It’s Literally Just Mowing (And Microtransactions, Ads, And Loot Boxes)

15 responses to “It’s Literally Just Mowing (And Microtransactions, Ads, And Loot Boxes)”

1. 

   markavian

   March 6, 2020 at 8:38 am

   Seems to be a typical way most tablet/mobile games are made, forcing you to view the same add over and over again, right in the middle of your enjoying the game in general.

   Reply
   1. 

      crotchdot

      March 6, 2020 at 9:15 am

      And certain websites…

      Reply
   2. 

      mad_danny

      March 6, 2020 at 9:33 am

      What I find really annoying is also how so many of them offer the neat, simple gameplay loops of oldschool freeware, but removing ads costs more than a lot of solid indie or older AA titles, and then they still try to to get you buying more gems after that!

      Here’s to the rare mobile games offering a compelling experience and a <$5 ad removal, where premium currencies are actually designed to be non-essential.

      Reply
2. 

   jiggle_counter

   March 6, 2020 at 9:42 am

   Genius, this is gonna make heaps of money, and no I’m not being sarcastic, there’s gonna be someone somewhere, probably a video content creator, who will throw six or more digits at this game for the sake of being random (and flexing how rich and great with money they are)

   Reply
   1. 

      geth

      March 6, 2020 at 10:09 am

      “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

      Reply
      1. 

         angorafish

         March 6, 2020 at 12:07 pm

         Sure, let’s blame the victims. They were pretty much asking for it anyway.

         Reply
         1. 

            geth

            March 7, 2020 at 3:38 pm

            Victims? How? No one else is responsible for you spending unreasonable amounts of money on micro transactions. We all know that developers prey on whales but it is always, and always has been, the user’s decision to spend their money how they choose.

            Reply
            1. 

               angorafish

               March 7, 2020 at 6:39 pm

               These game monetisation systems are intentionally designed to exploit a wide range of complex and interacting psychological biases. Human beings are not some fantasy of infinite choice and responsibility acting in a world of perfect information, they are biological machines with a range of programmed responses that evolved over millions of years. These cognitive biases have been widely understood by psychologists for many years, however most people are not psychologists.

               Exploiting unconscious human biases is the core business model for the vast majority of these companies, while the vast majority of the population are not conscious of how the manipulation programmed into a game’s systems is unconsciously influencing their decisions.

               There is a lot of excellent information on the topic out there you want to do some googling.

            2. 

               geth

               March 8, 2020 at 3:23 pm

               From what you said, give the right stimuli, certain people can be taken advantage of to do certain things against generally better judgement. To make foolish decisions. You can argue all you want that these people don’t have agency over their actions because someone else is influencing them, but no amount of pretty colours, sound, and induced FOMO is stopping them from stopping and thinking about what they’re going to do before they do it and what the repercussions will be, in this case spending thousands on a game’s micro transactions. Whether they consider their actions and still drop that huge amount of money or spend it because they never stopped to think for themselves, they are still a fool and have been taken for a ride that they could have gotten off of at any time, hence, victim or not, the quote stands firm:

               “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

               No one looks at the a problem gambler who gambles all their money away and thinks, “poor baby. It’s not you’re fault that you spent thousands and kept losing but still kept spending, trying to get it all back.” People see exactly what they’re looking at: a weak-willed person who should’ve stopped when they realised that they were only losing more and more, should have known that the system they were playing is in place to take their money, and should not have even entered gambling establishment in the first place because of their problem. Doing it anyway is allowing themselves to be taken advantage of (by something that the rest of us can see as a threat in that situation) and thus is a foolish decision. Saying they couldn’t help themselves is just an excuse for their lack of cognitive thought.

            3. 

               angorafish

               March 8, 2020 at 5:51 pm

               You’re wrong on pretty much every level. Gambling addiction is a widely and professionally recognised psychological condition, and the maxim “a fool and his money are soon parted” is generally not quoted as a socially acceptable model for doing business.

               You might personally have no problem with manipulating the shit out of people to scam them out of their money, but despite your voluminous assertions to the contrary this is not a widely shared opinion. Self evidentially, as we can see in the above article alone, it’s not an opinion shared by a lot of politicians either.

               The world in which your mind lives seems a particularly anarchic dog eat dog, survival or the fittest one which would justify pretty much any behaviour ones cares to imagine. Personally, however, I am happy that the society in which I live sees the value of protecting the vulnerable.

            4. 

               geth

               March 8, 2020 at 6:30 pm

               I see we’re not going to agree on this, which is perfectly fine. While we’re talking about where each other lives, allow me to make the observation that you seem to reside in a place where everyone should be protected, even from themselves. That is the type of society that ends up looking to others, often authority figures, to tell them what to do and think, and as history has shown time and again, that type of society often leads to forceful removal of those who wish to begin thinking for themselves. I’m glad we live in a world that does not do that but allows the individual make their own decisions and mistake and then, hopefully, learn from them, even if it is a bit dog-eat-dog. For the record, though, I prefer the survival of all through education and self improvement. If a person makes a dumb decision, yes, I feel sorry for them having to suffer the results of that decision but I’m not going to absolve them of being responsible for making it. I sincerely hope that they would learn from it and wish that they had stopped and seen what was coming instead having to face the consequences for the dumb decision. I prefer to hold people responsible for their actions rather than make excuses for them.

