This is also just online games. They can still play as much singleplayer games as they want. Considering how exploitative the online games that most people in asia play are I don't even mind this all that much. Still a bit of a dick move though. I'd prefer if they just made in game cash shops and loot boxes illegal. Or at least illegal for people under the age of 18.
This is also just online games. They can still play as much singleplayer games as they want.
Uncritical support then. When I think back to my teens, it's basically all single player games and occasionally that pirated Halo Trial that wasn't supposed to work but for some reason did
Xi is just embracing gamer tradition
In room multiplayer is peak gaming. Even the jankiest most frustrating game is fun as hell with other people.
Dk64 made for a terrible FPS but we played multiplayer guns only FPS mode while Golden eye was right there.
China will end up with a whole generation of Super Metroid speedrunners
Also they'll bring civ to the good old days where multi-player was passing the same save file back and forth over a message board.
I've been calling for restrictions on MMORPG style games for years, both because of the exploitation involved and I've personally lived with people who collected piss jars around their desk. There's just something very strange about those games that enraptures certain people. The most hours I've put into a game was 200 (enter the gungeon) so I think I'm missing the online game gene.
I don't know what would fix this, but certainly some kind of restriction on the gambling elements. Gacha games shouldn't exist. Maybe an encouragement in games for some kind of closure? Games where there's an ending and you don't have to play anymore. You did everything, so move on.
There’s just something very strange about those games that enraptures certain people.
It's an intentionally designed skinner box. That's it, it's a studied phenomenon and the people who get these games made know this and it's why they do this.
I don't think regulation is the correct course of action here. It's like drugs, millions of people take them with "no" problems, but keeping piss jars around the desk you play WoW at or whatever probably speaks to a deeper wrong than the game being intentionally addicting. Having been that sort of person (well, not the piss jars) it was mostly because the real world fucking sucked and was unrewarding at every opportunity and the video game wasn't and I could actually achieve things there and get a bit of dopamine.
That is to say, I was probably depressed as shit and used video games to cope. Could've been alcohol, figure that'd have been worse.
I don't know enough about society (they live in one) in china to have a strong opinion on this but I'm with you generally.
I was talking about the idea to regulate Online-Skinner-Boxes as a whole as put forth by this comment. I think it's an idea with it's heart in the right place, but just impossible to do.
Games where there’s an ending and you don’t have to play anymore. You did everything, so move on.
Because I get where this is coming from, but then you have outlawed Tetris.
Yeah, I don't know what would work then if not regulation. At least at a bar the bartender will cut you off when you've clearly had too much. Certain MMOs would do things like put in diminishing returns the more you play in a single day, like Kingdom of Loathing, or they'd structure things to take a large amount of offline time, like EVE.
Like most things this will probably have to be handled comprehensibly, because online game addicts probably have other issues. Normalizing regular mental health screenings for the whole population could be something to push for.
Yeah, I don’t know what would work then if not regulation
Better mental heatlh care. A less shit society.
Like I know that's kind of far fetched for most people but then strict regulation of skinner-box-esque video games is about as practical a law to do as prohibition of alcohol or marijuana because it's so insanely easy to circumvent. WoW has private servers, unless you get into full nationwide computer scans or whatever how are you gonna shut down people playing on a private WoW server that's hosted in another country?
Certain MMOs would do things like put in diminishing returns the more you play in a single day, like Kingdom of Loathing, or they’d structure things to take a large amount of offline time, like EVE.
Especially with Eve this hasn't really stopped anybody from being turbo-addicted to it, you know. They make alts. Now you can ban alts but then we're back to square one as to how the hell do you enforce this so it actually works instead of being a fig leaf so the gamers don't get mad at you.
Despite that, I'm not even convinced dimnishing returns aren't an integral part of the skinner box. They hook you with big good dopamine at the start and once you become addicted to that, it pewters out so you spent 3 hours to get the sum total of dopamine that 1 would've gotten you at the start. WoW does this and has done this forever, both on a macro-scale as each level up or better gear gets progressively harder to achieve and also on a micro-scale where you get XP bonuses after having not played it for a while. It's making you chase the dragon.
unless you get into full nationwide computer scans or whatever
I mean... Full nationwide surveillance of games isn't exactly beyond the capacity of the Chinese government.
