I think there's also something to be said here about the fact that a child of age 7 was allowed to play a game rated age 13+. Sure, "its cartoonishness allayed their worries"....but the decision to rate a game for a certain age is taking in a lot of different factors. If you take a 7 year old to a PG-13 movie which then traumatizes your child, you don't get to complain that "the poster looked so cartoony so I thought it would be fine" and then claim that it's the movies fault.
That said, I do believe that online games ratings should take into account additional factors like monetization models, expected screen time, tendency to be habit-forming, and that information presented to the parents. Really I feel that parents are underequipped these days to deal with the volume and types of media their kids have the ability to consume.
The ESRB EXPLICITLY (as seen whenever you boot up a modern video game) does NOT rate online interactions and probably also ignores online content
They are an industry made group to prevent a government run and mandated alternative, so they will never do anything that causes significant monetary losses to the industry, like labeling games with gacha mechanics as "M". The ESRB will not help parents stay away from exploitative "monetization mechanics" unless forced by regulation.
Yet another example of "Self regulation" not working.
These cases are complicated. The pandemic was a difficult time: a scary disease that ripped through the population and led to widespread lockdowns in most Western nations. It isn't any wonder kids would turn to videogames to comfort.
But the problem is wider than gaming. In the UK there's a recognised problem of "missing students" - kids who switched to homeschooling during 2020 but never switched back. Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school.
As someone without children it's hard for me to opine. I don't think games are entirely blameless - they're designed to hook you in, that's their business model, they probably have some habit-forming effects. But the kind of psychological dependence described here, sounds like the gaming is a proxy for something else.
That article starts with a child called Cody, and he's clearly going through something. Socially withdrawn, screaming when he isn't allowed to play, breaking down a door so he can return to his games console. But also: diagnosed with ADHD, no longer succeeding at school sports, going through the pandemic.
The article is vague about exactly what treatment he receives but it's serious enough to include medication. It all adds up to what sounds like a more serious underlying condition, with gaming as symptom rather than cause.
> Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school.
I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by refusing to do anything about the fact that these places we force them to attend ~40 hours a week keep turning into literal warzones and nobody's doing anything about it. If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. One of the most boring places I ever worked had fucking mantraps firewalling areas. This wasn't the Pentagon, this was an insurance company.
Everyone in a school is a sitting duck-- if not from gunmen, then from new forms of covert bullying that do not lead to actionable intervention. It's made all the worse when the bullies are the ones that get sympathy and support.
That's all before nonsense like zero-tolerance (punishes both the victim and offender), NCLB and "intelligent design."
The effect being, you go to school and sit around waiting to become someone's victim or pawn one way or another. The politics of American schools are indistinguishable from those of our minimum-security prisons; everyone is constantly anxious, frightened, and screaming there too. Risk of spontaneous murder is also high.
If I were a kid these days, I would refuse to attend any [public] school in most of the US. It's a failed institution.
We should do many more things to stop school shootings, including getting guns out of the hands of children. It's also important to understand how rare school shootings remain in the US. The shooting rate is pretty swingy, with some years fewer than 5 school experiencing at least one death, and other years as many as 40. Assuming 20 schools a year have a shooting death and 128,000 schools, that's a 0.01% chance each year that your child will attend a school where a shooting happens, or a 0.2% chance (260 deaths) across a 13-year primary and secondary education. That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period.
In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.
> If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week.
I dunno; threats and occurrences of actual violence are shrugged off pretty frequently by hospitals.
And my old high school? Sure, you have to have an ID card to get in, but the doors are still fully glass. You don't need a gun to get in; a brick would do the job. And it's private. The public schools are even worse. Wife worked for a couple of years in a downtown admin job at the local public school system; one of their few duties in schools was to proctor standardized tests several times a year. I took her to one in a very rough area that had metal detectors even 20+ years ago. It went off when we walked through, but no cops or security officers were present, and one of the students just told us to ignore it, because they all did. This - in a school that had bullet holes in the windows and ceilings (which, to be fair, were probably just potshots from the apartments across a ditch from the school that were fired when nobody was actually in the building).
Interesting article, but can't help but think that due to the pandemic an already growing issue was accelerated.
I see fortnite and games no different than the social media addiction that many people suffer from. The author rightly pointed that out. With a lack of social life allowed people were searching for anything that made them feel like they belong.
For myself, I was isolated during my highschool years and turned to online gaming and youtube communities. Back in 2010 it was less prevalent and definitely less predatory. It gives me some empathy for children and people today.
This article feels like a scapegoat article targeted towards Fortnite instead of a larger social anxiety issue. The author does touch on it, but not as much as I would have liked.
Maybe I'm just old, and I don't get it, but I feel like EQ was way more addictive than Fortnite and explicitly developed to be so. The intermittent reward structure, the social aspect of it, etc.
