I've made this point before, now making it again. The way that otherwise innocuous family-friendly mobile games are pushing the gambling trigger in people's brains is quite disturbing.
I'm used to basic video game rewards: you secure points and you use those points to upgrade in whatever way you see fit. Work for reward.
But most mobile games I've played recently won't allow that. You're forced into a lucky dip process, usually through crates with variable rewards.
Similarly, you cannot buy the game outright. You can only buy greater probabilities of winning rewards, usually at a very high price.
I'm not a natural gambler. I don't enjoy it. The thought of losing money without anything to show for it makes me quite anxious. But I can feel these games pulling that gambling fruit-machine variable-reward trigger in my brain.
And these games aren't for adults. They're kid friendly. There's something really quite disturbing about this development.
To clarify: my problem here isn't just the way they're trying to make money. It's that even if you spend no money, the part of the brain thry're stimulating is fundamentally the gambling trigger.
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Next few days will be rather trying. The Brexit government will claim an extraordinary achievement, rather than a sloppy act of vandalism. The Brexit headbangers will claim to object on deeply-held moral principle, rather than cynicism or incomprehension.
Johnson on one hand. Farage on the other. Twin poles of self-serving reactionary British political idiocy. ERG lot presumably splitting between one and the other. The gut shrinks with shame at the notion that they are in any way pertinent to the country's future.
But honestly, I am massively relieved. Having a deal, even one with parameters as poverty-stricken as this one, is a good thing.
I just played Echo on the VR, a kinda futuristic hoverball online multiplayer thing. Several important things happened.
First of all I had so much fun I nearly puked.
Secondly I am still dizzy. Thirdly, I fucking scored a goal man. Demonstrably my greatest ever sporting accomplishment (there are no others) and it was alone in my pyjamas with a computer on my face.
Oh yeah fuck, I forgot. It's Christmas and I'm an author. Buy my book you cunts. Buy it for your children or whatever. canburypress.com/products/how-t…
Especially the children. They must be indoctrinated into the desirability of an autonomous life. If you don't buy it for them and they grow up to be reactionary it'll be your fault.
There may arguably be an internal contradiction between indoctrination and autonomy but let's not dwell on these things.
So they've bottled it over Christmas. Knowing what it will entail, knowing that people will die, but in such a state of frozen petrified uselessness that it's going to happen anyway.
The messaging on this is going to be fucked, even by their standards. 'Isolate beforehand - except of course that you're supposed to isolate for ten days and it's now nine days to Christmas'.
'Don't go home unless it's necessary, except of course that Christmas fundamentally isn't necessary so nothing in this statement makes any sense.'
So from what I can ascertain, we're heading to a world in where there will basically be a weekly Star Wars AND Marvel TV show of some sort or another, all the time, forever. And that sounds a fine world to me.
Oh and an Alien TV show. Insane.
TV might actually be the perfect format to finally fix Alien. Some kind of anthology format? Like the old Dark Horse comics. I would eat. that. shit. up.