Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are super focused on adding new users and creating an addiction on a massive scale never seen before. Of course it's bad for kids.
Social media, smartphones, and tablets, are the new smoking.
I've been saying this for a while, particularly with respect to how our kids and grandkids will view these devices, systems, and patterns of behaviours— "Oh, there's grandpa, needing to leave the restaurant for a few minutes to get his social media fix because they've banned screens in here for privacy/ambiance/preference reasons."
Really? I can totally picture it. There are already upscale cinemas that ban phones, for grownups who don't want to look at the movie over a sea of glowing screens, and are willing to pay a premium price and surrender the use of their own device for the privilege.
Same goes with restaurants, especially fancy ones, where diners are sick of having everyone around them snapping pics of their food for instagram.
Or standup comedians requiring people to lock their phones in neoprene bags before a show. I was at a Dave Chapelle show last year where he did this, and his surprise guest after the show was Kendrick Lamar. It was actually jarring to be at a concert for the first time in a decade where there were no phones up, and people just focused on the performance.
On a recent tour, Jack White was banning cell phones at the concert - you had to check them at the door. Everyone I know who went to that show raved about the experience, to not feel the need to check in, to not see phones lifted above the audience film things, to just focus on the music.
As adults however, we are old enough to decide for our self if we want to commit to bad habits. Kids are not attributed that judgment. There is a difference between restricting the diet of a child and restricting the diet of an adult.
Wikipedia is informative, at the very least. It's the same reason why you don't see an outcry about people spending time at the library.
Youtube can be informative as well, although the majority of it is not. I consider YouTube to be as much of a problem as FB/Instagram, with the caveat that it can, by design, have useful content (which the other two cannot).
> There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not.
I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. Plus, the reason I ended up wanting to learn more about computers was to make games myself.
Civilization in particular is phenomenal. The Civilopedia was a treasure trove of details about different real-life historical concepts. And the "Women's Suffrage" video in Civilization 2 made quite an impact on me as a kid.
Having said that, I do think there's a big, big difference between playing games of that sort and... Candy Crush.
I've learned quite a bit about foreign cultures from Civilization which has prompted me to do my own reading/research to further my knowledge. There are also educational aspects to games like Factorio which can teach good logical problem solving and applied math skills.
My mother tolerated my and my sibling's videogame obsession throughout our youth, but she still largely felt we were wasting our time. I don't think she ever really understood the appeal.
Now she's older and retired, and whenever I visit to see what she's doing with her leisure time, she spends most of it on her laptop playing a fish aquarium game or Farmville on Facebook.
That's a fascinating turn-around though— I wonder if she considers what she's doing gaming? Basically, there are a lot of extremely high quality single-player narrative games out there, many of which provide a story/explore difficulty level where it's almost impossible to die. Would she still be prejudiced against those, or now that she understands the appeal in broad terms, would she consider upgrading to games that aren't a complete wasteland of F2P nonsense?
FWIW, many public libraries have a small collection of Xbone/PS4 games, so if you got the base hardware, there'd be an opportunity to sample a bunch of things quickly to try different styles and genres.
I don't think she's really interested in what I or my brothers considered "games". The high-intensity/fast-reflex or long-investment kind of games we would play probably did not appeal to her. She seems to have gravitated towards the casual-gaming stuff, where the end-goal of the game is meandering and there's a great deal of instant gratification ("Congrats! You clicked a button! Have a trophy!")
With that said, I regret in hindsight that I didn't force her to try Animal Crossing back when it came to the Gamecube 15 years ago. It was very much a prototype of the casual gaming trend that's popular now. We might've found some common ground back then before our ages caused role-reversal.
A lot of modern open-world games incorporate the meandering/gratification loop you're talking about though.
I can't find it now, but there was a heartwarming story on reddit a few months ago about a dad dying of cancer and playing BOTW on a switch in his hospital bed, and bonding with his adult son over it— he never even made it off the Plateau (the initial tutorial section of the game), but was having a ball running around collecting plants, making potions, getting gear, whatever.
Even if the violence level of Assassins Creed or God of War isn't your cup of tea, something like Detroit Become Human or Horizon Zero Dawn could be a good fit.
I don't think farmvile translated to interest in narrative game. There is no reason for it to. Whatever appeal of farmvill to her is, it very likely not be found in completely different narrative game.
It is sort of like assuming that someone who likes guitar rock songs would like metal, because both are music.
RTS games in particular were extremely fun for me, and I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking.
I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me cringe. They look designed to be addictive - not in the way that playing C&C was addictive, but that they're designed to form real addictive behaviors.
So I don't know what I'll do. It's a hard problem. Banning all screens doesn't seem like the answer. I don't know what is.
Games evolved from products that are sold once to a service that continuously extracts value from the customer. It's only natural that they try to be as addictive as possible when additional playing time means additional revenue.
They used to be that before they were sold as one-offs, too. Arcade machines demanding more quarters for extra lives is a meme I grew up with, and my childhood currency didn’t even have a coin called “a quarter”.
Yeah, because games are really expensive to make. Fucking up a single time has been known to take out entire publishers. The issue is that many games simply can't break even at $60 a copy and so they have to look to other methods.
This is the reality. I lost days playing Red Alert. Video games used to be fun. The used to be challenging. Even Super Mario Bros 3 was a challenging game that provided a sense of accomplishment.
Today gaming is much broader. Video games have merged with the larger gaming world (gambling). Most iOS games aren’t fun. They aren’t challenging. The are games of random chance at best. Like video poker or a Vegas slot machine you just press a button and hear a “winning” sound, even if you didn’t win.
It’s the weirdest thing when you watch somone playing a game like this and ask them, “Is it fun,” and their answer is, “Not really.”
Challenge is not the issue. Dark Souls is bloody difficult, but that doesn't mean that I feel like I've been using my brain after playing it.
Video games are awesome, but they provide too much stimulation and instant gratification for little kids. I don't think TV is much better, but video games are way more entertaining than TV.
Flipping heads on a coin 20 times in a row is difficult, but doesn't require thinking. Flipping a water bottle to land is difficult, but doesn't require critical/analytical thinking skills.
It astounds me how often I see ads for slot machine games on mobile. How could that possibly be fun? I guess there's an implication that you can actually win stuff, which I know isn't true. But them I've never seen the appeal of real slot machines either.
Talking about and being from that AoE games generation, I think a big part is the absence of any restrictions and incentives to stop. Only very few of my friends back then had unrestricted access to videogames or even TV. And even if they did, there is only so much time you could sink into a sp game before you might want to do other stuff. This even more so for non strategy games. There was only so much you could get from a Super Mario game. Internet access was even more restricted. And they would have been alot stricter if they had known what was out there. You might have heard the web is a fucked up place?
With even smaller kids having a smartphone and constant high speed access to the web, of course they are stuck to the screen. Its a never ending source of keeping you entertained and hooked and you might remember, that being a kid can be boring as hell. With the phones so affordable and everyone doing it, it was kind of inevitable of a development. I think we are witnessing the fallout of that development. With kids stuck to screens and as a reaction the ever increasing demand to make the web more childproof to at least have less of a bad conscience if you let your child have unrestricted access.
I dont think individual parents are to blame though, being a parent is tough and you dont want your kid to be the only one without a smart phone. Neither do I think an all or nothing approach is any more sensible. As always the dosage makes the poison, which is why I think approaches like in french schools are reasonable, who banned smartphones inside the school. Having it established, that there are restrictions to smartphone usage might help parents to establish restrictions as well. However, it all boils down to the question of what is appropriate content for children, and whether the internet is intended to be such childproof content. The answer might simply be no, in which case the only real option would be a second child proof web. Sure, it would be close to impossible to enforce, but so is the ban of giving alcohol to minors. Kids will get their hands on a beer sooner or later, but such bans are usefull enough to not give them easy enough access to drink daily.
But thats something we need to decide as a society. We might decide on something else or keep everything as is, but at least we would have made a decisions. Because we shouldnt kid our self, at the moment we simply keep ignoring the issue only interrupted from short periods of senseless actionism. The availability of smartphones have introduced new circumstances and it is no suprise, that without intervening, they had a clear effect.
> I don't see how playing hours of Starcraft and C&C wasn't an exercise in strategic thinking.
You're kidding, right? Those RTS, particularly Starcraft, are an exercise in APS more than anything else.
* For non-gamers, APS = actions per second. Being able to issue more commands than your opponent and "micro" (from the word micromanage) your units to tightly control their behavior are a large part of winning Starcraft. It's fascinating to watch high level Starcraft players clicking their mice at an almost inhuman rate.
I disagree. APM/APS is a requirement to play StarCraft well just like physical prowess is a requirement to play hockey. But it's far from being the only requirement.
yeah, there are definitely 'good' games, there used to be more. However, most games these days are also just digital crack. I guess it might be hard to understand that difference if you've never experienced things like AoE へ‿(ツ)‿ㄏ
I think the problem is not screens or technology, it is, as with so many things, greed and the 'marketing' tactics that it breeds.
I used to know a guy who was asked to explain himself when he referred to his game dev job as “selling crack to kids”. That was just over a decade ago, before the Cow Clicker clones got going.
To add to your point, I got into programming because I modified the buy menus in counter-strike to my liking when I was a young teen and immediately got hooked by the idea that I could make my computer automate things for me.
And let's be honest, as much as I like(d) counter-strike it's not an intellectual game by a long shot.
I remember my internet was so bad I had to add wait;wait;wait between issuing commands to the server or they would be dropped -- have been dealing with latency ever since :)
My first devops experience was maintaining Red Hat 7 boxes hosting Counter-Strike servers. I believe the version of CS at the time was 1.1. Our clan leader was IT for some company in Boston and was able to have these servers out of his office on a 100 mbit connection when the average internet connection was still dial up. I think I was 15 at the time.
The experience tought me a lot about SSH, compiling, text logs, config files, etc etc etc.
Although it's not the same subject, this reminds me of a video by Duncan "Thoorin" Shields, a rather controversial and prominent eSports figure: "Gaming is a Waste of Time" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXfnfBk3BM)
In the video, he talks (among other things) about people justifying the time they spend on video games by the fact that some players win millions by playing the game. Sure some do, but the very vast majority of players don't, and using the 0.01% of players as an exemple is not a good argument in favour of video games.
How did you come up with that percentage? Have you ever played CS?
Firstly, OP basically said that CS is not a strategic game at all, which is completely false.
Secondly, CS can get extremely strategic in the professional scene, but it is also quite strategic at higher ranks in the game's competitive mode ladder. It is also a heavily team-based game: e.g., if one of your team members is not communicating, you are at a huge disadvantage.
One of my earliest memories of "programming" was the discovery that Age of Empires .ai files could be edited in notepad to change (or in my case, intentionally break) the unit build progression of the computer players.
Yes, atleast playing games is not a passive mindless activity like watching TV, most games require active thought, interaction and decision making from the player.
I used to feel just like you. Now that I've escaped from video game addiction though, I'd totally admit the reason I felt that way was either due to implicit peer pressure from fellow nerds, or from lying to myself that there was some underlying cause for why I spent so much time in front of the screen (e.g. loneliness, shyness) which could have been addressed in much healthier ways.
I guess as a former addict you have to do things like categorically dislike all video games just to maintain your sobriety. Good on you for doing what you have to do to overcome your addiction, but such black and white opinions are not really healthy or smart for people who aren't struggling against a disease, IMO
I still play sometimes, so I get periodic reminders how it used to feel. (I don't dislike it. It's great fun in moderation.) But the things I spend my time on today are things I wouldn't had done when I was younger (be social with friends I like that aren't toxic, exersize, read, travel), but not because I didn't want to, but because I thought I couldn't (because I was too shy, or didn't have friends with compatible interests). I'm pretty sure past-me would've been way happier doing what I spend my life on now than what he did back then (if he'd only get through the initial no-fun investment hump to actually get the non-toxic friends, or past the point where exersize goes from annoying and exhausting to energizing and fulfilling).
But because I didn't feel like the life I'm living now was within reach back then, I lied to myself about the benefits of video games (so people wouldn't bother me or I felt better about spending my time in that way). That's my takeaway from introspecting on the parents and mine similar sounding scenarios.
> I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically.
I'm more annoyed that everytime video games come up, someone brings up Civilization as a strawman to argue.
99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples concerns about video games, it's always the same argument of: raise the benefits of Civilization, share nostalgia about playing it in the past and ignore the actual arguments being presented.
This thread is no exception. This is a place of more intelligent discourse - address the opposition's points, or concede they are valid.
> I'm more annoyed that everytime video games come up, someone brings up Civilization as a strawman to argue.
> 99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples concerns about video games, it's always the same argument of: raise the benefits of Civilization, share nostalgia about playing it in the past and ignore the actual arguments being presented.
> This thread is no exception. This is a place of more intelligent discourse - address the opposition's points, or concede they are valid.
If you had carefully read the comment you’re replying to, you'd have noticed the GP is addressing the claim “video games can be educational”. Not “most video games are educational”, but “video games can be educational”, which Ms. Stecher seems to be denying. Thus it makes perfect sense for the GP to present an example.
So before hypocritically accusing others of “strawmanning”, “unintelligent discourse”, and “ignoring the actual arguments being presented”, please take the time to read what people are actually saying.
And while 99% of games aren’t Civilization, I’d need a citation for the claim that 99% of games aren’t educational, if that’s what you meant to imply.
I think there's a lot more out there than Civ in the "formative/educational" market. My literal favorite game of all time is KSP, not just for the amazing gameplay but for what it's taught me. Similarly, semi popular but niche games like Farming Simulator and the other "%s Simulator 20%u" games have a lot of meaningful content. I'd argue even ArmA and similar games are educational in some capacity. Also, Portal because I just have to mention it.
That said, I don't know where I'd go with Fortnite, Overwatch, the COD lineup, and the rest of the mega titles. You could maybe make an argument for some of them maybe but I don't know what that would look like. They're fun games but mostly seem pretty devoid of anything inspiring or intellectually challenging.