Like someone else said, the OG of hardcore engagement maximization. I guess I don't have too much to add to the discussion but I think games have become _less_ addictive over time. Social media seems to have taken over in that regard.
Depends on what you mean by games. Do you include mobile games? Because those have the most revenue according to the Call of Duty maker. Also I kinda agree.
Your line of thinking isn't wrong. It is very common for the new hot game, taking up all your kid's time, to be vilified. Especially by those who don't understand its appeal. However, I think there is a bit of a gap between the Satanic Panic and modern SAS games. I don't have the exact words for it. The psychological drive to play is there for both. D&D would better fit into a long-timeline hold where you have fun playing and still enjoy the thought of playing even if you haven't played in years. Fortnite, and many other modern multiplayer/live service games, have a constant, short-timeline hold. Where there is an addictive drive to continue every second. Playing nonstop even if you're not enjoying it.
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That said, I do believe that online games ratings should take into account additional factors like monetization models, expected screen time, tendency to be habit-forming, and that information presented to the parents. Really I feel that parents are underequipped these days to deal with the volume and types of media their kids have the ability to consume.
They are an industry made group to prevent a government run and mandated alternative, so they will never do anything that causes significant monetary losses to the industry, like labeling games with gacha mechanics as "M". The ESRB will not help parents stay away from exploitative "monetization mechanics" unless forced by regulation.
Yet another example of "Self regulation" not working.
But the problem is wider than gaming. In the UK there's a recognised problem of "missing students" - kids who switched to homeschooling during 2020 but never switched back. Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school.
As someone without children it's hard for me to opine. I don't think games are entirely blameless - they're designed to hook you in, that's their business model, they probably have some habit-forming effects. But the kind of psychological dependence described here, sounds like the gaming is a proxy for something else.
That article starts with a child called Cody, and he's clearly going through something. Socially withdrawn, screaming when he isn't allowed to play, breaking down a door so he can return to his games console. But also: diagnosed with ADHD, no longer succeeding at school sports, going through the pandemic.
The article is vague about exactly what treatment he receives but it's serious enough to include medication. It all adds up to what sounds like a more serious underlying condition, with gaming as symptom rather than cause.
I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by refusing to do anything about the fact that these places we force them to attend ~40 hours a week keep turning into literal warzones and nobody's doing anything about it. If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. One of the most boring places I ever worked had fucking mantraps firewalling areas. This wasn't the Pentagon, this was an insurance company.
Everyone in a school is a sitting duck-- if not from gunmen, then from new forms of covert bullying that do not lead to actionable intervention. It's made all the worse when the bullies are the ones that get sympathy and support.
That's all before nonsense like zero-tolerance (punishes both the victim and offender), NCLB and "intelligent design."
The effect being, you go to school and sit around waiting to become someone's victim or pawn one way or another. The politics of American schools are indistinguishable from those of our minimum-security prisons; everyone is constantly anxious, frightened, and screaming there too. Risk of spontaneous murder is also high.
If I were a kid these days, I would refuse to attend any [public] school in most of the US. It's a failed institution.
In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.
I dunno; threats and occurrences of actual violence are shrugged off pretty frequently by hospitals.
And my old high school? Sure, you have to have an ID card to get in, but the doors are still fully glass. You don't need a gun to get in; a brick would do the job. And it's private. The public schools are even worse. Wife worked for a couple of years in a downtown admin job at the local public school system; one of their few duties in schools was to proctor standardized tests several times a year. I took her to one in a very rough area that had metal detectors even 20+ years ago. It went off when we walked through, but no cops or security officers were present, and one of the students just told us to ignore it, because they all did. This - in a school that had bullet holes in the windows and ceilings (which, to be fair, were probably just potshots from the apartments across a ditch from the school that were fired when nobody was actually in the building).
I see fortnite and games no different than the social media addiction that many people suffer from. The author rightly pointed that out. With a lack of social life allowed people were searching for anything that made them feel like they belong.
For myself, I was isolated during my highschool years and turned to online gaming and youtube communities. Back in 2010 it was less prevalent and definitely less predatory. It gives me some empathy for children and people today.
This article feels like a scapegoat article targeted towards Fortnite instead of a larger social anxiety issue. The author does touch on it, but not as much as I would have liked.
Thanks for sharing!
It hits me indirectly since I'm not addicted to games but still talk about games...
Maybe I'm just old, and I don't get it, but I feel like EQ was way more addictive than Fortnite and explicitly developed to be so. The intermittent reward structure, the social aspect of it, etc.
Like someone else said, the OG of hardcore engagement maximization. I guess I don't have too much to add to the discussion but I think games have become _less_ addictive over time. Social media seems to have taken over in that regard.
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