Gaming

Obviously, cash shops should be banned in games immediately.

Upvoted specifically for that last part.

I think there's a core difference between loot boxes, which is out and out gambling, and gameplay. Both can be addictive, but they have very different consequences.

Gameplay addiction steals your time and maybe your social life, but that's it.

Gambling addiction also steals your money. And when that's gone, drives you to extremes trying to find more.

Concerning Minecraft, as I know the game it seems fine, playing Java on a survival server I run for friends.

However, I wonder what the experience is for the other millions of players, on Bedrock, highly popular monetized servers, etc.

What crappy casino-like techniques are used to monetize Minecraft in those contexts? I really don't know as I'm in my own Minecraft bubble, but I'm sure there are lots of examples as it's such a monumentally large game.

I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.

Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.

Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.

I know a kid that is really into multiplayer Minecraft on Xbox and he is always after his parents for more Xbox cards so he can buy different skins and texture packs. Servers like Cubecraft and The Hive must be making a lot of money.

The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it's sort of fine, because they don't benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.

It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.

Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.

Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.

I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.

Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.

One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there's always something you just want to finish or do "quickly".

Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there's a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you ...

Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.

The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my "friends" when I stop playing their game?

I don't think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it's just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.