Then there's the ugly... Mobile games categorically seem awful.
Edit: Also, kids should be encouraged to mod games. I think you'll probably find more than a few people who are here right now because they found out how to mess with game files to change what they see on the screen, in effect, the ultimate power and learning experience.
I spent a lot of time playing
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and The Legend of Zelda.
I have warm memories of both. But I didn’t learn anything from Zelda- it was pure entertainment and connection to popular culture. I can still hum the theme song. I did learn some stuff from Carmen Sandiego.
Dude, don't be ridiculous. There are countless games that aren't FPS monstrosities.
Into The Breach, Starbound, Galactic Civilizations, Celeste... these are all games that require you to think in some way and aren't mindless hack-and-slash or competitive shooter games.
Can they replace going to school? No, but let's not devolve this argument into "most games aren't like Civilization". A lot of the hatred for games is seriously misplaced.
Yes, RTS train certain skills and educate in general. Yes, some other games and whole genres do that. And still all video games cause non-linear, lets say "addiction", to them. They increase tendency to procrastinate. Especially after significant play time over lifetime, when those same educational aspects are a justification to continue procrastinating playing them. I know this from experience and it is very hard and feels like increasingly harder to stop or limit it.
"I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically."
I think video games are beautiful. I just finished Detroit: Become Human, and I've been playing games since Wolf3d came out. I suspect that the digital story telling in many video games is every bit as much "literature" as any novel, poem, or play.
I also personally saw more people drop out of college because of WoW than drugs.
Just an anecdote.
But I don't feel that video games are any better or worse than smoking cannabis or drinking alcohol, and I don't mind feeling a little grated when folks marketed them to my kids in ways that directly attempt to increase their addictive potential.
> At an early age I acquired a taste for novel reading, and indulged it to such an excess, that my mind was enervated, and its relish destroyed for higher and more solid attainments. I feel that I had a capacity for better things; but, under the ascendancy of this idle habit, it sunk into a fatal lethargy, from which neither shame nor ambition could awaken it. The drunkard, in the intervals of sobriety, feels most keenly the evils of intoxication, and, if self love allowed him to be candid, could a tale unfold of disease, of mental and bodily suffering, that would do more for the cause of temperance than all the societies in the world have ever accomplished. The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.
Reading novels will make your brains pour out your ears, kid.
Any new form of entertainment will meet resistance.
Modding and making my own video games got me into programming. If it weren't for games I probably wouldn't be in a field as lucrative as tech.
I'd say it's important to avoid Skinner box style games, but otherwise they can be fun and mentally productive. If I had a kid I'd introduce them to games like Kerbal Space Program, racing games (e.g. Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo) [1], and maybe some RTS games as they got older. I think it's important to choose what games children. The examples listed above reward learning, discipline, and skill. Not luck or pure time commitment.
>Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result.
So this is kind of a problem. LOTS of people of our generation learned a lot of our history from games like Age of Empires and Civilization. But these sources of information aren't neutral. They had biases baked into their narratives by the simple structure of game design.
The notion of "nations" or "civilizations" as discrete, immutable, and clearly defined categories is actually straight up wrong. The idea of history as the story of competition between these civilizational entities is likewise wrong. But tons of people of our generation think of history this way. They think of technological advancement like a "tech tree" as if all of human progress can be charted on a map with no consideration for alternative ways the world could have shaken out. Monotheism MUST be invented after polytheism, you MUST have invented the wheel in order to invent agriculture, and so on. Overall you're being fed the idea that the world as it is is the only way the world could have been, which is just not the case.
We were being acculturated into a specific (and imperialistic) worldview about what history is and how culture works. But because nobody ever took video games seriously, they never bothered to understand and unpack their influence as pedagogical tools. It's not like a novel or a movie where the morals and themes of the narrative are there to make an intentional point. With games the logic of needing to have a game to play and goals and objectives to meet winds up transmitting themes and morals that people either don't intend or don't bother thinking very hard about.
Of course they weren't accurate, that's why I went to the library to learn more. But they transformed learning about history and geography from something tedious into something I would do on my own, in free time. Self-motivated learning, I think, is something special.
Age of Kings had a cool Condition/Trigger system for scripting campaigns. I thought the idea was so simple, yet powerful, it influenced me to write a scripting language based off the concept in Qbasic when I was 14. The scripting language idea consumed and while I dropped the Condition/Trigger system for something more sophisticated eventually, I worked on making my scripting language for years and learned a ton of skills.
Studying ancient history and reading books have been thought to be a frivolous waste of time by previous generations as well. It all comes from your frame of reference.
I think games can have a place. Even dumb games like Lemmings can have some place.
And some games really can be educational, or develop thinking skills, etc. I wonder what game critics would say about a child spending hours a day playing Chess.
But all chess and no soccer is not a good mix. All Fortnite and no chess is not a good mix. In fact, I seriously question the value of any Fortnite or Minecraft. As entertainment, a little bit isn't worse than many other entertainments. But too much is too much.
And as far as entertainment goes, I'm tired of yet another Marvel movie where we can blow up as many things as possible in the most spectacular ways and never even think about consequences. I know it's goofy to worry about real life when we are talking about mythological characters and aliens. But I do think that we spend a huge amount of time and money to train youth to disconnect from real life. If somebody dies on the other side of town, it isn't real so it doesn't matter. If you have to kill 100 opponents to get to the princess, it's all part of the game.
But many years ago we played cops and robbers and killed each other, too. Or cowboys and Indians. And we argued about whether somebody should be dead or not because of how many times they'd been shot. And we graduated from pointing fingers to rubberbands to add some realism. Then paintballs.
So I suppose the human brain is capable of sorting it all out.
But I think it is healthy to feed the brain some balance. Put down the controller and join a service project now and then. Adopt a highway, or visit a care center. Connect with real people and remind your brain that video games aren't real. And stealing cars isn't the only way to win the game. In fact, it's just wrong.
There is always a tendency to blame the addiction on the substance, but it's usually symptomatic of something deeper.
In this case I think it's happening because parents don't have as much time to spend with their children as they have in past generations and screens are a convenient way of keeping a child occupied in a safe way.
You are partially right. But when I grew up there simply weren't that many things to tempt children as there are now. Even if I had wanted to have some there was no fast food around, there were no smart phones, no Facebook, no cable TV. We had to find ways to occupy ourselves be it reading or playing some games.
It's hard for parents to fight off all these temptations.
In past generations parents spent much less time with kids than now. Kids were mostly roaming streets. Now society frowns upon letting kids be outside nonsupervised, hence the substitution - screens indoors.
Part of that is that when roaming the streets, you knew the people on your street and usually had an idea that people were home to be able to call you to let you know there was a problem. Being at work is different than being "around and available" at home. Didn't have to be spending time with them directly to be available.
When I was roaming at as kid it was to my other friends houses in my neighborhood and everywhere in between. I live in a fairly large neighborhood now and we only know one other boy in the neighborhood who is my son's age. It's unfortunate for him.
At the same time, my daughter has several friends in the neighborhood her age and they play together all the time either at our house or the house of another parent who works from home.
That said, when I was really little I watched a video of my 4 year old birthday party so many times I memorized it. My mom called it "the best babysitter." Even today I can play that video in my head.
The content of that article makes a different claim than the headline. It's possible to spend time with a child without devoting time to child care, which is what the article specifically cites. This would be the case for family run farms, and up until very recently the majority of the world's population were farmers.
I wonder what the results would be if they included grand-parents (and similar close relatives) in the count of time spent. Because parents are not the only close adults being able to provide a 'parental' role of supervision and care; and families have gotten more and more split along the years, with an always more isolated parent(s)-child(ren) nucleus.
Speaking of isolation, father's time may rise, mother's time may rise as well, and yet the time spent with parents may decrease too: think of the multiplication of single mothers (and to a lesser degree single fathers).
It is also the responsibility of developers to apply some ethical guidelines. As it stands, media and games are being designed with addictive rewards to hook in adults and children alike, in the name of monetization.
This article doesn’t really explain what the dark consensus is beyond just “screens bad”. There are certainly some things on modern computers that are little more than Skinner boxes, but those things aren’t what the parents in the article are talking about. What makes Fortnite and Youtube videos worse than Nerf guns and library books?
That's what stood out for me while reading the article. Here are some people who say "screens are bad" and here are some other people who say "screens are not so bad". Then, a little bit about how screens are addictive and not good for kids. You could substitute "Dungeons and Dragons" for "screens" and we'd be reading an article straight out of the 80's.
> "What makes Fortnite and Youtube videos worse than Nerf guns and library books?"
Well for one, and this is a big one, many games implement specific features such as character progression, rewards and even loot boxes that are specifically made to keep you playing. They directly trigger dopamine reward centers in the brain and are very much tied to addiction. Loot boxes especially are literally just gambling.
Youtube kids is also all kinds of messed up. Videos created using algorithms specifically to draw the attention of kids and sometimes contain very disturbing images and themes.
Here is a video on Jake Paul (and many big youtubers) and how he markets HARD to kids while also having videos containing very inappropriate material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c
On top of this, in terms of TV/Youtube vs books, there is a big difference in terms of it's effect on language, communication, and development. Also, TV/Youtube is a passive form of learning, reading books is active:
YouTube Kids horrifies me. I feel like a curation approach to "kid-approved" programming would be much better method than YouTube Kids. And when you think about it, that's how traditional TV programming worked. Seems like a good model, given how much of an impact media has on child development.
Sugary foods, opium, these things all cost money. Most things on the Internet are free. Think of the addictive things as “gravity wells”. Everyone explores until they find something that addicts them.
Many library cards for <18 year-olds didn’t allow certain adult books to be checked out. Books are mostly not algorithmically/peer generated. Even if you are addicted to some book series you will eventually finish it.
It would be nice if there was a content filter that parents could install that wasn’t curated based on someones opinion but worked more like Waze — routing you around places where everyone was stuck.
These stories come out all the time in history. First books, then radio, then tv, then video games, now screens. Surely there are some translational or longitudal analyses to see what effect these “distractions” have on “success”.
That's very true. One has to be weary of going too neo-Luddite, but at the same time, I don't think books and TV (on a mass scale anyway) caused kids to have less sex and skyrocket their depression and suicide rates.
>Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.
>"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand."
A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.
This larger issue of screen time and tech addiction will only continue to grow. At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. But because it's the brain and not the lungs it will play out differently.
People approach mental and physical health differently. Similarly dopamine addiction and chemical dependence are also treated differently in people's minds. One is often viewed as a moral failing the other as more "uncontrollable".
As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact. It's not "just a tool" and never will be.
- Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits.
- We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.
My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys.
McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood).
The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book).
There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away.
But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions.
It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium.
> My generation grew up with TV shows like The Transformers that got kids to beg their parents for toys.
But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history".
Consider that "bingeing" is a commonly accepted term when it refers to consuming an entire season of a show in one sitting and companies like Netflix churn out TV shows with a focus on this "bingeability", because that's their differentiator compared to regular TV.
I see this playing out right now with Apple's phones, which get continuously bigger and shinier and brighter with every new generation.
Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.
If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.
Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."
I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.
Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.
But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.
My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products.
If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else.
I'm not just talking about kids, I'm talking about adults too.
Smartphones absolutely add a lot of convenience and value. But, in my opinion, most of that value doesn't come from having deliberately addictive media consumption available at your fingertips at half a second's notice. Yet that's what phones are being optimized for.
Does calling an Uber need a 6" screen? Or voice navigation instructions in my car? Shooting photos and videos? GPS tracking my runs?
Most of the things that bigger screens enable are things that I'm trying to minimize, so making these big inviting smartphone screens is no longer adding value to my life. But that's the only phone Apple will sell me. No, it's probably not as bad as opiates. But "not as bad as opiates" is a pretty low bar to set for "should I be OK with this?"
What I really want is a small phone like that to go with an iPad. With a full size tablet, carrying it and sitting down to use it two handed are enough of a barrier that I can't absentmindedly find myself sucked into a reddit hole.
Maybe that's Apple's plan to sort this out. Make next year's iPhone Max Plus so big that you have to carry it around in your backpack and can't make a habit of staring at it all the time.
>Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.
Giant screens aren't being foisted on you, you go to the store and pay for them. You could buy a featurephone if you wanted.
What is the evidence for your argument that Apple is "optimizing the addictive parts"? Your argument seems to be entirely based on screen size; is there some study that demonstrates a correlation between screen size and 'addictive' qualities?
It's more the 3rd software companies that are optimizing the addictive parts than Apple, because that's how they make money.
Having the screen be smaller makes those software products suck enough that I don't like using them for extended periods, it's a defense mechanism against hyper optimized advertising engagement apps.
Personally I think that's a feature.
My other problem with Apple that they're only interested in the high end $750+ for their phones. The SE was comparatively a steal at $400, and nothing about the new ones is $250 more impressive. Can't be securely held one handed and adds a big screen that I don't want, so I'm not excited about paying more for it.
Check out the light phone 2 or the KY-01L, both phone looks pretty awesome. the light phone 2 being just call, text, and the KY-01L having a web browser (though it looks so bad I probably wouldn't use it)
So the argument is that his phone is too good and he is sucked in? So a crappier phone is the answer? That’s like saying people drive too much so we should remove the air conditioner and radio.
I don't want to go back down to a feature phone, but if you said "I want to bike more places instead of driving my car everywhere" it would be reasonable to not want to buy an $80,000 luxury sedan that you love to zoom around in.
Unfortunately Apple has decided that's the only car they're going to make.
My main priorities are size, photo quality, and respecting my privacy. I haven't seen a lot of options there, but if someone else is still making a phone that's as good as the iPhone SE I'd love to hear about it.
You are loosely comparing a large smartphone with tobacco; yet the reality is that an iPhone is more like matches: you can use it to start a campfire, light a stove to cook some kale or use them to smoke crack. It’s your choice what you do with the matches and it certainly isn’t the match manufacturer’s fault people choose to light the crackpipe rather than “healthier” options.
