.

'such games' = games with in-app purchases

The problem is the implication that "fun and gaming strategies are legitimate pursuits for a child" are only present in games with in-app purchases. That makes no sense at all.

I didn't take that implication away from the author's overall post or the specific sentence that you're referencing. I find it odd that anyone would. For someone to write enough words to be so specific as to remove all ambiguity would not make for interesting reading. Instead I choose to interpret the meaning of their limited words charitably.

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