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You'll need to pay to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character beyond the first free redo
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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'Playing games is healthy' will not counter the fact that points aren't real. Games make you... care about... arbitrary worthless crap. No general defense of the benefits of play will make the made-up goals... real. It's a game.
Oh, so you're actually fine with legal consequences for manipulative antipatterns; you're just struggling to maintain a prior conclusion as the slow realization undermines any consistent rationale. Good. Keep thinking about it. Hey, you know which other mobile-trash gimmicks inflate the price of frivolous nonsense with zero marginal cost? All of them.
That's a super subjective take. One person's trash is another person's treasure. Who's to say your collection of beanie babies holds any more value than my collection of achievements in Steam? It's entirely subjective.
Yes, because at a certain point, manipulation constitutes an initiation of force against a user. That point isn't "paid character respecs" though, but a consistent pattern of putting people under pressure so they have to make a decision before they can get complete information. If they allow refunds within a generous enough amount of time (i.e. if you drunkenly buy a bunch of cosmetics or something then request a refund when sober), then it's probably fine. However, I believe these types of rules should be set by court precedent, not legislatures, legislatures merely define broadly what constitutes "force" in a variety of contexts to give judges and juries something to build off of.
That's still shuffling unrelated definitions of "value."
You understand Achievements have no intrinsic worth. The fact you've been made to care about them anyway, is what I am talking about. You were made to care about collecting a thousand unicorn skulls, because the game dangled a cleverly-named merit badge for doing so. Dollar value: zilch. Totally arbitrary nonsense, could've been anything else.
Kinda weird to frame it with the non-aggression principle, but sure, yes, good. These systems exploit cognitive vulnerabilities to shortcut our decision-making and trick people out of real money. Generally for things that cost the seller nothing... like editing your own character on your own computer. Any game taking real money is inevitably a collection of these abusive antipatterns, for that kind of manufactured desire.
Nitpicking individual cases is letting the trees obscure the forest - these are game studios. Finding novel ways to manipulate customers is their job. Only a sweeping solution could possibly work.
For me, yeah, I agree. For someone else, maybe they do have value. Achievements are a particularly stupid example because you can automate getting them, but my point is that digital things can have value. Maybe they're sentimental (I did a hard thing and this proves it), or maybe they're resellable (rare item in a game, which can be traded).
Something physical that you value could have no value to someone else. Value is subjective.
As a libertarian, that's generally how I frame things, because if I can't justify it under the NAP, it's probably me forcing my values on others.
True, but isn't that true of pretty much everything if we zoom out enough? Politicians want to manipulate voters to get (re)elected, restaurants want to manipulate patrons to return, etc. We all have a selfish interest in getting others to do what we want.
There has to be a line at which point self-interest is "wrong" to the extent that we should use government to regulate it. I use the NAP to reason about that point, others use some other (often subjective) metric. This same line of reasoning could be used to ban porn games, games with self-harm, or games critical of a government.
Banning things is generally not what governments should be doing, they should practice restraint and only step in when someone's rights are violated or at risk of being violated.
Fixed the edit.
They literally cannot have the form of value in question. They're not real. However much you desire a goal in soccer, it's just a ball going through some posts. In some sense the entire concept is imaginary. We don't count when the ball goes back out. We could - we don't. It's arbitrary. All games work this way.
Any sense of pride and accomplishment, or whatever other justification you can name for how hard you enjoy your shelf of digital geegaws, is a product of the game exploiting your psychology. That's why affixing a price tag is immoral. You can be made to val-- to want, any damn thing. The more intrinsically worthless, the better... from the seller's perspective. You don't print a deed for the Brooklyn Bridge on the good paper.
My guy, the key word in that sentence was "novel." The point is that these abuses you now recognize as abuses will just be laundered into different forms. Like how we finally got rid of lootboxes, and the same problems ramped up under different gimmicks.
And now lootboxes are back. The only form of this bullshit that everyone recognized as bullshit, and they're just bringin' it right back, because hey guess what, your choices don't matter. They can tell you the stick gives you cancer and enough people will still buy it because they were tricked into forming an addiction.
Only legislation will fix this.
As if describing a hat with a timer as violence is obvious and rational.
You're trying to mesh the ideology you consider an identity with conclusions that feel undeniable. One of these things will not survive. In this thread, you've described retired cosmetics as a violation of people's rights - and justifying that is a stretch, when informed consent is the only tool in your bag.