Hacker News Reader

Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

Because in real life the store clerk won't let a child spend $1000 on their parents card making purchases again and again and again and again and again, but a video game will let a child do it in less than an hour and consider that a success and try to understand how to stimulate another child to do so.

View on HN

With the rise of online storefronts and employees who just don't care I beg to differ.

Differ all you want. No child will bankrupt a family at a trading card game store. These are physical goods paid in bulk with provisioning and there are laws for returning them.

Another point of contention is the randomness of packs. The way you play is: You save up to buy the entire set of boosters and already get almost all cards you need for competitive or fun play. The rest you need to trade for or buy individually. It is much more of a social interaction than gambling. The value you get from saving up and trading is easily 10x what you get from opening boosters.

That's why you will never see a bunch of kids queued up in front of a counter frothing from the mouth saying "just... one more!"

Allowing trading is a big part of it. Most online games never allow trading the things bought with real money, they get tied to your account. I guess as a way to prevent CC fraud but it still contributes to the issue.

Just to be clear, the biggest problems are associated with games that allow trading.

Trading wouldn't work due to online game deflation. They have to set you up in order to retain you. When you open a new account, or are a "returning player" you get a bunch of free/easy to get stuff that took someone else a decade to collect.

It's a double-edged sword. For the seller, the ideal would be getting people just as addicted but not allowing trading, since that increases the average spend required to get a specific desired pull substantially.

>No child will bankrupt a family at a trading card game store.

Let the child use a separate debit card? Bank cards are personal and work as an authentication factor.

> Let the child use a separate debit card?

I remember that cartoon. Was it Richie Rich?

You can't return an opened pack of Pokémon cards and more than you can get your money back for a used lottery ticket. It's absolutely gambling. Low stakes gambling maybe, but it's still gambling.

If you want to allow Pokémon cards and not casinos you have to accept that your rule isn't just "kids can't gamble".

A kid can’t clean out the Pokemon vending machines just the same. I’m in favor of not letting kids gamble but wish it was applied across the board.

But that is still a strange argument, because IF the argument is that loot boxes are so dangerous and addictive, why can, say, a 19 years old do it but a 18 years old can not? That makes no logical sense. One year is a magical difference suddenly?

Because you have to draw a line somewhere, if you want a line.

This same reasoning applies to sex consent, voting, driving, working.

We want to say "only qualified people can do x" but it's impossible to encode this in regulations and it always boils down to the sorites paradox.

So as a culture we have defaulted to "age is a good a proxy for being qualified".

This is a bit of a silly argument, given all the precedent in real life for this sort of thing.

Can a 16 year old magically drive a car properly, but a 15 year old can't? Is an 18 year old magically much more capable doing their electoral civic duty than a 17 year old? Is a 21 year old magically able to consume alcohol responsibly, but a 20 year old isn't?

(Or whatever age cutoffs are appropriate for your jurisdiction.)

We define these cutoffs not because they are magical or apply equally to everyone, but because we have to draw the line somewhere, in cases where we aren't going to do a blanket all-ages ban. Sometimes the cutoff is chosen poorly, certainly, but that's a problem with the implementation, not the idea itself.

You implicitly assume that age is a proxy for ability, but that's not the reason for these laws. Age is a proxy for membership in a social class where discrimination is permitted. Otherwise we would prevent people from voting, which Americans did with Literacy/IQ tests and Blacks.

The actual reasons is that they hope to have captured the childs' reward system by then. Laura Cress must write articles for the BBC if she stopped she would lose her purpose in life and be forced into rehab, she would experience ego death and ostracization until she builds another system approved skill. Current society is heading off a demographic collapse due to this built up debt.

The real problem is that we have invented a society that is less rewarding than a slot machine, not that humans are somehow built wrong. A slot machine or hard drug can only effectively hack ones physiology, a social system can hack the whole stack at once (Physiology, Emotions, Ego, Social belonging). You can give bad actors the pains of withdrawal, peril, existential crisis and social suicide all in one. There are examples throughout very recent history of each layer being captured more perfectly. Even physiology more perfectly than any drug, think enclosure act, 14 hour workdays in industrial England.

Fine, ban lootboxes, but don't pretend it's to protect youths, it's to utilize "children". society is a massively harmful and evil tool, we must acknowledge that it's pure unadulterated evil that wouldn't blink at killing all youths. This is a fact, not an opinion, morals are just an API for humans that the system uses.

Not just that, but this assumes that the average 18 years old has the same mental capacity as the others more or less. Bell curves clearly show the opposite

Clearly they do and many people can safely do things that are illegal and many people should be prevented from doing things that are legal.

However, we can't set up a force of psychoanalysts to assess every member of society and run chmod on them, so we go with a compromise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com