Parents Sue Gaming Companies Over ‘Video Game Addiction’, Because That’s Easier Than Parenting::Video game addiction. Sigh. Big sigh, even. Like, the biggest of sighs. We’ve talked about claims that video game addiction is a documentable affliction in the past, as well as the pushback that claim has received from addiction experts, who have pointed out that much of this is being done to allow doctors to get…
Parents are on individual basis challenged by teams of behavioral experts, a/b tests, and vast amounts of data being collected. It’s not as if it’s a level playing field.
Exactly. These are carefully designed to drip-feed dopamine rewards and keep maximizing “engagement” to maximize resultant profit, or at the very least, minimize the time the user spends doing anything else (including playing a competitor’s game).
Parents barely stand a chance. In child education lit, we’re still relying on old 90s tropes of “don’t let your kid sit in front of the TV too long” and “no more than two hours, preferrably maxed at one hour, for screentime of any screen per day”.
“Do you know where your kids are?” has been replaced by “have your kids gone outside today?”