If I understand you correctly, it’s the phone fault people are addicted to bad content? The phone is just too easy to use, too high quality that unwitting victims are just defenseless? If we are talking kids, that’s a parent problem, but if we are talking adults, then it’s a problem of self-responsibility. Grocery stores have plenty of ice cream for sale: it’s up to you to not buy and eat it all the time. Grown ups ought to act like it instead of blaming shiny objects of their own obsessions. Adults aren’t victims of their phones.
The user experience of scrolling through and viewing lots of content on a 4" screen is honestly not great. Apple, being Apple, sees that as a problem. I consider it a feature because it's easier for me to break away from. Web browsers, youtube, mobile games etc. I don't write emails from my phone unless it's an emergency, but I like having a smartphone because it gives me the option if I need to.
A lot of those behaviors, I currently have trouble with at full-size computers. I can absentmindedly browse cat pictures on reddit for a couple of hours. But I have to sit down at my computer to do that, I can't do it comfortably on a 4" phone screen. And I like it that way.
Put that comfortable time-wasting computer in my pocket where it follows me everywhere and I'm about 99% certain that I'm have a problem.
I'd love to know if someone's studied this more rigorously.
Perhaps I just don’t have smartphone addiction, but (if I do) there is something different between this “addiction” and others. There are no withdrawal symptoms for me. I feel the compulsion to pick it up and look at it, but if I don’t have my phone, after reaching for it in my pocket and not finding it a few times I just stop. I don’t feel a need to go find a phone or feel rotten because I don’t have one. And these feelings (that I don’t seem to have anyway) don’t get stronger and stronger until I get back to my phone.
I’ve felt withdrawal symptoms for caffeine, and I can only imagine it is worse for stronger drugs. Maybe this addiction is of the same sort but the withdrawal is so slight that I don’t notice?
You're right, I don't think it's as physically addictive as chemical compounds can be. But the time wasting is a very easy hole for me to fall into (he said, arguing with people in HN comments :P).
It's not the end of the world, if I end up having problems with it on my next bigger phone I'm more than capable of deleting the problematic apps. I've already done that with Facebook on my SE.
Even so, I'm also not excited about the ever climbing costs for new "upgrades" that I don't want. SE was a great size and had the top of the line camera from the 6s. Now if I want the smallest screen and the best camera, the price went from $400 to $1000. Welp.
I'm in the same boat as you. One thing I've learned over the last few years is that the problem with "phone addition" has more to do with the lack of boredom than any physical effects.
The really short version is that there's some science that suggests that periods of boredom increase creativity. By constantly keeping active with your phone, we're losing this "boredom time".
Personally, I've made a habit of occasionally just doing nothing every now and then. Put the phone away; don't listen to anything. It's actually great for my commute home (I take a bus). I can just sit/stand and not do anything and just relax for a few minutes on the way home.
Personally, I think the biggest problem here isn't that kids are spending a lot of time looking at their screens. It's that parents _aren't_ spending a lot of time engaging with their kids about the content.
When a screen is used to distract a child - or anyone,really - instead of engage them, that's where the problem arises.
That's correct -- it's adults too. And the odds are against the average person. But I must point out it's not just data scientists we are up against -- it's psychologists, psychiatrists and medical doctors, addiction experts, experts in gaming theory, etc. All are employed in order to help make software and devices more "compelling". Remember when they used to ask how "sticky" is the app? Careful timing of rewards, the use of color and sound, a/b testing on phrasing, email&text reminders, alerts, etc all work to keep you clicking like a trained circus animal.
Look, these people are not working to protect you. They're working to create addictions and deepen existing ones. Frankly I think the medical types should lose their licenses for violation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm" indeed. Making devices and software more ADDICTIVE, deliberately creating and encouraging mental illness (addiction) is a disgraceful violation of this oath.
This is an open secret in the video game world, to the point that some COUNTRIES are banning things like 'loot boxes' because they are naked gambling.
The problem began when users became the product being sold. Now the companies feel that they have a right to your mind and eyes, and are not above fostering or even creating clinical addiction to ensure they have access.
I lived in Russia during the time when slot machines were literally standing in the open on the streets, and yes, mentally infirm people were wasting themselves on them. Normal people did not.
It requires one to completely lack logic reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a slot machine is to waste his or her time and money.
The same way, it requires a particular lack of basic logical reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a smartphone app throwing 20 bling bling popups per second on you isn't different.
You don't need to be a genius to understand that clickfarming app must be removed, and to do so.
My former high school classmate who did not manage to leave Russia is running a typical "smartphone fixer" kiosk. He said few years ago that the most common request he gets from people is to "remove Google nagware and lock, block or delete Google Pay" so their child will never ever buy anything "in that Internet thing"
At least Chinese and Russian parents understood long ago that Google's business is all about "pocket slot machines (this is how people really call smartphones there)." Why wouldn't American parents do that too?
The problem is that it's not the "clickfarming" apps that are the real danger for the majority of people, I'd argue it's the endless algorithmically tailored content and social media streams most of us consume. The ones that fill our every - otherwise - idle moment with something to distract us with.
People going to casino with a genuine belief that they will win.
Casino — a business specifically mathematically engineered to make sure that nobody wins against a casino, to maximize your losses, and to make money from it. By the very definition, nobody "wins" against it. Yet, some people still come and play.
Same thing with google pocket slot machine — the very reason they link the game to your bank account is to milk money from you, or god forbid, your children.
As a person who wants to move from analyst to data scientist, this makes me aware I should probably take some techno ethics as well as learning stuff like R and analytics
I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction.
We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction.
The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors to actively limit dopamine uptake in your brain.
Bingo (anecdata)... a few years ago I spent the last 15min of a flight into SFO talking to a lady (who had been playing Bejeweled for 4 hours straight) about using touchscreens so long (it's my job). She mentioned how shaky she gets when she has to stop playing...
Can confirm... I am a 31 year old _data scientist_ who worked on these kind of algorithms, saw the metrics, and tweaked the algorithms to increase these metrics. I got addicted and it is harder to develop a healthy relationship with my phone/social media/youtube than it is with caffeine (I quit it!) or alcohol (I take a 1-2 month long break every year and rarely have more than 1 drink).
> A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.
This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults.
No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works.
> As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact
Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.
He never said these data scientists predicted the 6 year old brain and created the program accordingly. Just A/B testing and measuring what works best and what doesn't and progressively refining the product to match these findings is data science.
I'm already being downvoted, hopefully mostly for my tone rather than content, so by all rational means I should abandon this and go complain another day, but this really gets my goat.
A/B testing and measuring -- are you kidding me? That's how you go from 35% conversion to 36% conversion, not from 2 daily active users to 1e7 daily active users. Refinement only works if you're exploring a space that has productive alternatives in low dimensions, which is almost never the case. No amount of "progressive refinement" is going to turn Farmville into Candy Crush or Candy Crush into Fortnite. You have to look no further than those examples to see what I mean -- "Oh, look, Zygna has figured out a formula to hook users" followed by "Zygna can't repeat its success".
Zynga copied base from another developer and then A/B aggressively to squeeze maximum. It is not like it would be some shameful secret, that was even basic advice to developers after.
Zynga had repeated success, untill market saturated and other developers caught up. That does not make these tactics not working, that just makes them so common that they are not such a huge advantage anymore.
The developers of different kinds of games will have different motivations.
A developer of traditional games might think, "How can I make this game better in an aesthetic, or an educational sense?" Or, "How can I make this game a better FPS than the ones before?"
A developer of another game might think, "I want to make money, let me survey existing games and read psych literature and create the next billion dollar game. I don't care what form the game takes, or what players get out of it."
The claim is not that game developers for each game are creating an addictive game from scratch by A-B testing, but rather exactly what you said, that they're AB testing for smaller improvements in eyeball-retention, spending, and addictiveness, because all they care about are those metrics which drive profits (or valuation which can be converted into profits).
That a set of conscious design choices, on its own, isn't sufficient for extreme addictiveness doesn't change the fact that those conscious design choices are necessary, and those choices are being examined, analyzed, and documented by other game devs and by psychologists. So, of course you can take all the known lessons and apply them to a brand new game concept and fail horribly, but if your game is a success on other grounds and you mined other games and the literature for addictive ideas, you are much more likely to have a billion dollar super-addictive game than you would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
No -- a thousand people fell down the stairs, nine hundred and ninety nine of them found no link between their KPIs and engagement metrics, and the one that did thought that they figured out how the human brain works, instead of just realizing that they were successful for reasons that they likely will never understand or be able to replicate.
And a thousand of those .1%'ers will try a second time, and the .1% that succeed that time will be hailed as geniuses and people will set about copying their open plan offices and terrible management styles in the hopes of replicating their success.
I'm not a data scientist nor a psychologist nor an addiction expert nor ...
But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time.
In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights. Or climbmountain->climbhighermountain...
In games, you do that in 1/100 the time and effort. Tap a few buttons and "you win!!!!"
A sweeping statement to the effect of "people don't understand addiction" is basically malicious and I accuse you of being the inventor of gamification or one of their PR folk.
> But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" ... is an extremely strong addiction factor.
Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.
Well sure, we can say there's a prerequisite amount of fun to be had in the first place. Addiction is for pleasure not pain, at least for the average person. Something must not be so off-putting that you don't have a chance to get addicted. For example, a cigarette that caught your mouth on fire would probably not be smoked again. The fact that some (or even most, may be your point) games set your mouth on fire does not mean the addiction factor isn't there. It just means they're more boring than they are addictive in that critical early stage.
So we're going to no-true-scotsman our way out of this?
Nothing is binary; I'm not going to say "either leveling helps a game all the time or it doesn't". Sometimes leveling-up mechanics help a game, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it alienates one set of users and attracts another, and there's no magic formula for when it helps and when it doesn't, and the nature of the leveling-up mechanic itself and how fun that is can vary in effectiveness dramatically. It's like having the user's avatar wear a funny hat.
I remember myself struggling with Quake 3. It really felt to some extend hypnotic. Only after giving myself a proverbial slap on the face at around 2014 when I was 13 or so, and getting conscious of that being a problem, was I able vent Q3 out of my head.
I was addicted to video games into my 20s. Even now I have urges to fire up some MMO. It was only when I started working in UX design and researched human behavior that I understood how incredibly addictive video games are. Well designed video games go above and beyond to make you keep playing them. Even as a professional designer I frequently look to games to get ideas about how to hook visitors to spend more time in sites and apps. It's very ironic that the system that gamed me (pun intended) is now something I'm actively part of.
Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it.
Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.
There's a saying "When you let the camel's nose into the tent, the rest of him follows." If a technology has so many awful capabilities, then there ought to be a good reason to tolerate its existence.
Maybe, if you define 'technology' to be just things like instruction sets and transistor geometry.
By that narrow definition, phones contain more than technology: they contain policy. A phone loaded with addictive games embodies a policy of maximizing screen time. A phone with clickbait on its lock screen is designed to take up your time and bathe your retinas in bullshit. While the transistors are neutral, the policy is harmful.
As it happens, these policies are often set by people that mostly work on technology, so they get lumped together. From outside, people see the technology industry being responsible for all of it.
I hear you, its like saying alcohol is just a chemical. Which is true of course. But I think it's naive and idealistic. Taken to an extreme, you could say people are just chemicals and electrical impulses, right? But that's crazy.
> At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry.
To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]).
Just want to say how fantastic Common Sense Media is, and what a great resource it provides for parents trying to be intentional about all of this. Thank you for what you and your team do!
(And, to parents here who aren't familiar with their movie reviews and other resources, check them out: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ )
You guys are incredible, thank you so much for what you do!!
Movie and TV reviews have gotten so hung up on performance, star power and visuals that they give us parents very little idea about content. They’re useless in many cases.
I feel like common sense media is an amazing tool for those of us that are concerned with the content in media and helps parents make better decisions.
Common Sense Media is great! I personally really appreciate the lists of educational apps, like https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/preschool-math-apps-g... . I strongly recommend that parents go through the educational apps on these lists and get ones that their kids find engaging.
And here is a quote from one of those guides that pretty much sums it up:
“Pay attention to how your kids act during and after watching TV, playing video games, or hanging out online. If they're using high-quality, age-appropriate media; their behavior is positive; and their screen-time activities are balanced with plenty of healthy screen-free ones, there's no need to worry.”
Since I work from home on a computer all day, it seemed wrong to send mixed messages about screen usage. One trick we use is to set Alexa timers when starting screen time with our preschool and kindergarteners. You can argue with mom and dad, but Alexa is implacable. Also, the play room must be cleaned up and homework done, which seems to provide the “privilege, not a right” context we are looking for. It helps we have far better behaved kids in general that I have any right to expect. I blame my wife.
I think it's less about the screen time, and more about what's on the screen.
Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago.
Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive.
But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine.
I was an avid "gamer" growing up. I wasn't always the most responsible with it. Probably overdid it a lot. But I can see with my own child, this is a different ball-game altogether.
Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
> They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine.
I work in the gambling industry, making literally slot machines.
Slot machines are heavily regulated and there is a lot of "engagement" tricks that can not be used in the gambling industry. The kind of trick that Candy Crush will use.
The dangerous side of gambling is for people that think that they can "win money". But the games themselves are kind of boring by design. Regulations force us to make them boring. (And that is a good thing, I will not work on this industry otherwise).
The future of on-line games and mobile games is regulation. Micro-payments, push-notifications, etc. cannot be used without limits. People have right to their mental health more than companies have to higher profits.
Why AREN'T certain games subject to the same regulations as slot machines?
I can answer for the US:
Games aren’t subject to regulation because for the past few decades one party has made it their goal to destroy regulatory power to allow the wealthy to enrich themselves.
One party in the US has been completely captured by billionaires and corporations. This started in the 1970s around the time the Koches founded the Koch Institute (now Cato), and the Scaife, Bradley, Olin, and other rich families started using big money to influenfe politics. Continued through Reagan, his tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks (including rolling back Fairness Doctrine which allowed Limbaugh to fill the airwaves with propaganda). Then Gingrich, then Murdoch who kicked off Fox News. Now the US has one party that is a coalition of billionaires for funding and white identity politics for votes— and the only thing that party cares about is the wealth of their billionaire donors.