I might actually beyonf their power for now. We are probably alreadybdoing it though
Or many others, no, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Sure, the anti-videogame dragnet is an idea fitting for our times, it's also hot fucking garbage.
I don't object to its use to enforce regulation on games. Games companies are exploitative as fuck.
You think you may have gone a bit too far on the bit of hating every gamer there?
Like yeah games companies are exploitative as fuck on every possible level, outward and inward but maybe the state sniffer on every computer in the country is a bit much?
You don't need to sniff computers, just packets. That makes creating a dark-shard high enough effort to disincentivize 90% of the practice.
And I don't hate gamers, I want children defended from digital drug-dealers.
Between this and forcing companies to give up their profits, I expect China to be a utopia within 3 years.
Yeah they should be cracking down on companies like blizzard who hire literal psychologists to make their games more addictive. That and also predatory monetization like gacha shit.
Wait till I tell you about the psychologists that work in literally every other consumer industry.
There's a whole corner of the advertising world dedicated to straight-up fooling consumers. They study things like how a taller, thinner package is perceived to have a greater volume than a shorter, wider package that in fact holds the same amount of product. They then use that knowledge to give you less stuff for your money without you knowing.
One of the easiest places to attack free market fundamentalism is on the baseline assumption that real-world markets operate with something approximating perfect information. Not only is it far from the case that all participants have perfect information, but you have huge companies dedicating effort to fool ordinary consumers who don't have the time or energy to sift through all this shit.
"consumers behave rationally"
"Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
:this-is-fine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0&t=3s - Bill Hicks Marketers
It's called industrial-organizational psychology. Essentially applied psychology for anything that isnt mental health or academic research.
hire literal psychologists to make their games more addictive.
I don't know if that's actually true of B-A or not, but in most cases, where I've seen psychologists hired in games it's either been in design, because they specialize in decision-making in high-complexity systems (so, 'what choices can I give a player at this juncture that they will recognize as choices in the amount of time they have, and what would mislead them about their options?'), because they specialize in group-behavior ('how do I make these online psychopaths behave themselves?' - this never works), or to run research labs (big studios do this, little ones don't) or to do BI work. I've never actually met a psychologist who did work on making games explicitly addictive.
it made the rounds in the news a few years back. it absolutely happens. They're involved in everything including making sure the animation that plays when you open a loot box is maximally pleasing to get you to keep playing / purchasing.
Wouldn't shock me if Activision had those folks. I can say, however, that at most companies, it's actually just an artist or UX person who is doing research on things like "how do I make this ceremony maximally impactful", not an actual psychologist, and the only people who actually see the overall system for what it is are at a production level. "I want opening a loot box to feel good" doesn't seem like the kind of exploitation it actually is from the ground level, because the individual implementer just sees it as a variation on, "This should look good!" Banality of evil, etc, etc.
There are games that have mechanisms like that which directly punish bad behavior with bad outcomes, but the problem is that the problem of online abuse is worst in team games and punishing one member of a team punishes the whole team. What's worse, it becomes a tool with which to troll your teammates, either by sicing it on them or provoking it on yourself.
Unless you're suggesting that game developers start engaging in warlockry, in which case, I am onboard. We haven't tried summoning a devil to solve this problem.
Online games always have been. The grind and constant updates in MMORPGs come to mind (gotta get those skills up so your clan can raid the new boss!)
They weren't as monetarily exploitive as modern games, but the time sink aspect was way, way worse.
I would just like to point out that being extremely online enough to post to hexbear is not really any better than being a gamer.
I took like 2 weeks off and realised how out there my opinions had become. Not that that's a bad thing, it was just a weird feeling.
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extremely active thread
why is this website
For all the shit this site throws at gamers you have to be a special kind of person to be online enough to get here and then not also be into video games in some form
Damn kids shouldnt be gaming during their free time, they should be hate surfing social media for bad takes and getting into Internet arguements instead.
This is why they gotta be restricted. :xi-reactionary-spotted:
Funny to watch the kids in genzedong whine about how going for their vidya is too far. Tankies (including me) should all have to be faced with giving up their toy addictions to test their revolutionary resolve.
