[noduerme]

It's a real addiction, no matter how resistant you are.

I'm 44. I've never had social media accounts. When I was 18 or so, I had a Palm Pilot with a cellular modem cradle that let you actually go to (mostly text-based) websites. It was the first smart phone, really. Amazing for finding information, for someone who didn't even have dial-up internet until 5 years earlier. But eventually I put the Palm Pilot away. It wasn't really addicting (and it was insanely nerdy to walk around with a computer connected to the internet, in your pocket like that).

I militantly avoided owning anything beyond a flip phone again until I was 36 (2016), when I finally caved in and grudgingly bought a cheap Android phone to work on a mobile game. (For the first 6 months of development, I'd just written and tested it under emulation, but bug reports were getting too hard to reproduce). Six months after that, I found myself doom-scrolling on the damn thing every time I had a free moment.

What I noticed during my smartphone-free years of watching people play with theirs were a few things: They weren't considered nerdy. They weren't considered computers. The social awkwardness of looking at a device in public had changed into a shield for people against the social awkwardness of looking at their surroundings or acknowledging other people. People forgot how to interact and how to sit and wait without doing something with their phone. Doing something with the phone was more than passively sipping a drink or smoking a cigarette; it was a way to show other people that they didn't want to interact. Or a way to hide from interaction.

I think this has to do with the way apps are structured. The vast majority of people never needed a computer in their pocket. Computers were for information and for work. I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it.

[sourcepluck]

> I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it.

I just wanted to highlight this section of your post for anyone skimming to have more of a chance of seeing it. Excellently put.

I would add - and think it's essential - that yes it took a great amount of marketing, but also a great amount of people who could have said or done something turning a blind eye and not sounding the alarm. I'm thinking mainly of developers who were happy bringing home a fat paycheck, and governments who were happy to have more information about their populations.

[noduerme]

I'm happy to say I never built a free-to-pay game. I was only interested in casual arcade stuff you could play in 2 minutes while waiting for a bus. I considered anything with virtual goods to be unethical. Hate me if you must.

Still, I think gambling can be ethical. If done right. Giving a fair shot at a 97% average payback to consenting adults is at least as good as selling them garbage tokens.

So a bit of a side-track: I did design a slot machine (Flash, online) back in 2010, that let you build up bonuses and see how many multipliers you had built up until you were ready to use them on the next spins. That was when I was running my casino. I thought it clever. A player could use them at any time.

I tried to get that slot machine design approved through the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and they told me it would be illegal. A machine couldn't have a "memory" like that, which would entice players to keep adding money to get back their built-up bonuses. I countered that the player could run the bonus feature at any time, but, apparently even that violated the rules. If the player ran out of money, they'd still need to add more to trigger the bonus they'd accrued.

Flash forward to this year, I'm in Vegas and basically every slot machine is some variation of the fireworks/dragon machine where 3 separate bonuses build up over time... but not in any clear way, and where the last part of the bonus could take forever to actually be hit. Nor can the player force their bonuses into play. I dumped $700 on a machine, $100 at a time, explaining to my partner why this type of game was illegal 10 years ago, until I gave up on the SOB.

I'm mentioning this because, as a dev of casino games, I myself would have considered that type of game to be completely unethical. I don't specifically blame the devs; I think regulatory capture by companies like Bally has a lot to do with it. We had laws that prevented the worst kinds of addictive stuff from being peddled to the public, and those have been directly attacked and chipped away at.