Anon is not satisfied
Anon is not satisfied
Dude needs to stop playing predatory gacha games.
I don’t understand people who WILLINGLY install that shit. They KNOW how they work and are monetized. And unlike gambling at a casino, there’s zero chance of you being up money at any point.
Playing a video game does not destroy your body. Maybe try thinking instead of feeling.
there can be some visible effects from being addicted to video games
They are not a great analogy because they at least have a legit use in medicine.
That said, not really sure what the best analogy for SAAS slot machines would be. Even playing them for free you still have the sensation of pulling down on the device (phone screen/machine lever) and then the “spin” with variable rate rewards.
A better comparison would be alcohol. Many of people consume alcohol but very few people become alcoholics. Maybe it is genetic predisposition or environmental/mental factors that lead people to abusing it.
Similarly with gachas, millions of people play them as free to play, without ever spending money. A lot of people spend 10-20€ a month and very few people spend hundreds or thousands of euro every month.
As far as honkai star rail is concerned, i enjoy the story, environments, music and the characters and i recommend it. You dont need to spend and you can do everything(or miss like 5% of the rewards, if you dont want to tryhard) without ever spending money.
The main selling point of the game is the story and you can do that with any characters. If you dont want to participate in the endgame, you can ignore it. Ultimately it is a singleplayer turned based “rpg”, though it is actually just an anime+idle game. Every 40 days, you get a new episode/season.
Sure but then you only waste your time.
not true at all. you can absolutely fuck up your social life and work life by paying free games. you can fuck up your medical life too. easily meeting criteria for gaming disorder mild severity without ever spending a dime
Exactly. I have been gaming for decades, yet I never played any of these. Only heard of WOW out of all the names, no idea what the rest are.
It is possible to spend your money on games that provide the entertainment you’re looking for, but not exploit you.
I played Arknights for a bit because there’s actually a pretty solid tower defense game in there. There’s not a big selection of good games for Android and I wanted something I could play when I have no laptop with me.
Unfortunately the good gameplay is buried under tons of attention hogging gacha bullshit.
I stopped playing once I realized that I was spending more time doing chores than actually playing through interesting content. Also, while the BGM is nothing short of lavish, the presentation of the story is like a very cheap VN, which basically killed any hope of getting engaged in the story or the characters.
I didn’t spend much more than maybe twenty bucks on it so it’s not too bad given the partially solid gameplay. But yeah, I’m done with live service bullshit games.
Huh, that sounds like shit. Why would anyone play that?
I know when Factorio introduced quality some people complained it was like gambling, but in Factorio its done at a level where probability just averages out. I want a rare shiny iron plate and 2% of the time I will get one. So if I make 25,000 iron plates per minute I will be getting 500 rare shiny plates a minute.
Why do people gamble? Because that’s what this is.
The companies don’t even care about the average player. They are trying to hook rich people with more money then sense, aka whales.
A long time ago the industry realized an extremely small percent blows way more money than all the others combined.
If you ever played a game with any kind of monitization and asked yourself why everything is $40 and how the average player can afford it, this is why.
EA’s Real Racing turned into this pay-to-play shit. I genuinely enjoyed that game back when it came out, then everything started to get monetized and you had to do various things fairly often if you wanted to make any sort of progress.
Why can’t I just have a fun realistic racing game that doesn’t try to cram “upgrades” that cost real money down my throat?
I grew up playing Gran Turismo 3, and that was an absolute blast - me and a Buddy had a Miata in the game that we both put a lot of time into, and it taught us about how car running worked (to a certain degree, anyway). My wife got me a PS5 when we were dating, and I immediately bought GTA7 at full price… Only to be met with an absolute assload of microtransactions.
It bothered me so much that I ended up going out and buying a PS2 off FB marketplace and dug out GTA3 from my parents’ collection of games.
Professionals disagree with you.
Like it’s in the definition lol.
Gambling An Addictive Behavior with Health and Primary Care Implications
Over the past several decades, and particularly during the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in the accessibility of legalized gambling in the United States and other parts of the world. Few studies have systematically explored ...
I’m going to give you the BoD and say that I think your confusing how addiction works and how the body regulates itself. Also, I should be more clear that anything causing an intense reward response can be addictive. Not just any old response will do, it has be a rush.