We’re not going to have any regulations to protect people until we fix US politics and media.
This does not hold to to scrutiny. The case that was appealed to the supreme Court that establishes that video games are protected by the First Amendment was challenging a law championed by a California Democrat, but was mostly overturned by liberal justices.
What video games have to do with "white idntity politics" is beyond me.
And yet the tech industry overwhelmingly supports Democrats? Partisan politics has nothing to do with the topic at hand. But, if you want to go there, I might suggest that Cato is a libertarian organization and libertarianism is about the rights of the individual to make their own choices rather than having the state dictate those choices. Bringing the Koch brothers into a debate over addictive screens is just silly.
Both parties are heavily influenced by and for the rich. But only one party is obsessed with identity politics, and it's not the one you're implying.
Your side has far more to lose than the side of Fox News and Limbaugh if the fairness doctrine were to return. Because for every one of them, there are 10 media sources slanted in the other direction.
Video games are protected by the first amendment right to free speech and expression. Slot machines are gambling devices that take in and pay out money. The two aren't really comparable. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the regulations on slot machines only apply when they're used in real money gambling. Presumably, if someone built a slot machine that didn't take in or dispense tokens, and could not be used in gambling in any way, it wouldn't be subject to those regulations. But obviously this is a moot point since a slot machine without a payout is just a glorified random number generator.
Not necessarily. Right now the industry is largely unregulated, but that's more a question of enforcement than any sort of real legal protection.
In the US you can't build a slot machine that accepts money and dispenses tokens that have value. That's often how things operate in Japan, but the same model is generally illegal in the US.
It's questionable if spending real money on virtual currency to buy "loot boxes" that randomly give things of value is legal. And if that's legal, it's not obvious if changing the rate of rewards is legal.
In game items don't have value. If they did, then effectively all games with RNG mechanics would be banned. Heck, even the original Rogue would fall under that umbrella.
That's simply the most well known example. Blizzard had a real money auction house in DIII which they got a cut of profits from virtual item sales so they clearly understand items have value. PLEX in eve online directly links real world money with their in world currency etc.
I could go on, but saying it's virtual is not necessarily enough to protect these companies.
This is actually a rapidly developing area of law. There is a lawsuit brought by Washington State that is arguing that virtual credits, in connection with games of chance, constitutes "something of value" that is covered by the state's gambling laws.
If the state wins, it could result in an expansion of regulation of this type of mobile game.
Yes. Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania allow gambling. But I guess that at any moment local or federal regulations could be created.
> And does the regulating code specifically mention physical machines?
There is specific regulations for casinos, for on-line gambling, for jackpots, sports betting, etc. e.g. CHAPTER 69O INTERNET AND MOBILE GAMING from the linked PDF
Example of definitions:
* "Authorized Internet or mobile game" means any game authorized by the Division for use with an Internet or mobile gaming system.
* "Client terminal" means any device that is used to interact with a gaming system for the purpose of conducting server-based gaming activity.
* "Data warehouse" means a system of one or more servers located in New Jersey for the purpose of storing transactions received from the primary gaming equipment.
* "Dormant account" means an Internet gaming account, which has had no patron initiated activity for a period of one year.
> Why AREN'T certain games subject to the same regulations as slot machines?
Slot machines are regulated because they fall under the category of gambling and video games don't meet the legal definition of gambling. (Although, I'd agree that it's starting to seem more and more as if they should.)
There's a pretty good explanation of the criteria at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... but the brief summary (from the article) is "Gambling consists of three elements: consideration, prize and chance. If any one of those three elements is missing, the game is simply not gambling (Rose, 1986))."
By looking at those criteria, there's a lot of ways video game companies can defend themselves. The strongest one IMO being that, from a legal standpoint, there is no prize. You "win" things or get drops but the TOS of all games say that the player does not own them (or anything else in the game) in any legal sense. The analogy would be more like a carnival ride where you are paying for the experience rather than the expectation of getting anything material in return.
> You've gotten me wondering: Why AREN'T certain games subject to the same regulations as slot machines?
Probably because the problem is not perceived as bad enough to get regulated yet. The industry was getting dangerously close to this when there were all those cases of kids racking up huge bills through in-app purchases on iPhones, but that has died down enough that it's not on the radar anymore. I think if the games industry gets too aggressive again, regulation will sweep in.
Certain forms of video game dynamics: e.g. some loot box mechanics have recently been identified as being covered by gambling regulations in some nations.
Can you recommend any literature on the topic of these "tricks"? If you're not in the industry, awareness is probably the best weapon against these practices.
I'm not who you're responding to, but I like this longread from the Verge about the specific design of slot machines that fuel addictive behaviour by users:
Sry what? You have no issue working in that industry because those games are 'boring'? But you do not have any issue that you create something which is literally boring and only there for other people to put there money in and play never again (because it is so boring) or lose everything?
> You have no issue working in that industry because those games are 'boring'?
Not because they are boring, but because they are less addictive than they can be. So they are "boring" in comparison. If we were allowed to use all tricks that mobile and on-line games do it will be really bad for society as it will create more addiction.
It is like Coca-Cola. Even that so much sugar makes it problematic, I find it better that at least does not include cocaine like it did in 1891. Does that make Coca-Cola good? No, it does not. But I find that makes it a lesser evil. Even that cocaine-less Coke is more "boring" nowadays, it is the right thing to do.
I don't know. I have never seen anyone buying more coca cola on a weekend than i would be able to afford with my salary.
I have seen people putting shit ton of money into those machines and they lost easily 100,- Euros per Hour?
I'm sure there is always a white/gray/black thing going on but i do put a slot machine at the very end of black not in gray or white at all.
Coca Cola and the water stealing and the addiction is btw. an additional example for something not that good, it does not make a slot machine any better.
I think Fortnite is just a bad example. It's one of the few games where you don't feel at a complete disadvantage when you choose not to spend money on it.
A simpler example is Battlefield 1942 vs Battlefield 5, 1, or any of the recent entries: the first had zero unlocks; everything was available, and it was a game for the fun of it. In the newer entries, the unlocks and other bars you fill provide a sense of achievement and progress, and maybe that just gives players with fun objectives to do while playing but the cynic in me sees people gloating about 1000 kills with the Kolibri and thinks it's more about preying on addictive tendencies.
While I think your point is totally on the mark I am going to chime in like a pedantic pain in the arse and mention that Civ has been addictive as fuck since the early 90s when I ruined at least a month of my life playing just one more turn.
But yes, I agree with your point in the general sense!
>Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
Or just not letting kids get into those games. At some point my wife pointed out that I had a problem disengaging from certain types of games (for me it was MOBAs specifically). They are super-addictive.
It never really got in the way of anything and if I had anything else to do I would go do that, so it wouldn't really qualify as "addiction" in a DSM sense. But the issue is what it does when you don't have anything to do. They have a way of swallowing up basically ALL of your free time. And I didn't feel happier or better off for having spent my time that way, it felt more like compulsion than desire. I see a lot of young people on the internet being enslaved by compulsion like this, engaging in somewhat problematic consumption of video-games, porn, or social media.
I decided to just uninstall and stop playing those sorts of games, but I was also a grown-up with life experiences, hobbies, social connections, and responsibilities before I ever started. I knew what I was missing with "real life" by letting myself sink into that so it was easy enough for me to stop, I had other, more edifying sources of dopamine to go after. Kids, often times, either don't have enough freedom of movement to go do those things or just plain don't know what else there is out there. It's the same reason drug and gambling addiction tends to take hold among people with depression.
Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago.
In the old days, the focus was on playability. Games were fun. But a new genre has emerged particularly in mobile gaming that does something strange: it compels play even when it isn't fun anymore. In the old days when a game stopped being fun, you would stop playing. But these games, when they stop being fun, you make an in-game purchase...
I played Candy Crush for a while a few years ago. It's a fundamentally fun game, and the trap is that every once in a while I'd hit a level that I couldn't get past ( at least without being really, really lucky). So you I'd paid to get past it and move on to more fun. I spent maybe about $5 on it before ultimately getting tired of it. My rationalization was the game was legitimately fun and I didn't mind throwing the developers a little money for providing a decent little game.
But I've seen so many similar games where the game itself wasn't fun at all, even though the rewards were still enticing. The Simpsons Tapped Out comes to mind. And in those cases I realized the game play itself wasn't interesting or fun and quickly quit. Basically, any game that has timers in it will fall into this category because the timers are there solely to make sure you keep coming back and have a compelling reason to do it often.
I think the difference is how quickly you get the reward is and how the reward is gained. It also relates to the way the money is made.
In 'old school' game you receive reward after period of effort. You have to perform better and push yourself. Game is designed to be fun but selling the game once is where the money is. Good game is measured by the short peak experiences, not by the average feeling.
Another (more advanced but evil) way to design addictive game is when it the difficulty and reward frequencies are optimized to keep you playing for as long as possible. You are offered cheats or the difficulty automatically adjusts to optimize the time you spend with the game. The goal of the game is stretch the interest over time just above the threshold where you would quit. In the end the game just removes lows from the boring moments.
Yes. It's irritating to me to hear screen time constantly discussed as a monolith. For example, I have no issue with my son playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He gets to poke around and experiment and explore and it has sparked a lot of imaginative play, curiosity and interesting conversations.
Likewise, it's fine if he wants to watch the videos we've taken of our family, it helps him to remember relatives we don't get to see very often.
Conversely, I have ZERO tolerance for advertising. I am increasingly convinced that marketing is the source of a majority of modern society's ills and I don't want it anywhere near his brain until he's able to properly comprehend its purpose.
Advertising to kids happens through Youtube and Instagram, not those ugly Adsense iframes that can be spotted a mile away and at this point fall under "banner blindness" for a lot of users.
I'm not a gamer so I don't know much about Zelda, but the sort of hypnotic hold some Youtube/Insta personalities have on kids is astonishing. They will parrot their talking points, talk about them relentlessly with friends and buy whatever they're shilling, be it makeup, game guides, phone skins, what have you.
I remember reading an analysis saying it's the "persistence" features in games that have the strongest potential for addition. E.g. you could play Counter-Strike all night, but the only thing you bring out is your improved skills. Unlike MMORPGs and similar where you "develop the character" and "accumulate equipment" (these days, also for real money).
I'm worried by how the big market of mobile games with very little discernible intellectual content are influencing kids. Games are inherently forced to have some kind of intellectual engagement (though I think we've explored the edge with cookie clicker) so I'm not that alarmed just yet. But from what I've seen most of these games don't seem to engage the user in a way that encourages them to challenge themselves.
2 hours per day and 66 pickups. I feel I've been curbing my usage a lot since Screen Time got added to the iPad/iPhone. Mainly Slack, Messages, Feedly and Safari.
I wish the rhetoric around "screens" was less focused on the delivery mechanism and instead more focused on the problematic thing behind those screens.
The issues raised here seem to not be related to glowing LCDs, but rather particular apps and behaviors in those apps that lead to addictive and problematic behavior.
"Screens" is even broader than saying things like "the internet is bad". The latter statement already sounds unhelpful because everyone has a better understanding of just how diverse of a platform "the internet" is.
The problem, of course, is that it's really difficult for a parent to differentiate between the various types of things kids can do on their screens, especially for someone who is less tech savvy in general. This isn't to say that it shouldn't be done, just that it's hard.
Personally, if I had to select one "easy avenue" to ban or restrict, it would be not screens but internet access. This has the side effect of putting the parent in charge of acquiring new content.
I have a 2 and a half year old son now. My wife and I have found for us that the right answer is simply moderation, variety, and supervision.
1. We moderate how much time is spent on screens. Each day he probably spends a total of an hour or less in front of any screen (iPad/iPhone/Projector).
2. He does watch some (highly filtered) educational YouTube content, but we also make sure he's playing educational and interactive games, like building, drawing, and learning Chinese (we're a bilingual household). He also has lots of books and we read to him actively, he participates in sports, we take him outside to playgrounds and parks, do arts and crafts with him, and he helps us with chores around the house (in a fun way), etc.
3. When he is playing a game or watching a video, we're there participating. We're monitoring and filtering the content he's viewing, and we're actively adding to the educational experience by talking about the things he's seeing and doing with him.
Technology is a tool, and how it's used matters. Outright banning it means we're missing out on its potential benefits, and also we miss the opportunity to teach him from an early age how to use it properly. I fear a child who hasn't learned to cope with technology for 13 years and is then suddenly introduced to it will struggle far more.
It was a little bit of a struggle at first, but now when we tell him it's time to turn off the iPad, he usually will do it himself without fuss, and he increasingly will turn it off without even prompting and move on to another activity like reading or drawing.
> I fear a child who hasn't learned to cope with technology for 13 years and is then suddenly introduced to it will struggle far more.
This is also one of my bigger fears. There is a strange mix of people in my generation (born 1990's), who are non-techies, and are either responsible with their internet use or display worrying signs of unhealthy internet presence. Even though tech has been around for some time now.
Some, I realised, were introduced to technology rather late. A fun example is how some people would be offended if I were to call them "gamers". They don't own PC games, don't own a console, but they spend their entire commutes and more playing mobile games.
That's a great point. But it takes a lot of time and effort to filter the content your child consumes. That's because the system is designed so the end user has almost no control over the information flow.
So this will affect the poor disproportionately (once again).
If you don't have time to discover child-friendly, educational content, no money to buy ad-free movies and games from trusted companies, you'll just give your child a tablet with a tab open showing an educational video. What your child will be watching 10 minutes later is up the the mercy of Google. Whatever it's going to be, I bet it won't be in the best interests of your child.
There's no microtransaction apps or other nonsense like that.
You can even set limits like "30 minutes app time per day", "30 minutes book time", "30 minutes video time", etc.
You can also remove or add specific apps you want your kid to have access to.
