Games

For someone else, maybe they do have value.

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.

True, but isn’t that true of pretty much everything if we zoom out enough?

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.

(often subjective)

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.