Addiction isn’t just doing something repeatedly or enjoying something a lot. It’s a progressive hijacking of the brain’s reward system. It starts with an activity (like gambling) triggering a strong reward response. That response draws people to repeat that activity for the “high”. If the behavior is engaged in regularly, the brain adapts over time. The reward response becomes less intense (this is what “gaining a tolerance” is), causing the person to to engage in the behavior more frequently or intensely to get the same “high” as they did the first time. Eventually, the behavior stops illiciting a reward, and you start to get stressed without whatever behavior it is that originally made you feel high. The person is no longer seeking the behavior because their reward system is telling them to, but for relief from the stress and anxiety of NOT performing the behavior. This is where addiction occurs.
Gambling, sex, and drugs all activate activate this feedback loop in the brains reward system. In contrast things like drinking water or wearing boots just just don’t engage the reward system in the same way. You can experience this yourself by having an orgasm, drinking a glass of water, and comparing the difference in how you feel afterward. Drinking water and wearing clothes are biological necessities or habitual actions. They’re not neurologically reinforced the same way that high reward activities like gambling or sex are.
I think we tend to prefer to think of chemical addiction as the true definition because of opiods like heroin. In the case of heroin, you’re not activating your reward system so much as you’re introducing a reward chemical WAYYY more powerful than anything your body can produce.
Other drugs don’t replace dopamine tho, they just make your body release all of the dopamine it has at the same time, resulting in a similar, but less intense feeling. Getting addicted to these drugs is really no different, biologically speaking, than becoming addicted to a behavior.
Recognizing gambling as an addiction is not a slippery slope to naming more mundane things as addictions. It’s the result of decades of work in neuroscience by thousands, if not millions, of doctors.
here’s a quick cheat sheet of current DSM criteria for a SUD:
spoiler
1 increased amt used
2 desire/failure to reduce use
3 lots of time spent on it
4 cravings for it
5 life obligations unmet
6 social relationships disrupted
7 reduction in recreational activities
8 use even in dangerous situations
9 use despite medical risk
10 building tolerance
11 experiences withdrawal
you need at least 2 to meet mild criteria (very easy to meet mild!) and 6 or more to be considered severe
so let’s look at oxygen addiction:
we dont increase our use over time, we have no desire or failure to reduce use (even if suicidal it’s not about the oxygen), oxygen requires very little time to get, we generally dont crave it cuz we always got it and without it there are no cravings anyway, it doesnt disrupt obligations, doesnt impact relationships, doesnt impact recreation, we don’t put ourselves in dangerous situations just to use it, there’s no medical risk to consuming it, and we do not build tolerance. we DO experience w/d. so 1 out of 11 aint cuttin it, sorry!!
addictions counselor here, can confirm Rooskie91 has a pretty accurate response
I’m guessing where you get caught up is in the fact that it’s a behavioral addiction , right?
well the medical community isn’t far off. gambling disorder is only now just starting to become recognized as an addiction. there’s trouble too, because “addiction” isn’t an appropriate medical term anymore – it’s “substance use disorder” which encompasses a much wider range of problematic behaviors. and yet! if someone comes in with primary Dx Gambling Disorder, we can’t bill that as SUD services because it’s technically not a substance lol
behavioral addictions are very similar in how they work and how they’re treated. tbh the main difference is just the lack of risk from acute intoxication / withdrawal. gambling disorder can and does completely ruin lives.
I don’t understand people who WILLINGLY install that shit
The ads are everywhere and the games are often F2P - no barrier to download or install. Excellent for hooking younger kids, especially ones whose parents can’t or won’t give them access to the old fashioned games.
And unlike gambling at a casino, there’s zero chance of you being up money at any point.
Arguably the singular upside. You can coast in a Gacha game without losing a ton of money a lot longer than you’ll last in Vegas.
Yeah, he’s shit but if you’re impressionable and self-centred, you can get sucked in by his bit.
Like I remember watching a couple clips and thinking sounds like he’s just saying common sense reasonable stuff with a side of pop philosophy – I don’t get what people are mad about but I have a good relationship with my parents and was raised to respect myself and others, so he had no to Morty’s Mind Blowers for me. I just moved on.
Later of course, thanks to others writing about it, I discovered that he has said some legitimately heinous things, and despite being so pathetic is actually an incredibly dangerous individual, meme-wise.