Honestly it's wonderful to give a young kid that level of autonomy and access to information. You should still pay attention to what they do. But there's no need to give them access to the open internet or to curate everything yourself.
I’m curious how people invite other kids over for kid parties. That kid can’t drink soda, this one is forbidden screens, this one is no gluten, that one is no meat. When you have a baby, does the hospital give you a giant list of stuff you could forbid them to choose from?
The headline is chilling, but the actual content of the article boils down to "Many people in Silicon Valley feel that too much screen time is bad for kids".
That being said, I found this anecdote to be particularly... unsettling.
> “I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
It's tough to explain away the emotional desire for something that was manufactured to be cool and addictive
This has always been a form of Luddism. Tech is inevitable.
I view tech similarly to how I view sex-ed in 2018: it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen (teen pregnancies, stds, etc...). Your kids are going to grow up to be adults with bad tech habits if you don't start teaching them how to use it responsibly and protect themselves early.
Help them find good content. Have days where no tech is allowed on the weekends, but don't keep them away from it completely. Give them time to unwind with tech and choose stuff themselves, just as you probably do. Teach them about privacy and the problems that can come up with tech so they know how to deal with it themselves. Teach them that too much tech isn't good for you and you need to do other things too.
Monitor what they're watching and make sure you talk to them when things get out of hand. Expect to have some occasional issues, and treat them like you would an adult: are they sad? Is something going on at school? Is the tech affecting their ability to do other things at the time?
Eventually your kid is going to use tech. Teach them early how to be responsible with it.
We try and do all this - the hard thing I find is what limits to put in place and how when they do find stuff that feels less worthwhile or on the addictive side, which they obviously do. It's actually harder than it sounds I have found to set time limits - particularly with siblings as they play together, look over eachother's shoulders etc. and if your daily schedule isn't completely regular due to other activities. We've gone for making one day at the weekend screen-free but it often feels like that isn't enough.
I use a food analogy when talking about tech consumption with my kids, so I'm fine with occasional junk food so long as they're keeping a well rounded diet and getting exercise. It takes some work to get there, but so far, so good.
We have a pretty standard schedule:
- Tech off at 6pm every night and during dinners
- After school till 6 is basically free for all time if they don't have other obligations, which I count as decompression from the day. They hang out with neighbors too.
- Weekends we allow tech, but only if it's educational programming or they're creating something (arts, crafts, stop motion, game programming), so it's a bit more strict.
I mean, you still have to go and actually learn how to drive once you turn 15-16 before anyone actually gives you a license/their car. People put a lot of time into that. There's also the fact that too small of a child physically can't see out of the front window.
Driving is a much smaller scope than technology. If you restrict the development of technology skills, when you eventually reintroduce technology it will take months or even years to catch up to peers that have been using technology for their entire life.
I don't think it's accurate to call this a form of Luddism, when the whole point of the article is that it is specifically Silicon Valley technologists that have come to the conclusion that this tech is a net negative for children.
The first 3-4 people mentioned in that article were connected to Facebook and Youtube, so "no shit" comes to mind when you think about them having a questionable relationship with tech and their own decision-making. Part of an education for anyone should be to understand why those two sites specifically can be problematic even if sometimes useful.
1. Ban gambling in games. That is, if real money is involved in the transaction, then there should be no element of chance involved. If not that, at least properly enforce gambling laws to games given that gambling is illegal for children anyways.
2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead.
Problem is, policy makers are clueless when it comes to games. These policies have no chance of passing anytime soon.
It’s not just cluelessness that is the problem, it is the motivation, ideology (and influence by funders) of the policy makers.
(Speaking here only about US regulation.) More details in my comment above including a link.
>2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead.
So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating.
Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft.
The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.
I've played mobile games where the option to pay just gets your through the game faster, and in my experience, if the game is any fun, why would I want to spend money to be able to play it less? But if people want that, I guess it's OK.
On the other hand, if the game requires endless grinding, and let's face it, a lot of these games are really just tedious work with a reward system built in, with little or no strategy or even decision making (beyond to play or not play), and you are literally paying to avoid drudgery. I've tried plenty of games where I soon realized it was nothing more than working towards a reward, and there was literally no "game" to it.
Well, if playing the game is drudgery, then it's not a good game. At this point, I would say the market should sort things out, but that doesn't appear to be working. People are clearly playing these games and getting hooked on them.
So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way.
This is one of the things I dislike most about modern games: We used to have cheat codes in single player games which allowed you to skip the BS and have a different kind of fun. Now, we have money that does the same thing.
As a result, new games not only tend not to support cheats, but they also treat the users as hostile, preventing even things like memory read hacks and config file edits. Some of the most fun I've had was editing lua config files to modify how units moved in single player games like Command and Conquer Generals, to change the game entirely.
User hostile, anti-hacky, 'skinner-box-or-nothing' design in single player gaming is only a symptom of the problem, but it's a nasty one.
I'd have to say whatever the waldorf schools are doing is working. My father-in-law's neighbor is an education PhD and her son has been in waldorf schools from the start. He is the most intelligent, wise, and confident kid I have possibly ever met, and he takes care of a wide range of animals at home (horses, chickens, alpaca, pig). He always seems fulfilled and is always excited to talk about what he is learning in school.
His mom who was previously writing and editing textbooks took a job at a public school in a lower income area of the county. She couldn't stay for even a year as she was so upset and dissapointed with the methodology they were using, heavily relying on screens and allowing kids to get away with everything.
I know that I will definitely do everything I can if I have children to get them into the same school.
Have you considered that the kind of parents that raise such children re the kind of kids to put them into waldorf schools, not that waldorf schools do something special.
(waldorf kid here) while that is an obvious confound, the waldorf pedagogy strong encourages children not be exposed to any screen time at all. It goes further: even at the kindergarten level, all toys and costumes are natural materials, you won't find a single piece of plastic among items intended for a child's use. Even the crayons are made of beeswax.
> It goes further: even at the kindergarten level, all toys and costumes are natural materials, you won't find a single piece of plastic among items intended for a child's use. Even the crayons are made of beeswax.
I can't possibly imagine the purpose for these restrictions.
Waldorf is all about fostering imagination, so they try to limit anything that comes with a pre-defined set of ideas that tell you how to interact with it. A plastic firetruck already has an identity; an unfinished wood truck can be anything.
I feel like a contrarian. After deleting twitter and facebook last week, I'm jumping off this smart phone train this week. A factory defect emerged in my smart phone, so I purchased a LTE flip phone. I decided I'm not going back to the smart phone. I know I'm not the average case, but I don't think quitting a smart phone has that much of an impact on the functional aspects of life.
Looking around nearly all adults are addicted - looking at phones whenever they can. The issue is should children wait before they get addicted or get hooked in early.
I still want to build a MOOP - Massive Open Online Psychology. So much of our lives can be monitored that frankly I think they will be - so we may as well turn that to a positive.
84% of parents with well-behaved children went for a walk instead of allowing a second hour of games. Why don't you press this button, it will give a one minute countdown to all devices in your house.
Your coats are in the hall, apart from Jennifer's who dropped hers in her room.
63% of parent whose children dropped clothes on their bedroom floor have successfully used the phrase "Please hang your clothes up dear, the coat fairy does not visit till next month"
Ok, come on. There is way too much "back in my day games weren't that bad" in this thread. Do you guys remember WoW? And Diablo?!?! Talk about a game designed to target addiction centers.
The issue is not games like Fortnite. The issue (as you said) is people letting their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite.
WoW was less of an explicit slot machine than a lot of mobile games. While things like item drops had a random element, it wasn't a "pay once per chance" sort of deal like loot boxes. You just kept killing mobs, and when you got a drop it was great. The impact wasn't all that good anyway, since even the best item would be obsolete in 4-5 levels.
Yawn. When I was six people said video games would rot my brain too. Turns out I had more to worry from my parents generation wrecking the economy and destroying our shared institutions. Cue next moral panic.
To me it seems the focus is wrong. Screens are not the problem. Most people having kids today grew up with screens. The problem is how the screens are used. Mobile devices and many apps have been developed to feed dopamine. This problem isn't isolated to children either.
You can disable or control this addiction pattern. Short, repeating patterns with rewards are how you feed addiction.
Turn off most or all push notifications. Don't mindlessly use devices in short, repetitive ways that reward your brain with dopamine (eg checking social media over and over for new posts). For things like social media, HN, and reddit have specific times of the day you use them and that's it.
Short cycle games like Fortnite feed this pattern too. Put time limits in place. This applies to adults too. It's really easy to play one more game.
> “Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’”
If this is you stop. Give your children freedom. You don't need to track them or know what they're doing 24/7. Being a helicopter parent will hurt them far more in the long run than giving them screen time.
This is no different than when people were buying TVs for the first time in 1956. Those closest to the tech display the greatest fears.
In the 1980s there was hysteria that video games would turn kids into social pariahs due to the bad effects from violence and gore. But shooting a cluster of pixels in 1984 is trivial compared to running the bloods and guts of realism of a PS4. But not much is said anymore.
I think iPads are bad for kids as they become the subject matter, not that what they're trying to do. This is why iPads in education are bad IMO. Kids need to allow their brains to develop the appropriate cognitive functions but things like instance access to info reduce the ability to think, reduce the ability to memorize, and reduce the attention span of kids. In adults it's different as we're already as under/developed as we'll get.
The fact that parents have had somewhat silly concerns about past technologies does not discount current concerns.
I truly believe that the new crop of "psychologically optimized" mobile games and apps have crossed a line in this regard. Books, movies, comics etc were of course designed to be appealing and enjoyable, but were not specifically designed to consume as much of your time as they possibly could.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadSocial media, smartphones, and tablets, are the new smoking.
Same goes with restaurants, especially fancy ones, where diners are sick of having everyone around them snapping pics of their food for instagram.
I would also assume by the time millenials are grampas nobody is gonna be looking at screens but through some AR glasses/lenses
Frankly when I was a kid there were oldschool forums I'd frequent all the time.
I think this isn't a "kid" problem. I see just as many adults glued to their screens.
Youtube can be informative as well, although the majority of it is not. I consider YouTube to be as much of a problem as FB/Instagram, with the caveat that it can, by design, have useful content (which the other two cannot).
I'm still peeved so many people hate video games categorically. Age of Empires & Civilization got me into history as a kid and I checked out dozens of books as a result. Plus, the reason I ended up wanting to learn more about computers was to make games myself.
Having said that, I do think there's a big, big difference between playing games of that sort and... Candy Crush.
Now she's older and retired, and whenever I visit to see what she's doing with her leisure time, she spends most of it on her laptop playing a fish aquarium game or Farmville on Facebook.
FWIW, many public libraries have a small collection of Xbone/PS4 games, so if you got the base hardware, there'd be an opportunity to sample a bunch of things quickly to try different styles and genres.
With that said, I regret in hindsight that I didn't force her to try Animal Crossing back when it came to the Gamecube 15 years ago. It was very much a prototype of the casual gaming trend that's popular now. We might've found some common ground back then before our ages caused role-reversal.
I can't find it now, but there was a heartwarming story on reddit a few months ago about a dad dying of cancer and playing BOTW on a switch in his hospital bed, and bonding with his adult son over it— he never even made it off the Plateau (the initial tutorial section of the game), but was having a ball running around collecting plants, making potions, getting gear, whatever.
Even if the violence level of Assassins Creed or God of War isn't your cup of tea, something like Detroit Become Human or Horizon Zero Dawn could be a good fit.
It is sort of like assuming that someone who likes guitar rock songs would like metal, because both are music.
I share Ms. Stecher's skepticism, though. Games today are fundamentally different from what they were when we were growing up (I'm guessing we're around the same age if you were big into AoE). Some of my friends have kids now, and the games I see them playing make me cringe. They look designed to be addictive - not in the way that playing C&C was addictive, but that they're designed to form real addictive behaviors.
So I don't know what I'll do. It's a hard problem. Banning all screens doesn't seem like the answer. I don't know what is.
Maybe Nintendo will save us.
Today gaming is much broader. Video games have merged with the larger gaming world (gambling). Most iOS games aren’t fun. They aren’t challenging. The are games of random chance at best. Like video poker or a Vegas slot machine you just press a button and hear a “winning” sound, even if you didn’t win.
It’s the weirdest thing when you watch somone playing a game like this and ask them, “Is it fun,” and their answer is, “Not really.”
Video games are awesome, but they provide too much stimulation and instant gratification for little kids. I don't think TV is much better, but video games are way more entertaining than TV.
If my kid was good at Dark Souls I’d be impressed. Hell, if I was good at Dark Souls I’d be impressed with myself.
Flipping heads on a coin 20 times in a row is difficult, but doesn't require thinking. Flipping a water bottle to land is difficult, but doesn't require critical/analytical thinking skills.
With even smaller kids having a smartphone and constant high speed access to the web, of course they are stuck to the screen. Its a never ending source of keeping you entertained and hooked and you might remember, that being a kid can be boring as hell. With the phones so affordable and everyone doing it, it was kind of inevitable of a development. I think we are witnessing the fallout of that development. With kids stuck to screens and as a reaction the ever increasing demand to make the web more childproof to at least have less of a bad conscience if you let your child have unrestricted access.
I dont think individual parents are to blame though, being a parent is tough and you dont want your kid to be the only one without a smart phone. Neither do I think an all or nothing approach is any more sensible. As always the dosage makes the poison, which is why I think approaches like in french schools are reasonable, who banned smartphones inside the school. Having it established, that there are restrictions to smartphone usage might help parents to establish restrictions as well. However, it all boils down to the question of what is appropriate content for children, and whether the internet is intended to be such childproof content. The answer might simply be no, in which case the only real option would be a second child proof web. Sure, it would be close to impossible to enforce, but so is the ban of giving alcohol to minors. Kids will get their hands on a beer sooner or later, but such bans are usefull enough to not give them easy enough access to drink daily.
