[goostavos]

I don't even know where people are coming from any more.

Like literally everyone else in tech who knows how the sausage gets made, I'm appalled by the teams of Ph.Ds which exist solely to exploit the dopamine response of children. However, it never would have ever crossed my mind to jump from "here's a particular problem" to "the government should control how much of a specific activity your child can do at home"

[devnulll]

There are all sorts of things governments express control over, even at home.

The obvious scenarios are alcohol, nicotine & drugs. As a parent of young children, there are addition parallels between Minecraft / Roblox / Alcohol / Cigarettes.

To a real degree, more effort is put into making gaming deliberately additive - although flavored vaping (bubble gum, cotton candy, etc) would like to enter the conversation.

[goostavos]

I don't know if we're coming at it from the same angle if we're lumping Minecraft in with alcohol and cigarettes. To your initial point, though, just because the government currently expresses control is not actually an argument that they should continue to do so or be granted additional powers to do more. Because it's normal, doesn't mean it's correct.

Flavored vaping products are for sure bad. I'll happily give you that. I'll also give you sugar, processed food, alcohol, cigarettes, McDonalds, and a near never ending supply of things we regularly consume (food, entertainment, or other).

I wouldn't petition the government to control access to any of them. I tend to trust the millions of individual personal (or parental) decisions over the long haul more than I do centrally planned, top-down mandates.

[xvector]

Videogame addiction probably stunted my childhood development as much as drugs would have, so I can see where the Chinese government is coming from if it's from an addiction perspective.

[devnulll]

> I don't know if we're coming at it from the same angle if we're lumping Minecraft in with alcohol and cigarettes.

My belief is that's a reasonable debate with very valid points on both sides. At a personal level, kids 2-12 are Addicted to games (Minecraft, Roblox, etc). Taking the games away has the same impact as taking away narcotics from an addict.

The unregulated ability of these platforms to target children (and they do), seems very analogous to pre-regulated cigarettes, drug, and alcohol marketing.

I wager more psychological studies are done on driving MAU, rapid viral adoption, and upping Click Through Rates than were done for nicotine.

[pluto8195]

the US has imposed many rules on the manufacturers and distributors of addictive substances as well (banning flavored vapes, marketing towards children), I think it would be much more constructive to impose some regulation on how games are made, and how they are pushed rather than the behavior of children.

[binarybanana]

What makes you think adults don't like flavored liquids?

Seems insane to suggest that adults would prefer the taste of ashtray over apple or orange (I like fruity aromas). I mostly vape without flavoring nowadays because I'm lazy, but I just don't get the mindset. Adults like sugar, sweets, lemonade and all that stuff just as much as children do. Some seem to really like the taste of cigarettes, but I think for the most part people are just more comfortable to say "I like the taste" instead of "I'm addicted to nicotine", because inhaling burnt plant matter along with the diffused active agents and aromatic compounds generally isn't good for taste. Weed also tastes much better vaped.

[Spivak]

I think it's more a response to two decades of corporations having free rein to exploit kids (and adults honestly but I understand such a policy would be less palatable). We've known since forever that the only solution would be government intervention since the market will never correct a dopamine lever and just .. nothing happened because it's profitable.

It's honestly nice to see a not totally incompetent government try a novel policy with good intentions. It's welcome break from the firehose of our own government making policies that seem to only target the poor and minorities.

[ryan93]

You make it sound a lot more scientific than it is.

[eric-hu]

Seconded. It doesn’t take a team of PhD’s to run A/B testing on features and variations that improve lift. Tie performance bonuses to improved engagement and sales, and you can motivate many non doctorates to find novel ways to make things addictive.

[Jensson]

Pretty sure Candy Crush has such a team of PhD's though. Not all games, but the big games definitely do.

You can read about it here from their own page:

https://careers.king.com/kingdom-news/data-at-king/

> That experiment is typical of how we learn from data at King. We have about 150 people working in data roles, out of a total workforce of 2,000. They come from a range of backgrounds. Many are from the games industry, of course, but we also bring in lots of recruits straight from university.

> These people will have just done their masters or PhD in a wide range of disciplines. Many of our team studied statistics, physics or computer science but we also have people who came from theoretical biology because work on DNA sequencing in that field has produced a lot of data-sophisticated people. Others are behavioural psychologists or behavioural economists.

Now in the specific example they choose to highlight they saw that making the game less frustrating made people spend more money. However if making the game more frustrating turned out to make more money since users bought more powerups then they absolutely would do it.

[ryan93]

None of that requires any special knowledge of the brains dopamine response