Comment by gitrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gitrog | Hacker News Reader

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I'll skip right over the conversation about how the world is run. I read some of the article you sent (it's quite long), and let's just say that so far I'm not convinced.

> I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I re-read the rest of your responses to this thread, seems like your only issue is with how appropriate a joke is in technical documentation.

I am interested, given your world view, to know why you think a tutorial on encrypting saved game states isn't also inappropriate? In fact, isn't the technical documentation inappropriate in its entirety? Why should I be told how to use the game engine? Just because these "elitist" developers built the engine, doesn't mean they can tell me how I should use it?

>If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I'm a game developer. I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them. If you're a game developer and you believe that using psychological techniques to make people play games is wrong then you should probably not be making games, otherwise you're consistently engaging in immoral behavior yourself.

The singling out of mobile games is just a reflection of the bias that game developers have to think some kinds of games are morally wrong because it offends their sensibilities.

> I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them.

Neither do I, maybe you read my reply incorrectly. I said, feel free to extrapolate the criticism to all game devs who explicitly try to make the games addictive and hook people with micro-transactions. So your whole line of reasoning there kind of falls flat.

There's no criticism. Making a game addictive is making a game addictive. If you're doing it with micro-transactions or with RNG-gating it's the same thing.

You can't conflate games that try to create a fun experience, and engage people through feelings of discovery, fun, achievement, and games that use manipulative techniques to create frustration and exploit psychological feedback loops to extract a steady stream of money from people. Its just not the same thing at all. Like comparing a novel to a lottery ticket. Both are written on paper but the comparison stops here.

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