But thats something we need to decide as a society. We might decide on something else or keep everything as is, but at least we would have made a decisions. Because we shouldnt kid our self, at the moment we simply keep ignoring the issue only interrupted from short periods of senseless actionism. The availability of smartphones have introduced new circumstances and it is no suprise, that without intervening, they had a clear effect.
You're kidding, right? Those RTS, particularly Starcraft, are an exercise in APS more than anything else.
* For non-gamers, APS = actions per second. Being able to issue more commands than your opponent and "micro" (from the word micromanage) your units to tightly control their behavior are a large part of winning Starcraft. It's fascinating to watch high level Starcraft players clicking their mice at an almost inhuman rate.
I think the problem is not screens or technology, it is, as with so many things, greed and the 'marketing' tactics that it breeds.
And let's be honest, as much as I like(d) counter-strike it's not an intellectual game by a long shot.
I remember my internet was so bad I had to add wait;wait;wait between issuing commands to the server or they would be dropped -- have been dealing with latency ever since :)
Oh, you'd be surprised by how much strategy goes into CS at the highest levels of play.
The experience tought me a lot about SSH, compiling, text logs, config files, etc etc etc.
So not for 99.99% of the players.
Although it's not the same subject, this reminds me of a video by Duncan "Thoorin" Shields, a rather controversial and prominent eSports figure: "Gaming is a Waste of Time" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiXfnfBk3BM)
In the video, he talks (among other things) about people justifying the time they spend on video games by the fact that some players win millions by playing the game. Sure some do, but the very vast majority of players don't, and using the 0.01% of players as an exemple is not a good argument in favour of video games.
Firstly, OP basically said that CS is not a strategic game at all, which is completely false.
Secondly, CS can get extremely strategic in the professional scene, but it is also quite strategic at higher ranks in the game's competitive mode ladder. It is also a heavily team-based game: e.g., if one of your team members is not communicating, you are at a huge disadvantage.
But because I didn't feel like the life I'm living now was within reach back then, I lied to myself about the benefits of video games (so people wouldn't bother me or I felt better about spending my time in that way). That's my takeaway from introspecting on the parents and mine similar sounding scenarios.
I'm more annoyed that everytime video games come up, someone brings up Civilization as a strawman to argue.
99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples concerns about video games, it's always the same argument of: raise the benefits of Civilization, share nostalgia about playing it in the past and ignore the actual arguments being presented.
This thread is no exception. This is a place of more intelligent discourse - address the opposition's points, or concede they are valid.
> 99% of games aren't Civilization. We all know people are talking about that 99%. The article even calls out that the parents make exceptions for some educational games/screen time. And yet rather than legitimately engage and address peoples concerns about video games, it's always the same argument of: raise the benefits of Civilization, share nostalgia about playing it in the past and ignore the actual arguments being presented.
> This thread is no exception. This is a place of more intelligent discourse - address the opposition's points, or concede they are valid.
If you had carefully read the comment you’re replying to, you'd have noticed the GP is addressing the claim “video games can be educational”. Not “most video games are educational”, but “video games can be educational”, which Ms. Stecher seems to be denying. Thus it makes perfect sense for the GP to present an example.
So before hypocritically accusing others of “strawmanning”, “unintelligent discourse”, and “ignoring the actual arguments being presented”, please take the time to read what people are actually saying.
And while 99% of games aren’t Civilization, I’d need a citation for the claim that 99% of games aren’t educational, if that’s what you meant to imply.
That said, I don't know where I'd go with Fortnite, Overwatch, the COD lineup, and the rest of the mega titles. You could maybe make an argument for some of them maybe but I don't know what that would look like. They're fun games but mostly seem pretty devoid of anything inspiring or intellectually challenging.
Then there's the ugly... Mobile games categorically seem awful.
Edit: Also, kids should be encouraged to mod games. I think you'll probably find more than a few people who are here right now because they found out how to mess with game files to change what they see on the screen, in effect, the ultimate power and learning experience.
I have warm memories of both. But I didn’t learn anything from Zelda- it was pure entertainment and connection to popular culture. I can still hum the theme song. I did learn some stuff from Carmen Sandiego.
Into The Breach, Starbound, Galactic Civilizations, Celeste... these are all games that require you to think in some way and aren't mindless hack-and-slash or competitive shooter games.
Can they replace going to school? No, but let's not devolve this argument into "most games aren't like Civilization". A lot of the hatred for games is seriously misplaced.
I think video games are beautiful. I just finished Detroit: Become Human, and I've been playing games since Wolf3d came out. I suspect that the digital story telling in many video games is every bit as much "literature" as any novel, poem, or play.
I also personally saw more people drop out of college because of WoW than drugs.
Just an anecdote.
But I don't feel that video games are any better or worse than smoking cannabis or drinking alcohol, and I don't mind feeling a little grated when folks marketed them to my kids in ways that directly attempt to increase their addictive potential.
> At an early age I acquired a taste for novel reading, and indulged it to such an excess, that my mind was enervated, and its relish destroyed for higher and more solid attainments. I feel that I had a capacity for better things; but, under the ascendancy of this idle habit, it sunk into a fatal lethargy, from which neither shame nor ambition could awaken it. The drunkard, in the intervals of sobriety, feels most keenly the evils of intoxication, and, if self love allowed him to be candid, could a tale unfold of disease, of mental and bodily suffering, that would do more for the cause of temperance than all the societies in the world have ever accomplished. The excitement of novel reading is akin to intoxication. When it subsides, it leaves the mind collapsed and imbecile, without the capacity or the inclination for active exertion. I question, whether the confessions of an opium-eater exhibit more striking evidences of the pernicious influence of that stimulating drug on the physical system, than the experience of an habitual novel reader can furnish of the injurious effects, produced on his mental organization by the constant perusal of works of fiction.
Reading novels will make your brains pour out your ears, kid.
Any new form of entertainment will meet resistance.
I'd say it's important to avoid Skinner box style games, but otherwise they can be fun and mentally productive. If I had a kid I'd introduce them to games like Kerbal Space Program, racing games (e.g. Forza Motorsport, Gran Turismo) [1], and maybe some RTS games as they got older. I think it's important to choose what games children. The examples listed above reward learning, discipline, and skill. Not luck or pure time commitment.
So this is kind of a problem. LOTS of people of our generation learned a lot of our history from games like Age of Empires and Civilization. But these sources of information aren't neutral. They had biases baked into their narratives by the simple structure of game design.
The notion of "nations" or "civilizations" as discrete, immutable, and clearly defined categories is actually straight up wrong. The idea of history as the story of competition between these civilizational entities is likewise wrong. But tons of people of our generation think of history this way. They think of technological advancement like a "tech tree" as if all of human progress can be charted on a map with no consideration for alternative ways the world could have shaken out. Monotheism MUST be invented after polytheism, you MUST have invented the wheel in order to invent agriculture, and so on. Overall you're being fed the idea that the world as it is is the only way the world could have been, which is just not the case.
We were being acculturated into a specific (and imperialistic) worldview about what history is and how culture works. But because nobody ever took video games seriously, they never bothered to understand and unpack their influence as pedagogical tools. It's not like a novel or a movie where the morals and themes of the narrative are there to make an intentional point. With games the logic of needing to have a game to play and goals and objectives to meet winds up transmitting themes and morals that people either don't intend or don't bother thinking very hard about.
And some games really can be educational, or develop thinking skills, etc. I wonder what game critics would say about a child spending hours a day playing Chess.
But all chess and no soccer is not a good mix. All Fortnite and no chess is not a good mix. In fact, I seriously question the value of any Fortnite or Minecraft. As entertainment, a little bit isn't worse than many other entertainments. But too much is too much.
And as far as entertainment goes, I'm tired of yet another Marvel movie where we can blow up as many things as possible in the most spectacular ways and never even think about consequences. I know it's goofy to worry about real life when we are talking about mythological characters and aliens. But I do think that we spend a huge amount of time and money to train youth to disconnect from real life. If somebody dies on the other side of town, it isn't real so it doesn't matter. If you have to kill 100 opponents to get to the princess, it's all part of the game.
But many years ago we played cops and robbers and killed each other, too. Or cowboys and Indians. And we argued about whether somebody should be dead or not because of how many times they'd been shot. And we graduated from pointing fingers to rubberbands to add some realism. Then paintballs.
So I suppose the human brain is capable of sorting it all out.
But I think it is healthy to feed the brain some balance. Put down the controller and join a service project now and then. Adopt a highway, or visit a care center. Connect with real people and remind your brain that video games aren't real. And stealing cars isn't the only way to win the game. In fact, it's just wrong.
In this case I think it's happening because parents don't have as much time to spend with their children as they have in past generations and screens are a convenient way of keeping a child occupied in a safe way.
It's hard for parents to fight off all these temptations.
Edit: Today parents spent twice as much time with kids as 50 years ago. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
When I was roaming at as kid it was to my other friends houses in my neighborhood and everywhere in between. I live in a fairly large neighborhood now and we only know one other boy in the neighborhood who is my son's age. It's unfortunate for him.
At the same time, my daughter has several friends in the neighborhood her age and they play together all the time either at our house or the house of another parent who works from home.
That said, when I was really little I watched a video of my 4 year old birthday party so many times I memorized it. My mom called it "the best babysitter." Even today I can play that video in my head.
Speaking of isolation, father's time may rise, mother's time may rise as well, and yet the time spent with parents may decrease too: think of the multiplication of single mothers (and to a lesser degree single fathers).
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”
Over a huge ominous image. You are dead on about 80s D&D/satanism scare mongering.
Well for one, and this is a big one, many games implement specific features such as character progression, rewards and even loot boxes that are specifically made to keep you playing. They directly trigger dopamine reward centers in the brain and are very much tied to addiction. Loot boxes especially are literally just gambling.
Youtube kids is also all kinds of messed up. Videos created using algorithms specifically to draw the attention of kids and sometimes contain very disturbing images and themes.
This article is a good overview of how Youtube is not a good choice for kids: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/17/peppa-pig...
Here is a video on Jake Paul (and many big youtubers) and how he markets HARD to kids while also having videos containing very inappropriate material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c
On top of this, in terms of TV/Youtube vs books, there is a big difference in terms of it's effect on language, communication, and development. Also, TV/Youtube is a passive form of learning, reading books is active:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/books-vs-tv-how-they-stac_b_1...
Many library cards for <18 year-olds didn’t allow certain adult books to be checked out. Books are mostly not algorithmically/peer generated. Even if you are addicted to some book series you will eventually finish it.
It would be nice if there was a content filter that parents could install that wasn’t curated based on someones opinion but worked more like Waze — routing you around places where everyone was stuck.
Um, do we know that? Especially about TV?
>"We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand."
A 6 year old's brain has no chance against a team of trained data scientists. We all know this.
This larger issue of screen time and tech addiction will only continue to grow. At some point maybe a decade or two it will be a smaller version of the concerns about the tobacco industry. But because it's the brain and not the lungs it will play out differently.
People approach mental and physical health differently. Similarly dopamine addiction and chemical dependence are also treated differently in people's minds. One is often viewed as a moral failing the other as more "uncontrollable".
As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact. It's not "just a tool" and never will be.
- Everything has a potential of being addictive, but we focus so much on drugs since they have some especially addicting properties that aren't present in other habits.
- We're stuck with Enlightenment age thinking such as "tabula rasa" and we attribute too much human behavior to free will, an ill-defined term that nobody whom I ask can provide a comprehensive answer to.
McDonalds has marketed to children for the better part of a century (and it has followed many people into adulthood).
The medium has changed, but the practices are the same as Edward Bernays and Anna Freud cooked up so many decades ago (Sigmund was never happy with the way his family members used his psychoanalysis research to sell products, even though they used it to help sell the English version of his book).
There is more of it today, yes. Kids don't want toys, and hence we see Toys-R-Us disappear .. they do want games, and it's pretty important for people in tech to teach kids about how absolutely atrocious in-game purchases are and how you should NEVER participate in that rubbish and discourage everyone else from doing so in the hopes it eventually goes away.
But it won't, because there are always people who don't know, or even with full knowledge, can't help those addictions.
It's a complicated problem, but current phones/tech are just the medium.
But the medium can also be the message.
But the addiction component wasn't built-in the way it is now. Everyone remembers "Saturday morning cartoons with cereal" because there was a set time and place for that event. After the episode ended, it didn't auto-play the next episode, or recommend 5 highly similar shows based on your "viewing history".
Consider that "bingeing" is a commonly accepted term when it refers to consuming an entire season of a show in one sitting and companies like Netflix churn out TV shows with a focus on this "bingeability", because that's their differentiator compared to regular TV.
Nobody has actually believed in that for decades, and it certainly isn't present in the public consciousness.
Then they give us "Screen Time" and Tim Cook talks about giving people the tools to be aware of how much they're using their phones and to make their own decisions about it.
If drug companies said "We're discontinuing Advil for your headaches and replacing all painkillers with small dosage opiates, but we'll give you an app to count how much you're taking and you can make your own decisions" we'd immediately jump down their throats.
Apple discontinues the iPhone SE, standardizes on a comparatively gigantic 6.1 inch screen size for their mainstream phone model, and tells us "It's fine. We gave people a new app so they won't get addicted to their phones."
I don't think it's fine. Apple's just in denial about it because the design team likes big shiny things, premium phones print money, and users keep on buying them because we collectively don't have a grip on the downsides.
Just give me a damn phone that I can call a car or text friends on, I don't want to or need to spend hours consuming media on a giant shiny screen. But if I get a giant shiny screen foisted on me, I know it's going to happen.
But like you said, if someone's living on their phone too much, we treat it like their own moral failing. The manufacturers that made the phones this way and the software companies that deliberately A/B tested their engagement stats to death to rope you in as hard as possible and sell more ads? Nah, not their fault. It's these irresponsible phone users not owning up to their own faults.
My iPhone adds incredible value to my life and I find screen time very useful in helping me control my own urges to over consume enjoyable content. I don’t think people at Apple are intentionally selling you cigarettes or opiate like products.
If parents can’t understsnd spending too much time on phones or infront of TV is potentially harmful then it’s common sense we’ve lost. Nothing else.
