Snot Flickerman

But the Lord came down to see the city OS and the tower app the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking programming the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city OS. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

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I understand I didn’t make it clear in this comment and I apologize for that, elsewhere in the thread I made clear that I don’t want games like WoW/Diablo/Borderlands/Balatro to get banned, but I do think it’s important to recognize how their systems work and can impact people with addiction/gambling issues. I think we haven’t ever actually had a conversation about that aspect of these games, and I think it may be an important one to have, even if it only deeply affects a small sliver of society. Out of 9 billion people, a sliver is still often millions.

Also, and I do apologize, (especially if it was just a typo) but it is actually “wide berth” not “wide birth.” Otherwise, I agree with your point. However, I really did have friends who struggled with WoW in functionally the same way I have had other friends struggle with drugs and alcohol. They were in the minority, but they existed. I think it’s important to find ways to help those people deal with those issues without impacting the large number of people whom it does not. As I said elsewhere, I personally don’t have good ideas how to achieve that, I just know the conversation should happen. I would hope more clever and thoughtful people than I could have good ideas.

Ah yes, the ESRB, the group built to avoid actual regulation.

I mean, I get it, to an extent, the MPAA was and is absolute dogshit and filled with weird right-wing Christians who don’t like things that show women’s sexual pleasure and a lot of other weird censorial decisions.

Like how Hillary Clinton wanted to ban GTA because of the Hot Coffee mod, when the actual “Hot Coffee” minigame wasn’t available in an easily accessible way.

So, to that extent, I can understand why they built that system to avoid idiot fucking puritans taking over the ratings sytem, but I generally agree, it’s become more of a taboo thing just like the “PARENTAL WARNING EXPLICIT LYRICS” just made people want that version more. (That really worked out, huh, Tipper Gore?)

Without actual enforcement, it becomes something cool for kids to get.

I’m not the one who made the original post so I’m not asking for a solution for this.

I’m pointing out how hard it is to lay down a line in the sand and say “this one is bad and this one is good” because sadly, but very arguably, the core game mechanics are addictive themselves.

I remember the couple in China South Korea whose baby died because they were playing too much WoW.

It’s been 20 years I got the country wrong: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2005/06/547/

Some people just cannot control themselves when it comes to a skinner box.

I don’t know what the solution is because I’d rather not see Diablo/WoW/Borderlands/Balatro get banned.

I just think it is important to discuss the reality of their skinner box operational procedures.

…and because literally every mechanic in the game is random. The whole game is a skinner box. I say this as a fan of Balatro.

To quote myself from elsewhere in the thread: The blinds are random, the jokers are random, the store is random, the planets are random, the tarot cards are random, it’s all random.

That’s literally what gives Balatro an addictively replayable quality.

True, and I say this as a fan of Balatro…

…but the core of Balatro is literally in its random presentation. The blinds are random, the jokers are random, the store is random, the planets are random, the tarot cards are random, it’s all random. World of Warcraft didn’t need you to pay money to get epic loot either, but I still had friends ruin their lives over chasing epic loot in WoW. I haven’t had any friends ruin their lives over Balatro yet, but I also don’t think it’s impossible for that to happen. Obviously Balatro isn’t “gambling” in the sense of taking a risk with actual real money, but otherwise it still fits the definition of a skinner box.

Because at their core, when a massive amount of the gameplay revolves around random chance, it’s very easy to get addicted to it.

Thanks for calling them out for being Skinner Boxes (also known as an Operant Conditioning Chamber). When my friends were having addiction issues with WoW 20 years ago, I called it out as being addictive because it was a glorified skinner box. Nothing has changed, it’s just become more exploitative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

For anyone unfamiliar, it’s a science experiment. There’s two rats in two boxes. One rat has a lever that, when pressed, drops food to the rat. The rat only presses the lever when it is hungry. In the other box, the rat has a lever that randomly outputs food, but never consistently. A lot of the time, it produces nothing. The rat in that box spends all day long pressing the lever. Since it has no idea when the food will come, it panics and never stops trying to get more food, unsure if it will starve if it does not.

This is Diablo/World of Warcraft and the “Epic Loot” problem. People are clicking on the games endlessly looking for that top tier loot drop. It’s the same thing, because the results are inconsistent, people get addicted to the grind of trying to find the “best” item.

Also, thanks for pointing out that it doesn’t matter what game it is it’s still not okay. It wasn’t okay when it was WoW, it’s not okay when it’s Genshin Impact.

It’s time for developers and legislators to take responsibility and start protecting the players, especially the younger ones, from these predatory practices.

They’re making fucking bank with these practices. It will have to be stopped by government regulation. Self-regulation of industries has literally never fucking worked once in history. Look at Boeing, which has had the FAA basically glad-handing it for 50 years and it’s falling apart at the seams (sometimes literally).

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

-Upton Sinclair

Altneratively: You’re spending that $12 to register a well known corporate site that just changed domains and their old domain is up for sale.

You buy the old domain, throw up a site that looks like the old site, and now you have hundreds of thousands of people using your site as though it was the real one and any information they put in the site is yours.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/11/watchtowr_black_hat_whois/

I guess Open Source doesn’t exist?

Personal opinion: This is actually excellent because we could actually use developers who have worked these jobs and thus are familiar with how they work, and then they can develop actually useful code for small businesses.

For example: restaurants often have the ability to order online, but they have zero rate limiting, so you can end up with 30 different orders made within 30 seconds of each other and all those people will expect their orders ready at the same time and in the meantime you’ve got exactly three cooks and each meal takes at least five to seven minutes to get out. Someone could design a rate limiter, no one has. Because there aren’t developers working those jobs realizing that workers are being worked to the bone because of businesses refusing to add limits to how much demand can come through their door.

Now do MicroSD

Game Preservationists When a Game Sucks:

“Good I’m glad it’s gone.”

but to minimise the cost

What about the cost to the environment? That cost is just a negative externality to them and you, apparently. Yet I’m the one accused of thinking “conservatively.”

Burning ten times as many fossil fuels to “minimise the costs” is literally fucking stupid and short-sighted.

This comes up again and again:

AI only does a half-ass job, so you need a real human stepping in to “fix it in post.”

We’re seeing corporations throwing money hand over fist at AI because corporations want it to replace workers.

We’re burning an extra planets worth of energy for something that still needs human intervention to be usable.

Maybe, just maybe, we could just pay humans a living fucking wage to do the same work to begin with instead of constantly trying to find more and more ways to just not pay people at all.

Like, shocker, if you have a fully staffed customer service department, you actually will solve problems for people faster than an AI staffed customer service department.

The corpos don’t care, they’re not actually interested in solving our problems. They’ll burn the planet to the ground in effort to avoid paying us a living wage.

They have fallen victim to the hyper-reality of the Spectacle.