Chebucto Regional Softball Club

The entire business model is a scam. All counterarguments have been bickering about word choice when tricking people out of their money, or glibly endorsing tricking people out of their money.

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.

This blatant psychological manipulation will only be replaced with covert psychological manipulation. The entire business model exists to funnel you toward throwing unlimited money at them for essentially nothing. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Only legislation will fix this.

*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.

It works better now than Discord will later.

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.

It sounds like they already had a safe harbor even if they *didn't* jump when a company said so.

Rejected.

Those scare quotes on "my kids" are by far the most alarming part of that sentence.

[sad barhah]

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.

Fixed the edit.

> 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.

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.

'Playing games is healthy' will not counter the fact that points aren't real. Games make you... care about... arbitrary worthless crap. No general defense of the benefits of play will make the made-up goals... real. It's a game. > It’s about power imbalance. Oh, so you're actually fine with legal consequences for manipulative antipatterns; you're just struggling to maintain a prior conclusion as the slow realization undermines any consistent rationale. Good. Keep thinking about it. Hey, you know which other mobile-trash gimmicks inflate the price of frivolous nonsense with zero marginal cost? All of them.

Variations on a scam.

> I’m not talking about how they got addicted, but what they choose to manage that addiction. Because addressing systemic problems would require you to examine your trivial worldview. Why would all these people choose an expensive problem that slowly kills them? Oh well, must be their own choice. The morons. And you *are* calling them morons, by consistently saying it's a stupid decision. Why would rational people make irrational choices, by the millions? Shut up is why. Shut up and never ask questions, because only individual choices matter, and large scale individual choices can't have systemic implications. > There’s no objective measure of value for something like this. You're defending cancer sticks.

Calling victims stupid *is blaming victims.* Cigarette smokers aren't morons - they were given a chemical dependency by forces that didn't *lie,* exactly, but nonetheless fucking obviously tricked them into a chemical dependency. If your standard is "misrepresentation" then every smoker ever was duped by misrepresenting smoking as safe or cool or sexy or whateverthefuck lever got them to fork over their money to huff carcinogens. Every game that charges money inside the game is misrepresenting the value of whatever bullshit it's selling. Games make you value arbitrary bullshit! That's what makes them *games!* The entire fucking point is made-up rules for arbitrary rewards! Attaching a dollar value to that is inherently abusive. There is no ethical version of that exploitation of human shortcomings. > I don’t want to live in a nanny state where the government decides what’s good for me. Will this sandwich kill you? Who knows! Cherish the mystery. It's your god-given right to guzzle unpasteurized milk. Drink up, and good fucking luck.

A scam is when you pay money for bullshit. If someone convinces you to want bullshit, it's still bullshit. You recognize a threat to children and their parents... and your entire response is limited to people you know, personally. Systemic problems *are not about you.* It's still a threat, to millions of people. It's half the god-damned industry. You *know* it's your place to say "this is bullshit," because you're telling other parents how to raise their damn wiener kids, and you're warning your own kids that it's bullshit! But god forbid we use any sort of collective action to stop greedy assholes from monetizing innate human shortcomings. People *know* it's bullshit, but do it anyway, therefore... it's not bullshit. They're not victims, somehow. They're not addicted to oh my fucking god you used cigarettes as a positive example what is wrong with your entire worldview. Every interaction with you is like a fascinating glimpse of an alternate universe where harm is made-up. How dare we try to prevent it!

This is just 'it makes money so it can't be wrong.' People *chose* to get scammed, ergo, not a scam. Zero concern for how they were manipulated into it. In fact, you've explicitly told me, any manipulation is 100% fine, unless it's overt lying. Hooray for the unlimited right to coax money from rubes! *You* don't have to care, because you're immune to propaganda. Surely that abusive source of easy cash won't affect the options available to you! It's only half the goddamn industry, so far! So long as *a* game exists, where you can just own it and not be hassled to keep tipping the robot, it's fine. It's fine! Who gives one solitary shit about this hundred-billion-dollar behemoth convincing your kids that addiction and frustration are what video games are for?