Take it easy.
Smartphones absolutely add a lot of convenience and value. But, in my opinion, most of that value doesn't come from having deliberately addictive media consumption available at your fingertips at half a second's notice. Yet that's what phones are being optimized for.
Does calling an Uber need a 6" screen? Or voice navigation instructions in my car? Shooting photos and videos? GPS tracking my runs?
Most of the things that bigger screens enable are things that I'm trying to minimize, so making these big inviting smartphone screens is no longer adding value to my life. But that's the only phone Apple will sell me. No, it's probably not as bad as opiates. But "not as bad as opiates" is a pretty low bar to set for "should I be OK with this?"
The new Palm small phone thing is a nice idea, except that it's a companion accessory to go with a bigger phone. So close: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18022382/...
What I really want is a small phone like that to go with an iPad. With a full size tablet, carrying it and sitting down to use it two handed are enough of a barrier that I can't absentmindedly find myself sucked into a reddit hole.
Maybe that's Apple's plan to sort this out. Make next year's iPhone Max Plus so big that you have to carry it around in your backpack and can't make a habit of staring at it all the time.
Giant screens aren't being foisted on you, you go to the store and pay for them. You could buy a featurephone if you wanted.
Having the screen be smaller makes those software products suck enough that I don't like using them for extended periods, it's a defense mechanism against hyper optimized advertising engagement apps.
Personally I think that's a feature.
My other problem with Apple that they're only interested in the high end $750+ for their phones. The SE was comparatively a steal at $400, and nothing about the new ones is $250 more impressive. Can't be securely held one handed and adds a big screen that I don't want, so I'm not excited about paying more for it.
Also both those phones have e-ink displays.
It reminds me of the Colonel Sanders scene in So I Married an Ax Murderer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TPMS6tGOACo
Unfortunately Apple has decided that's the only car they're going to make.
If I understand you correctly, it’s the phone fault people are addicted to bad content? The phone is just too easy to use, too high quality that unwitting victims are just defenseless? If we are talking kids, that’s a parent problem, but if we are talking adults, then it’s a problem of self-responsibility. Grocery stores have plenty of ice cream for sale: it’s up to you to not buy and eat it all the time. Grown ups ought to act like it instead of blaming shiny objects of their own obsessions. Adults aren’t victims of their phones.
A lot of those behaviors, I currently have trouble with at full-size computers. I can absentmindedly browse cat pictures on reddit for a couple of hours. But I have to sit down at my computer to do that, I can't do it comfortably on a 4" phone screen. And I like it that way.
Put that comfortable time-wasting computer in my pocket where it follows me everywhere and I'm about 99% certain that I'm have a problem.
I'd love to know if someone's studied this more rigorously.
I’ve felt withdrawal symptoms for caffeine, and I can only imagine it is worse for stronger drugs. Maybe this addiction is of the same sort but the withdrawal is so slight that I don’t notice?
It's not the end of the world, if I end up having problems with it on my next bigger phone I'm more than capable of deleting the problematic apps. I've already done that with Facebook on my SE.
Even so, I'm also not excited about the ever climbing costs for new "upgrades" that I don't want. SE was a great size and had the top of the line camera from the 6s. Now if I want the smallest screen and the best camera, the price went from $400 to $1000. Welp.
The really short version is that there's some science that suggests that periods of boredom increase creativity. By constantly keeping active with your phone, we're losing this "boredom time".
Personally, I've made a habit of occasionally just doing nothing every now and then. Put the phone away; don't listen to anything. It's actually great for my commute home (I take a bus). I can just sit/stand and not do anything and just relax for a few minutes on the way home.
Personally, I think the biggest problem here isn't that kids are spending a lot of time looking at their screens. It's that parents _aren't_ spending a lot of time engaging with their kids about the content.
When a screen is used to distract a child - or anyone,really - instead of engage them, that's where the problem arises.
Hell, I'd argue that many 40-50 year old brains clearly don't stand a chance against a trained data scientist.
Look, these people are not working to protect you. They're working to create addictions and deepen existing ones. Frankly I think the medical types should lose their licenses for violation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm" indeed. Making devices and software more ADDICTIVE, deliberately creating and encouraging mental illness (addiction) is a disgraceful violation of this oath.
This is an open secret in the video game world, to the point that some COUNTRIES are banning things like 'loot boxes' because they are naked gambling.
The problem began when users became the product being sold. Now the companies feel that they have a right to your mind and eyes, and are not above fostering or even creating clinical addiction to ensure they have access.
I lived in Russia during the time when slot machines were literally standing in the open on the streets, and yes, mentally infirm people were wasting themselves on them. Normal people did not.
It requires one to completely lack logic reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a slot machine is to waste his or her time and money.
The same way, it requires a particular lack of basic logical reasoning to not to understand that the the purpose of a smartphone app throwing 20 bling bling popups per second on you isn't different.
You don't need to be a genius to understand that clickfarming app must be removed, and to do so.
My former high school classmate who did not manage to leave Russia is running a typical "smartphone fixer" kiosk. He said few years ago that the most common request he gets from people is to "remove Google nagware and lock, block or delete Google Pay" so their child will never ever buy anything "in that Internet thing"
At least Chinese and Russian parents understood long ago that Google's business is all about "pocket slot machines (this is how people really call smartphones there)." Why wouldn't American parents do that too?
Casino — a business specifically mathematically engineered to make sure that nobody wins against a casino, to maximize your losses, and to make money from it. By the very definition, nobody "wins" against it. Yet, some people still come and play.
Same thing with google pocket slot machine — the very reason they link the game to your bank account is to milk money from you, or god forbid, your children.
I'd argue a prime-of-their-life 34 year old _data scientist_ doesn't stand a change _against their own algorithms_ if they immerse themselves. It's addiction.
We need to stop acting like it is "weak-minded" people (children is a dog-whistle for this) who are susceptible to tech addiction.
The idea of "standing a chance" is literally like saying you can consciously control your dopamine receptors to actively limit dopamine uptake in your brain.
I asked what she did... a game designer at Zynga.
If I see myself spending too much time on my phone, for instance, I'll put it away for a while.
This is ridiculous. I mean, utterly and completely ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. This all happened by chance, not by some miracle of data science. For every product that captured 6 year old brains, there are millions of failed products that did not capture any brains at all. For every claim of "hey, I just tried to stimulate dopamine addiction in my successful table game" there are a million people who tried to do the same thing and failed. This is just a ridiculous narrative that uses post hoc reasoning and ignores survivorship bias to try to justify some parochial view of what makes children become "productive" adults.
No human is going to be able to predict what will be good and bad for child development except in very narrow cases around health and nutrition (and even there we're wrong 92% of the time when we stray out of those narrow bands). The world of tomorrow is not the same as the world of today and each generation will adapt and thrive in their own way. We'll keep stumbling through trying different crazy approaches, each with drawbacks and advantages, and occasionally pushing for the "one true" approach that will be discredited before we ever get to figure out if it works.
> As much as we want it to be true, technological advancement can never be separated from social/ethical impact
Yeah, sure, of course. But responsibility for social/ethical impact is almost zero in all cases except as a retrospective tool, and trying to predict social/ethical impact is a suckers game because this is simply not possible. This idea that we can somehow have a simplified model of how humans behave and that such a model has any validity at all is a common one in marketing and social science research, but is clearly fallacious.
A/B testing and measuring -- are you kidding me? That's how you go from 35% conversion to 36% conversion, not from 2 daily active users to 1e7 daily active users. Refinement only works if you're exploring a space that has productive alternatives in low dimensions, which is almost never the case. No amount of "progressive refinement" is going to turn Farmville into Candy Crush or Candy Crush into Fortnite. You have to look no further than those examples to see what I mean -- "Oh, look, Zygna has figured out a formula to hook users" followed by "Zygna can't repeat its success".
Zynga had repeated success, untill market saturated and other developers caught up. That does not make these tactics not working, that just makes them so common that they are not such a huge advantage anymore.
A developer of traditional games might think, "How can I make this game better in an aesthetic, or an educational sense?" Or, "How can I make this game a better FPS than the ones before?"
A developer of another game might think, "I want to make money, let me survey existing games and read psych literature and create the next billion dollar game. I don't care what form the game takes, or what players get out of it."
The claim is not that game developers for each game are creating an addictive game from scratch by A-B testing, but rather exactly what you said, that they're AB testing for smaller improvements in eyeball-retention, spending, and addictiveness, because all they care about are those metrics which drive profits (or valuation which can be converted into profits).
That a set of conscious design choices, on its own, isn't sufficient for extreme addictiveness doesn't change the fact that those conscious design choices are necessary, and those choices are being examined, analyzed, and documented by other game devs and by psychologists. So, of course you can take all the known lessons and apply them to a brand new game concept and fail horribly, but if your game is a success on other grounds and you mined other games and the literature for addictive ideas, you are much more likely to have a billion dollar super-addictive game than you would have been 20 or 30 years ago.
Nobody fell down the stairs and discovered that the tumble accidentally linked their KPIs to engagement metrics.
And a thousand of those .1%'ers will try a second time, and the .1% that succeed that time will be hailed as geniuses and people will set about copying their open plan offices and terrible management styles in the hopes of replicating their success.
But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time.
In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights. Or climbmountain->climbhighermountain...
In games, you do that in 1/100 the time and effort. Tap a few buttons and "you win!!!!"
A sweeping statement to the effect of "people don't understand addiction" is basically malicious and I accuse you of being the inventor of gamification or one of their PR folk.
Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.
Nothing is binary; I'm not going to say "either leveling helps a game all the time or it doesn't". Sometimes leveling-up mechanics help a game, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it alienates one set of users and attracts another, and there's no magic formula for when it helps and when it doesn't, and the nature of the leveling-up mechanic itself and how fun that is can vary in effectiveness dramatically. It's like having the user's avatar wear a funny hat.
Technology will always be "just a tool." By its nature, it is morally neutral. The use of technology for good or for evil reflects the morality of the people deploying it.
Explosives, baseball bats, water, radios, software. All have been used for noble purposes and for evil. That does not impart morality to the technology.
By that narrow definition, phones contain more than technology: they contain policy. A phone loaded with addictive games embodies a policy of maximizing screen time. A phone with clickbait on its lock screen is designed to take up your time and bathe your retinas in bullshit. While the transistors are neutral, the policy is harmful.
As it happens, these policies are often set by people that mostly work on technology, so they get lumped together. From outside, people see the technology industry being responsible for all of it.
To be fair, the comparison is applicable, but not the best. I think it's more akin to slot-machines and other forms of gambling, themselves heavily regulated (though maybe not for much longer [0]).
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/14/politics/sports-betting-ncaa-...
Here is the report on Technology Addiction: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/technology-addicti...
Here is our other research reports covering a wide range of media/technology topics effecting children, families and teachers: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research?page=1
(And, to parents here who aren't familiar with their movie reviews and other resources, check them out: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ )
Movie and TV reviews have gotten so hung up on performance, star power and visuals that they give us parents very little idea about content. They’re useless in many cases.
I feel like common sense media is an amazing tool for those of us that are concerned with the content in media and helps parents make better decisions.
Since I work from home on a computer all day, it seemed wrong to send mixed messages about screen usage. One trick we use is to set Alexa timers when starting screen time with our preschool and kindergarteners. You can argue with mom and dad, but Alexa is implacable. Also, the play room must be cleaned up and homework done, which seems to provide the “privilege, not a right” context we are looking for. It helps we have far better behaved kids in general that I have any right to expect. I blame my wife.
Echoing some of the existing comments: Games and sites today are vastly different than they were 20 years ago.
Games like Civilization, Quake, Diablo, C&C, Mortal Kombat, Tony Hawk etc... were definitely addictive.
But modern games like Fortnite and Clash of Clans are not engineered the same way. They are specifically designed to function like a slot machine.
I was an avid "gamer" growing up. I wasn't always the most responsible with it. Probably overdid it a lot. But I can see with my own child, this is a different ball-game altogether.
Not sure what the fix is either, other than ruthless enforcement of quotas.
I work in the gambling industry, making literally slot machines.
Slot machines are heavily regulated and there is a lot of "engagement" tricks that can not be used in the gambling industry. The kind of trick that Candy Crush will use.
The dangerous side of gambling is for people that think that they can "win money". But the games themselves are kind of boring by design. Regulations force us to make them boring. (And that is a good thing, I will not work on this industry otherwise).
The future of on-line games and mobile games is regulation. Micro-payments, push-notifications, etc. cannot be used without limits. People have right to their mental health more than companies have to higher profits.
Is that a state-by-state regulation? A federal regulation? And does the regulating code specifically mention physical machines?
Thanks in advance for satisfying my curiosity.
I can answer for the US: Games aren’t subject to regulation because for the past few decades one party has made it their goal to destroy regulatory power to allow the wealthy to enrich themselves.
One party in the US has been completely captured by billionaires and corporations. This started in the 1970s around the time the Koches founded the Koch Institute (now Cato), and the Scaife, Bradley, Olin, and other rich families started using big money to influenfe politics. Continued through Reagan, his tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks (including rolling back Fairness Doctrine which allowed Limbaugh to fill the airwaves with propaganda). Then Gingrich, then Murdoch who kicked off Fox News. Now the US has one party that is a coalition of billionaires for funding and white identity politics for votes— and the only thing that party cares about is the wealth of their billionaire donors.
We’re not going to have any regulations to protect people until we fix US politics and media.
(Good read on the history by respected historian: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/50/divided-we-stand/ )
Getting into the concrete example of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, on the other hand...
What video games have to do with "white idntity politics" is beyond me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merch...
Both parties are heavily influenced by and for the rich. But only one party is obsessed with identity politics, and it's not the one you're implying.
Your side has far more to lose than the side of Fox News and Limbaugh if the fairness doctrine were to return. Because for every one of them, there are 10 media sources slanted in the other direction.
In the US you can't build a slot machine that accepts money and dispenses tokens that have value. That's often how things operate in Japan, but the same model is generally illegal in the US.