            5. 

               angorafish

               March 8, 2020 at 8:19 pm

               @geth I appreciate you keeping this civil.

               I don’t strictly disagree with you about personal responsibility.

               What I think you haven’t acknowledged in any of your arguments, however, is any responsibility held by the other side. Specifically, the extremely well resourced corporations with thousands of staff and years of research and experience dedicated to exploiting human vulnerability.

               This is not a level playing field. Individual consumers start at a distinct disadvantage against well resourced corporations, and this is why we have laws and regulations to protect individuals from exploitation.

               If two blokes decide to bet on a coin flip I don’t have too much sympathy for the bloke who ends up losing.

               If, on the other hand, one of those two guys supplies the coin and knows in advance that the coin has a bias towards heads, landing on heads 70% of the time, while the other is going in on the bet based on a reasonable assumption that the odds are close to 50/50, that’s a scam.

               Furthermore, if that guy takes that coin and stands outside of Centerlink offering desperate people the opportunity to bet, that’s exploitation.

               Let’s say, further, that the bloke sticks in the hand of everyone coming out of Centerlink a completely ‘free’ locked box whether they ask for one or not. He then goes on to say that they can keep the useless box and go home, or they can pay him $10 to open it immediately. He explains that some boxes contain an IOU for $100 and others contain an IOU for 5c, both of which he will pay immediately straight out of his wallet upon opening.

               At the risk of vastly over simplifying the many far more manipulative additional systems around ‘surprise mechanics’ online, such as disconnecting one’s perception of spending actual real world cash behind multiple layers of ‘gems’ and other in game currency, this is exactly what is happening with loot boxes.

               It’s not unreasonable for politicians, and society, to take some responsibility for re-balancing the unfair playing field between large corporations and individual consumers to something a little closer to fair.

            6. 

               pylgrim

               March 9, 2020 at 1:34 am

               @geth

               Sorry for jumping in on this conversation but I wanted to point out that what you are missing is that there are different kinds of people. Let’s say that indeed there are the intently self-sabotaging, the chronically stupid who refuse to learn from their mistakes even as they experience the consequences once and again. I could understand your lack of sympathy for such people, even if I don’t exactly share it.

               However, you don’t think about the people who fall for this stuff and who could be argued bear little or no blame. Those who are psychologically vulnerable, either as a part of their wiring or as a result of a temporary upheaval. Those who literally never learned better and a lack of education and insight disallow them for realizing that they are being played and that the game is rigged against them. Those who are desperate for one or another reason and with a clouded judgment make mistakes while holding hopes engineered by the game makers to pray on their desire to believe. Those who are naturally innocent and naive and simply cannot imagine the makes of a game with such cute illustrations to be up to something nefarious, so it must be just bad luck or something. Etc.

               There are many ways and reasons why somebody can fall for this stuff without being fully aware, their agency wrestled out from them with psychological traps and tricks. They may or may not end wising up but until then they were fleeced. You may argue that that’s the price of learning, but it’s not as though they signed up for it.

               So while you think about the most despicable and deserving victim of these scams, spare a thought for those who are not deserving of being taken advantage of. Your satisfaction at seeing the former get the comeuppance of their bad decisions needs to be tempered with the compassion for the people whose beliefs or circumstances were intently manipulated to engineer those bad decisions. Then you need to ask yourself, what is preferable? That the innocent suffer so the idiots get what they deserve, or that the idiots are saved from their bad decisions in order to protect the innocent?

            7. 

               geth

               March 9, 2020 at 5:44 am

               @ pylgrim
               I don’t recall taking any satisfaction from any aspect at any point in this conversation. Rather, I previously stated that I pity those people when they suffer the consequences. Please don’t try to make me sound one who takes glee in the suffering of others. I’m not your Saturday morning cartoon villain.

               Both of you raise valid points- yes, there are those who genuinely cannot help it and/or will be pulled into being taken advantage of by swindling companies out to grab a quick buck. However, those are the outliers. The majority of people don’t have any good reason not to stop and see what’s going on.

               My post was in reply to:
               there’s gonna be someone somewhere, probably a video content creator, who will throw six or more digits at this game for the sake of being random (and flexing how rich and great with money they are)
               which describes a person deliberately spending money on something likely so frivolous purely for being “random” or showing off how much cash they have. That was the type of person whom I was referring to, which should have been obvious, as it was a reply to a statement explicitly specifying that type of person and no others. However, for whatever reason, my meaning has been assumed to refer to all people instead of the very specific subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup that I was referring to in the post that I was replying to. So let me clarify, as it seems that, unless all bases are covered, someone is going to assume you are a thoughtless and generally bad person: in the situation where the person in question is clinically diagnosed to be of sound mind and body by at least three medical, psychological, and religious professionals and is not suffering from any other unaccounted-for ailments aside from simple naivety and/or lack of forethought, “a fool and his money are soon parted.”

               When most people hear that specific quote, do you think they immediately try to think of specific people whom it doesn’t apply to, or do they mentally acknowledge that, typically, it has some merit to it. If it didn’t, it probably wouldn’t still be widely known several centuries later.

               Now that I’ve clarified exactly whom I was referring to and that the quote that I cited refers to people in general as opposed to those with extenuating circumstances:

               Cobra Commander for World President in 2020!

3. 

   germinalconsequence

   March 6, 2020 at 11:31 am

   No thanks. I’ll take the original Lawn Mower any day.

   Reply