Tankies (including me) should all have to be faced with giving up their toy addictions to test their revolutionary resolve.
Crank detected.
There are more important things than fun. Doing meth is fun for a time.
they don't seem 2 be that pissed i think yer just a h8r lol Did they ban u 4 being a lib or something?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/pegjka/gamers_seething/
There's a ton of seething in the comments.
Lots of "I support everything they do except this is going too far"
Hilarious how abstract politics are to teenagers. Threaten to take away their anime, vidya, or porn, and most of these kids would start goosestepping if the fascists offered their favorite products to consume back to them.
It’s funny to me how this is going too far but executing drug dealers is based.
Don't you know the fastest way to
heavencommunism lies in asceticism?Yeah Thomas Sankara giving up air conditioning was totally going overboard
fr tho lol I just wanna be able to go to work, get paid fairly, and then fuck around in my free time however I please.
how can I be a good communist if I can't play the game I get shit on everytime I play? :sicko-no:
Tbh if I didnt have my vidya I'd probably go straight to heroin, but I still support this law
Lot of y'all complaining need to read "anyone under 18 years old" about 50 more times. It's literally a rule for children and considering how they tend to behave in online games, this isn't a bad rule. If they want to become g*mer hermit reactionaries the second they become an adult, they're still allowed to. It makes no sense to me to argue that if a kid wants to play an online game in extreme quantities they should be able to.
Lot of y’all complaining need to read “anyone under 18 years old” about 50 more times.
No no no! It's not fair! Mom said I could play all night and Dad's working late. I DID all my homework. I'll finish cleaning my room tomorrow. I don't WANT to play with my stupid little brother because he DOESN'T FOLLOW THE RULES. Mr. Xi you are the WORST and I HATE YOU!
slapping a warning on the box is totally sufficient countermeasures for being groomed
Also children shouldn't be on those voice chats to begin with. My bfs younger brother gets called the n word everytime he goes on the lobbies
yeah, i don't disagree really. and there are definitely edge cases like minecraft that probably aren't the kind of thing they're looking to block access to but might anyway. but then, there's always couch co-op and single player games for the kids to play too, it's just online stuff that's being limited.
4 hours a week is extreme quantities? what does that make 40 hours a week fucking wageslaving?
The commies fail to consider the implications of this in THE ESPORTS SCENE
The speedrunning scene won't be affected, this is only for online games.
There were already restrictions of 1.5 hours per day, or 3 hours per day on holidays. So unless those affected streaming, these shouldn't either.
It’s not even all multiplayer games. It’s multiplayer games with an official Chinese release.
Anyone could just play another region’s version of the game.
As a former DOTA head, all I can imagine is how insufferable the "NA DOTA IS BACK BAYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" will be.
Critical support to Peruvian/Phillipino players in their protracted people's war to make NA G*mers seethe
here in USA we have the freedom to prostitute yourself on the street bowled over on heroim after you lost your job due to excess gaming (which is freedom)
I like video games but league of legends needs to be annihilated
When I first heard this headline I assumed it was a lie just because it sounds impossible to enforce
It's only online games, which means they can just shut down the servers except for the three hours they want.
But it only applies to minors so you can’t just shut it all down. Afaik they’re pushing the enforcement to the game companies themselves which means blizzard or whoever has to be the one tracking your age and using that to limit your play time which seems like it’s just gonna produce a lot of players that were all born on 1/1/2000 or whatever
Replying to myself because I found the answer elsewhere:
I just want to clarify to everyone who doesn't know: In order to play online games in China, you need to open a QQ account with your ID in it. For best of my knowledge (haven't been in China for a couple of years) everyone under 18 are limited for 8 hours of weekly game time anyway. The thing is, usually, kids just link their parents ID or random people's ID to their accounts and then they play as much as they want.
So kinda similar to the firewall. It’s not that hard to get around it, but it’s a mild difficulty that stops people who don’t care very much. That’s fantastic!
I personally think only 3 hours a week is a bit over the top, but for me gaming was the only thing worth doing when the 2-3 neighbors my age were busy. a noble effort nonetheless