It's questionable if spending real money on virtual currency to buy "loot boxes" that randomly give things of value is legal. And if that's legal, it's not obvious if changing the rate of rewards is legal.
EX: People buying WoW gold.
IIRC, Blizzard doesn't profit from that directly and explicitly prohibits it in their ToS.
I could go on, but saying it's virtual is not necessarily enough to protect these companies.
If the state wins, it could result in an expansion of regulation of this type of mobile game.
Here's an article with some more detail.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/game-show-network-hit-online-g...
The regulations were designed for casinos before video games became so popular and way before mobile games and micro-transactions even existed.
Example of gambling regulation for New Jersey: https://www.nj.gov/oag/ge/docs/Regulations/MergedRegulations...
> Is that a state-by-state regulation?
Yes. Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania allow gambling. But I guess that at any moment local or federal regulations could be created.
> And does the regulating code specifically mention physical machines?
There is specific regulations for casinos, for on-line gambling, for jackpots, sports betting, etc. e.g. CHAPTER 69O INTERNET AND MOBILE GAMING from the linked PDF
Example of definitions:
* "Authorized Internet or mobile game" means any game authorized by the Division for use with an Internet or mobile gaming system.
* "Client terminal" means any device that is used to interact with a gaming system for the purpose of conducting server-based gaming activity.
* "Data warehouse" means a system of one or more servers located in New Jersey for the purpose of storing transactions received from the primary gaming equipment.
* "Dormant account" means an Internet gaming account, which has had no patron initiated activity for a period of one year.
Slot machines are regulated because they fall under the category of gambling and video games don't meet the legal definition of gambling. (Although, I'd agree that it's starting to seem more and more as if they should.)
There's a pretty good explanation of the criteria at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... but the brief summary (from the article) is "Gambling consists of three elements: consideration, prize and chance. If any one of those three elements is missing, the game is simply not gambling (Rose, 1986))."
By looking at those criteria, there's a lot of ways video game companies can defend themselves. The strongest one IMO being that, from a legal standpoint, there is no prize. You "win" things or get drops but the TOS of all games say that the player does not own them (or anything else in the game) in any legal sense. The analogy would be more like a carnival ride where you are paying for the experience rather than the expectation of getting anything material in return.
Probably because the problem is not perceived as bad enough to get regulated yet. The industry was getting dangerously close to this when there were all those cases of kids racking up huge bills through in-app purchases on iPhones, but that has died down enough that it's not on the radar anymore. I think if the games industry gets too aggressive again, regulation will sweep in.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-25-now-belgium-de...
I am talking about basic stuff like:
* Push notifications reminding you that you should play the game.
* Let you win some money but then lose it unless you make a payment.
* A bar that fills faster at the beginning and then starts to fill slower. So it looks like you are closer to a goal that you actually are.
* Show a deck of cards that instead of the 52 standard cards, expected by the players, has another configuration that makes you lose more often.
etc.
Any mobile games video - like https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014450/Behavioral-Economics-a... - has a lot of forbidden techniques for on-line gambling.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8544303/casino-slot-machin...
Not because they are boring, but because they are less addictive than they can be. So they are "boring" in comparison. If we were allowed to use all tricks that mobile and on-line games do it will be really bad for society as it will create more addiction.
It is like Coca-Cola. Even that so much sugar makes it problematic, I find it better that at least does not include cocaine like it did in 1891. Does that make Coca-Cola good? No, it does not. But I find that makes it a lesser evil. Even that cocaine-less Coke is more "boring" nowadays, it is the right thing to do.
I have seen people putting shit ton of money into those machines and they lost easily 100,- Euros per Hour?
I'm sure there is always a white/gray/black thing going on but i do put a slot machine at the very end of black not in gray or white at all.
Coca Cola and the water stealing and the addiction is btw. an additional example for something not that good, it does not make a slot machine any better.
But yes, I agree with your point in the general sense!
Or just not letting kids get into those games. At some point my wife pointed out that I had a problem disengaging from certain types of games (for me it was MOBAs specifically). They are super-addictive.
It never really got in the way of anything and if I had anything else to do I would go do that, so it wouldn't really qualify as "addiction" in a DSM sense. But the issue is what it does when you don't have anything to do. They have a way of swallowing up basically ALL of your free time. And I didn't feel happier or better off for having spent my time that way, it felt more like compulsion than desire. I see a lot of young people on the internet being enslaved by compulsion like this, engaging in somewhat problematic consumption of video-games, porn, or social media.
I decided to just uninstall and stop playing those sorts of games, but I was also a grown-up with life experiences, hobbies, social connections, and responsibilities before I ever started. I knew what I was missing with "real life" by letting myself sink into that so it was easy enough for me to stop, I had other, more edifying sources of dopamine to go after. Kids, often times, either don't have enough freedom of movement to go do those things or just plain don't know what else there is out there. It's the same reason drug and gambling addiction tends to take hold among people with depression.
In the old days, the focus was on playability. Games were fun. But a new genre has emerged particularly in mobile gaming that does something strange: it compels play even when it isn't fun anymore. In the old days when a game stopped being fun, you would stop playing. But these games, when they stop being fun, you make an in-game purchase...
But I've seen so many similar games where the game itself wasn't fun at all, even though the rewards were still enticing. The Simpsons Tapped Out comes to mind. And in those cases I realized the game play itself wasn't interesting or fun and quickly quit. Basically, any game that has timers in it will fall into this category because the timers are there solely to make sure you keep coming back and have a compelling reason to do it often.
In 'old school' game you receive reward after period of effort. You have to perform better and push yourself. Game is designed to be fun but selling the game once is where the money is. Good game is measured by the short peak experiences, not by the average feeling.
Another (more advanced but evil) way to design addictive game is when it the difficulty and reward frequencies are optimized to keep you playing for as long as possible. You are offered cheats or the difficulty automatically adjusts to optimize the time you spend with the game. The goal of the game is stretch the interest over time just above the threshold where you would quit. In the end the game just removes lows from the boring moments.
Likewise, it's fine if he wants to watch the videos we've taken of our family, it helps him to remember relatives we don't get to see very often.
Conversely, I have ZERO tolerance for advertising. I am increasingly convinced that marketing is the source of a majority of modern society's ills and I don't want it anywhere near his brain until he's able to properly comprehend its purpose.
I'm not a gamer so I don't know much about Zelda, but the sort of hypnotic hold some Youtube/Insta personalities have on kids is astonishing. They will parrot their talking points, talk about them relentlessly with friends and buy whatever they're shilling, be it makeup, game guides, phone skins, what have you.
Reading: 13:19
Social: 10:27
Education: 2:02
This is despite trying to cut down my use.
and then it drops off into under 10 minutes on various reference apps.
The issues raised here seem to not be related to glowing LCDs, but rather particular apps and behaviors in those apps that lead to addictive and problematic behavior.
"Screens" is even broader than saying things like "the internet is bad". The latter statement already sounds unhelpful because everyone has a better understanding of just how diverse of a platform "the internet" is.
Personally, if I had to select one "easy avenue" to ban or restrict, it would be not screens but internet access. This has the side effect of putting the parent in charge of acquiring new content.
1. We moderate how much time is spent on screens. Each day he probably spends a total of an hour or less in front of any screen (iPad/iPhone/Projector).
2. He does watch some (highly filtered) educational YouTube content, but we also make sure he's playing educational and interactive games, like building, drawing, and learning Chinese (we're a bilingual household). He also has lots of books and we read to him actively, he participates in sports, we take him outside to playgrounds and parks, do arts and crafts with him, and he helps us with chores around the house (in a fun way), etc.
3. When he is playing a game or watching a video, we're there participating. We're monitoring and filtering the content he's viewing, and we're actively adding to the educational experience by talking about the things he's seeing and doing with him.
Technology is a tool, and how it's used matters. Outright banning it means we're missing out on its potential benefits, and also we miss the opportunity to teach him from an early age how to use it properly. I fear a child who hasn't learned to cope with technology for 13 years and is then suddenly introduced to it will struggle far more.
It was a little bit of a struggle at first, but now when we tell him it's time to turn off the iPad, he usually will do it himself without fuss, and he increasingly will turn it off without even prompting and move on to another activity like reading or drawing.
This is also one of my bigger fears. There is a strange mix of people in my generation (born 1990's), who are non-techies, and are either responsible with their internet use or display worrying signs of unhealthy internet presence. Even though tech has been around for some time now.
Some, I realised, were introduced to technology rather late. A fun example is how some people would be offended if I were to call them "gamers". They don't own PC games, don't own a console, but they spend their entire commutes and more playing mobile games.
It really doesn't if you use the tools available.
For instance Amazon FreeTime (https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-FreeTime-Unlimited-Monthly-Sub...) gives you a curated library that is appropriate for the age range you set.
There's no microtransaction apps or other nonsense like that.
You can even set limits like "30 minutes app time per day", "30 minutes book time", "30 minutes video time", etc.
You can also remove or add specific apps you want your kid to have access to.
Honestly it's wonderful to give a young kid that level of autonomy and access to information. You should still pay attention to what they do. But there's no need to give them access to the open internet or to curate everything yourself.
That being said, I found this anecdote to be particularly... unsettling.
> “I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
It's tough to explain away the emotional desire for something that was manufactured to be cool and addictive
I view tech similarly to how I view sex-ed in 2018: it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen (teen pregnancies, stds, etc...). Your kids are going to grow up to be adults with bad tech habits if you don't start teaching them how to use it responsibly and protect themselves early.
Help them find good content. Have days where no tech is allowed on the weekends, but don't keep them away from it completely. Give them time to unwind with tech and choose stuff themselves, just as you probably do. Teach them about privacy and the problems that can come up with tech so they know how to deal with it themselves. Teach them that too much tech isn't good for you and you need to do other things too.
Monitor what they're watching and make sure you talk to them when things get out of hand. Expect to have some occasional issues, and treat them like you would an adult: are they sad? Is something going on at school? Is the tech affecting their ability to do other things at the time?
Eventually your kid is going to use tech. Teach them early how to be responsible with it.
We have a pretty standard schedule:
- Tech off at 6pm every night and during dinners
- After school till 6 is basically free for all time if they don't have other obligations, which I count as decompression from the day. They hang out with neighbors too.
- Weekends we allow tech, but only if it's educational programming or they're creating something (arts, crafts, stop motion, game programming), so it's a bit more strict.
YMMV, of course.
it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen
How about driving technology? Children receive abstinence-only education on driving until they turn 15 or 16.
There's plenty of precedent for young children being unable to safely & responsibly handle certain things.
Was it Luddism that I wasn't allowed to operate a table saw when I was eleven?
1. Ban gambling in games. That is, if real money is involved in the transaction, then there should be no element of chance involved. If not that, at least properly enforce gambling laws to games given that gambling is illegal for children anyways.
2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead.
Problem is, policy makers are clueless when it comes to games. These policies have no chance of passing anytime soon.
So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating.
Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft.
The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.
On the other hand, if the game requires endless grinding, and let's face it, a lot of these games are really just tedious work with a reward system built in, with little or no strategy or even decision making (beyond to play or not play), and you are literally paying to avoid drudgery. I've tried plenty of games where I soon realized it was nothing more than working towards a reward, and there was literally no "game" to it.
Well, if playing the game is drudgery, then it's not a good game. At this point, I would say the market should sort things out, but that doesn't appear to be working. People are clearly playing these games and getting hooked on them.
So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way.
As a result, new games not only tend not to support cheats, but they also treat the users as hostile, preventing even things like memory read hacks and config file edits. Some of the most fun I've had was editing lua config files to modify how units moved in single player games like Command and Conquer Generals, to change the game entirely.
User hostile, anti-hacky, 'skinner-box-or-nothing' design in single player gaming is only a symptom of the problem, but it's a nasty one.
His mom who was previously writing and editing textbooks took a job at a public school in a lower income area of the county. She couldn't stay for even a year as she was so upset and dissapointed with the methodology they were using, heavily relying on screens and allowing kids to get away with everything.
I know that I will definitely do everything I can if I have children to get them into the same school.
I can't possibly imagine the purpose for these restrictions.
84% of parents with well-behaved children went for a walk instead of allowing a second hour of games. Why don't you press this button, it will give a one minute countdown to all devices in your house.
Your coats are in the hall, apart from Jennifer's who dropped hers in her room.
63% of parent whose children dropped clothes on their bedroom floor have successfully used the phrase "Please hang your clothes up dear, the coat fairy does not visit till next month"
The issue is not games like Fortnite. The issue (as you said) is people letting their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite.
You can disable or control this addiction pattern. Short, repeating patterns with rewards are how you feed addiction.
Turn off most or all push notifications. Don't mindlessly use devices in short, repetitive ways that reward your brain with dopamine (eg checking social media over and over for new posts). For things like social media, HN, and reddit have specific times of the day you use them and that's it.
Short cycle games like Fortnite feed this pattern too. Put time limits in place. This applies to adults too. It's really easy to play one more game.
> “Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’”
If this is you stop. Give your children freedom. You don't need to track them or know what they're doing 24/7. Being a helicopter parent will hurt them far more in the long run than giving them screen time.
In the 1980s there was hysteria that video games would turn kids into social pariahs due to the bad effects from violence and gore. But shooting a cluster of pixels in 1984 is trivial compared to running the bloods and guts of realism of a PS4. But not much is said anymore.
I think iPads are bad for kids as they become the subject matter, not that what they're trying to do. This is why iPads in education are bad IMO. Kids need to allow their brains to develop the appropriate cognitive functions but things like instance access to info reduce the ability to think, reduce the ability to memorize, and reduce the attention span of kids. In adults it's different as we're already as under/developed as we'll get.
https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer...
More recently, parents used to complain about teenage girls locking themselves in their rooms to talk on the phone with their friends.
I truly believe that the new crop of "psychologically optimized" mobile games and apps have crossed a line in this regard. Books, movies, comics etc were of course designed to be appealing and enjoyable, but were not specifically designed to consume as much of your time as they possibly could.