Over the last few months, Hawaii has been making headlines due to Rep. Chris Lee’s push to regulate the use of loot boxes in video games. Now, there is some legislation going up for a vote. Now is your chance to push back against a trend that is harming gamers and ruining gaming.

The bill linked below proposes that sales of games with variable reward purchases will be clearly marked and restricted to consumers 21 and over.

If you have your mind made up already, you can submit your testimony. It can be as easy as a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If you haven’t decided, let me try to convince you to testify.

Photo by Carl Raw on Unsplash

Gaming has changed. A lot. It used to be that the game you bought is the game you got. These days, nearly all games are riddled with micro-transactions and, increasingly, those micro-transactions are taking the form of loot boxes. And that’s bad for everyone. Here’s why:

Loot boxes take advantage of variable reward conditioning, which is known by psychologists to be the quickest way to induce addiction. That victorious feel you get when you get an epic drop? That feeling is what keeps you grinding — and buying — through the boring drops in between.

This is bad (and annoying) enough when you’re a regular gamer, but things get really ugly when you’re a whale. What’s that? It’s what casinos and video games call people who spend way more money than the average consumer… way more.

Too often, the reason people spend that much isn’t because they’re getting that much value out of the experience. There is such a thing as pathological gambling, and slots are known to cause it most quickly. Likewise, the DSM is calling for investigation into problematic gaming behavior, which I suspect people will eventually find isn’t entirely unrelated.

Point blank, this kind of psychological hacking to relieve us of our money is abusive and unethical, and the video game industry has shown no signs of resisting the siren song of immense profits obtained from vulnerable people.

But this doesn’t just affect whales, it’s making all of gaming worse. Not only are major publishers starting to ship games that are increasingly designed to pressure you into micro-transactions (even at the cost of gameplay, *cough cough Battlefront*), large publishers are just making less games in general.

No, it’s not your imagination, there are less AAA games. In 2010, there were about 60 major releases per year. In 2017, that number has dwindled to around 5–10. And yet, revenue has remained high. How? You guessed it.

If you need proof of all this, YouTuber Tarmack has done a really great job of diving into these companies’ public balance sheets to illustrate the point.

Now, I’m for letting people make their own decisions and I’m not particularly big on government regulation, but at the same time, the people who have expertise in addictive technologies and who have access to our living rooms and pockets are shirking their responsibility to us, and actively designing experiences that compel us to but. No seriously, here is the CEO of EA on an investor call explaining how they identify opportunities to manipulate vulnerable gamers into making purchases.

Now, I can’t think of people many people more vulnerable to this than kids — and I can’t help but think of all the stories of kids running up micro-transaction bills in the hundreds of dollars…or in the case of Jack Black’s kid, in the thousands! Casinos are already regulated to be 21+, so it seems like this should be a pretty common-sense measure in the face of this unethical behavior, and hopefully it’ll help keep this stuff from being normalized for younger consumers. We can’t let publishers “hook ’em while they’re young.”

I’m late posting it, so you only have about 20 minutes, Hawaii. If I’ve convinced you, please submit your testimony.

This is the first of a few efforts by Chris Lee. If you want to participate in helping make gaming about gamers again, please sign up for this mailing list so we can send you more information about upcoming bills. (Yes, it’s a redirect to a Google Form, that’s supposed to happen) Hope you’ll join us.