Yeah, i don't disagree with a thing ya wrote. I'm not claiming that people **shouldn't** care; just that it's better to push for regulatory change rather than trying to affect it thru collective consumer action or raising awareness.

That's still shuffling unrelated definitions of "value." You understand Achievements have no intrinsic worth. The fact you've been made to care about them anyway, is what I am talking about. You were *made* to care about collecting a thousand unicorn skulls, because the game dangled a cleverly-named merit badge for doing so. Dollar value: zilch. Totally arbitrary nonsense, could've been anything else. > at a certain point, manipulation constitutes an initiation of force against a user. Kinda weird to frame it with the non-aggression principle, but sure, yes, good. These systems exploit cognitive vulnerabilities to shortcut our decision-making and trick people out of real money. Generally for things that cost the seller nothing... like editing your own character on your own computer. Any game taking real money is inevitably a collection of these abusive antipatterns, for that kind of manufactured desire. Nitpicking individual cases is letting the trees obscure the forest - these are game studios. Finding novel ways to manipulate customers is their job. Only a sweeping solution could possibly work.

Yeah, they had a really good thing going on and it's sad that it didn't last.

> Dollar value: zilch For me, yeah, I agree. For someone else, maybe they do have value. Achievements are a particularly stupid example because you can automate getting them, but my point is that digital things can have value. Maybe they're sentimental (I did a hard thing and this proves it), or maybe they're resellable (rare item in a game, which can be traded). Something physical that you value could have no value to someone else. Value is subjective. > Kinda weird to frame it with the non-aggression principle As a libertarian, that's generally how I frame things, because if I can't justify it under the NAP, it's probably me forcing my values on others. > Finding novel ways to manipulate customers is their job True, but isn't that true of pretty much everything if we zoom out enough? Politicians want to manipulate voters to get (re)elected, restaurants want to manipulate patrons to return, etc. We all have a selfish interest in getting others to do what we want. There has to be a line at which point self-interest is "wrong" to the extent that we should use government to regulate it. I use the NAP to reason about that point, others use some other (often subjective) metric. This same line of reasoning could be used to ban porn games, games with self-harm, or games critical of a government. Banning things is generally not what governments should be doing, they should practice restraint and only step in when someone's rights are violated or at risk of being violated.

> True, but isn’t that true of pretty much everything if we zoom out enough? My guy, the key word in that sentence was "novel." edit: goddamn ctrl+enter shortcut. hang on.

It's not exactly a scam, though, is it. Are the game companies committing fraud?

When people criticise me or my actions, I have at least as much right to defend myself as you do to cast judgement and voice it in the first place. But the magnitude of the condemnation you expressed by your word choice is greatly at odds with what I have done. I bought a game because I thought its value would be worth the price for me. Having used it, I've found my early assessment was right. You clearly have different expectations for a game to be worth buying, and my purchase makes it less likely that companies will have to cater to you in the future. I understand your frustration, but I have not wronged you or anyone else.

Fixed the edit.

When people can pay ten times the cost of a whole-ass game, for one tiny thing in a game *they already bought,* and any one game pushes a thousand such absurd schemes - scam is the closest word I know. The money being taken is hilariously disconnected from any form of value or cost, even when it's not something literally free, like letting you modify your own character on your own computer. It was a bit much when The Sims and a couple expansions could run you a couple hundred dollars. When buying everything in one generic game totals the cost of a fucking house, that's a crime with more steps.

Yeah, fair point.

No Man's Sky is the other extreme, I actually feel kinda embarrassed that I get so much new content without paying for it. Like, other companies would make it into 20 DLCs already. And even the non-shitty companies would make at least 2 DLCs out of the content. I think they redeemed the shitty start many times over, they should really charge for some DLC.

Let's go with a simple approach: is anyone giving money for something where they don't fully understand what they are getting in return. That is, they don't know they are getting a decoration or unlocking a character or whatever?

Rejected.

So you agree it's not fraud?

Wrong. People are getting tricked into spending money on bullshit. As a multi-billion-dollar industry, often for things with literally zero cost. If you want to split hairs about why scam isn't *quite* the right word for that rampant abuse, propose an alternative or stop bickering about it. I'm not interested in prescriptivist semantics on this recently-invented intolerable greed. If you have any serious defense of this abuse besides fixating on *word choice* then I've yet to hear it.

I'm not fixated on the word choice. You just changed it to trick but haven't in any way proven that game companies are "tricking" or "defrauding" anyone. You're just making an empty claim. Explain how spending money on a character skin is a trick. Or buying DLC isn't getting you what you paid for. As far as I can tell you haven't even established that anything they are doing is even "dishonest" which I think is a much much lower bar. You literally have not a god damned thing to back up your pov.

*You* changed it, from scam to fraud. Synonyms are words that mean nearly the same thing. I'm not gonna jump through whatever hoops exist in your brain, to avoid describing *how this is bad.* A scam is a thing where you trick people for money. Fraud is a thing where you trick people for money. That's what those words mean. Nothing could possibly excuse all the content in a mundane video game costing ten thousand times more than any other mundane video game. If people are doing that anyway - they were tricked. Quod erat demonstrandum. Nobody's ever *forcec* to get scammed. That's what the trick is. Victims freely choose to throw away their money, for some bullshit. That alternative is a mugging. If the value of paying for all the shit in the game is obviously nonsense, then the value of paying for any shit in the game is obviously nonsense.

First, to set the record straight: look up the definition of scam If the definition of scam is defrauding someone, I changed nothing about your word choice.

So your proof someone was tricked/scammed/defrauded is that they spent more money on something than you would? They key point you seem intent on avoiding is that you have not shown a single example of someone *actually* being tricked/scammed/defrauded. Someone buying a thing that is arbitrarily priced well outside of it's practical value or actual cost is not a scam, it's literally the definition of a luxury good. Is every person who buys a diamond getting scammed, in your mind? What about those $1000 shoes people buy as an "investment"? Were they scammed in your imagination?

This libertarian attitude only works for rational decisions. That's essentially impossible, in the context of a game, because games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That's what makes them games. All games trick people - into caring about points, or drops, or goals, or anything else that's *not real.* There's no ethical version of attaching a dollar value to that made-up desire. Nothing makes this abusive manipulation more obvious than when people pay the price of a house and receive a floppy disk's worth of static props. We're not bickering over whether games should cost $70. Nobody thinks games should cost $10,000. So obviously no *part* of a game should cost that much! If it's even possible to dump that much money into one game, and still only have a portion of its content, something's gone terribly wrong. Snipping over how we describing that problem is aggressively missing the point. And that problem is half the industry. That problem is a multi-billion-dollar effort by an army of game developers, whose talents are being misdirected to convince people to open their wallets and look the other way. It's inexcusable, which is why you've made no effort, besides tacitly blaming their victims. Veblen goods can't exist in a *single-player game.* There's nobody to peacock for. A housewife who spent a month's salary on gems in some mobile puzzle trash was plainly not purchasing luxury anything. Nor is anyone wowed by the ostentatious signalling of a virtual rasta hat for which you paid ten actual dollars.