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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

I kinda disgust me that he seems proud of pioneering selling in-game resources for cash feeding of feeble minded and children.

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Well, you kind of need to deceive yourself in this way if you want to justify your work to yourself.

Kind of easy if it makes you tons of money.

"it is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding"

Indeed it is a very common pattern. People tend to believe whatever is convenient (read: self serving) for them to believe.

It's just about the feedback loop. People were addicted to games long before micro-transactions.

Tetris has sucked countless hours out of peoples' lives. Hell, I even almost lost a job because of Civilization 3. I'm completely unable to play "one more turn" style games in moderation.

Mobile games are optimised so that players like to spend time playing the game, and have the option of exchanging money for time in-game. You can either grind (use time) or spend money (use less time).

If people enjoy the game and want to spend money to get ahead, they have the option. No one is forcing payments, it usually goes badly for the game.

WalterBright could probably comment on that as Empire (although long before my time) is apparently one of the first career-ruining-ly addictive games.

They built a widely used and loved product, why not be proud?

Should Cambridge Analytica love that its Facebook quizzes were widely used and loved?

It’s a bad product that people get addicted to, so I wouldn’t want to work on it, much less be proud of it. It would be like being proud of inventing banner ads, or spam, or artificial trans fats, or telemarketing robocalls, etc etc

I feel like what is ignored in these conversations is that the vast majority of users just play this game as an entertaining piece of art. ~1% of problem users get addicted to games, whether they are FarmVille or smash brothers.

That is just the way it is. It isn't right to squash the freedom of the vast majority of people because a small subset of users lack self control.

Most people play the lotto to release stress. But there are quite a few who abuse it (or it abuses them).

I think it depends on the net benefits. It’s odd to pose it as “squashing freedom” as I don’t think that anyone is proposing that FarmVille be banned or made illegal. I just think it’s a bad thing to make and not something to be proud of.

“I made a thing that lots of people like, but pisses lots of people off, is responsible for needless deaths, and lots of people wasted money.”

I think you could contort logic to make any creation "bad" for some subset of people.

Is any videogame a bad thing to make? What about movies that arguably can inspire mass shooters or other negative events to occur.

Can the creators of smash brothers or dota not be proud either? Those games fuck some small subset of people up too. I played smash brothers for thousands of hours myself.

> It’s a bad product that people get addicted to,

Every time I hear about people having issues with partner being addicted to gaming, the game in question is PC or console game. Typically competitive online one, sometimes single player. It is rarely mobile game, like I never heard people complain about partner being addicted to Farmville.

But, somehow, those games get defended each time.

The problem here is not the addiction to the game itself, but rather to the fact that sometimes they become a gambling addiction issue, with all the issues it brings. It ends up being a money pit for some people, with the worst offenders spending thousands of dollars a month on pay-to-play mobile games.

Gambling addiction is also something that's normally hidden from the partner, and mobile games are great at allowing that, so there's also this difference. The partner won't see the issue until it's too late.

The thread was about addiction and anyway, calling these gambling is a stretch. You do know about partners gambling and people do complain about it. The partner and kids are typically the person who get the most of consequences.

But my other point was about hypocrisy. People here go at length hating on Farmville and talking about addiction, because Farmville is not cool in their social circles and is game they personally dont like.

You do not get the same outcry about games that are actually the most frequently mentioned by people who deal with gaming addiction issues. Those games are mentioned either positively or not at all. And if you would call the people who play those games feeble minded, you would not ended up upvoted.

They are considered psychologically akin to gambling, are being investigated in several countries under their relation with gambling, and at least one country (Belgium) has declared them to be gambling.

And plenty of others concluded that calling Farmville gambling is absurd stretch.

Besides, I found that Overwatch, FIFA 18, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive at considered "game of chance" in Belgium, because you place bet and win or loose.

Not clickers like Farmville. I did not found a single article that would implied so.

Because Farmville is irrelevant today ?

Same applies to drugs. Those game are micro-optimized to trick people into paying money for it. No one would ever say "The money I spent on farmville was well spent".

How do you know this? A Farmville player might have been proud of his/her farm? It might have given them hours of pleasure and joy. Why should you dictate what they should feel?

Hell people who buy games literally say “I have no regret buying this sooner” I say it myself all the time!

I paid for a builder on Clash of Clans, a similar game. I didn't regret it, it added quite a bit to the game.

People buy what they like. Just because you dislike Farmville doesn't give you the right to invalidate everyone else's enjoyment of the game.

Heroin is also a widely used and loved product.

That's not true. Most people hate Heroin. Some love it, of course.

It's hugely pernacious in our culture though, lots of songs and film reference it - obviously there's a lot of bad press but it is also hugely romanticised. A lot of the users thoroughly enjoy it, much like Farmville.

It's great until it's not - story of most addictions

How is heroin even remotely relevant to a Facebook game?

Both are engineered to be highly addictive and people spend a huge amount of money on them, to the point that people could say that it is widely used and loved, despite being a detriment to users and society as a whole.

I sympathize with your feeling, but it’s a little astonishing how easily “hacked” human brains are. I don’t think you have to be feeble minded or a child to spend hundreds of dollars a week on digital avatars.

Ye, but most people are not falling for it. A very low share get bitten for real.

"Up to 50% of revenue comes from 0.15% (15 in 10,000) of players"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play

With 'feeble minded' I meant weak versus addiction. Maybe not the 100% correct term.

The thing I don't like about online gambling is that it can be hidden by the addicts. I mean sure it is their money to do whatever with, but it might still be shady immoral practice to enable that, like casinos or Farmville.

https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ Obligatory

if you compare the share prices of fakebook and zynga, it is evident selling personal data is more lucrative than selling game tokens

I feel like had smartphones not come sooner Zynga could of reached a point where they would of outright bought out Facebook. Smartphones were just slowly becoming relevant during these years.

I almost want to call it the Eternal September Part 2 when Facebook took off like wildfire on the last year or so of MySpace being relevant.

Smartphones taking off specifically Android meant people could just play games on their phone and not have to wait to get home to a computer.

Maybe there are other less shady ways of earning a living than selling people's privacy or profiteering of their addiction?

Google and Facebook don't really sell personal data, and least not directly. They might buy some, and advertisers happily give them data, but I rarely hear about them actually selling it. They do let advertisers run ads that are targeted using this data, but that's not the same as "felling personal data." It's more like selling user attention.

You hate all game companies in the same way? Or just the ones that make games that are not exactly for you?

Come on you know what I mean ...

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