#but more importantly it literally opens up the ability to start banning whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want

[montanabohemian]

[tres-leeches]

Don't invite the fed into video games you morons

You may think upon reading that sentence that I must be some sort of crazy person cause all gamers ever do is talk shit about the government attempting to regulate games, and you would be right, except on one issue where this goes out the window for some reason.

Loot Boxes

(note before I go on that I don't like loot boxes either)

All I ever see from big influencers on the subject is sucking the dick of the UK for regulating them and praying that such legislation would make it over here to the states. You always see them using the exact same "think of the children" argument that they themselves lambast the establishment for using when it comes to things like banning violent videogames. You can really tell that they know this is a contradiction too cause they wont just flat out say it until they let it eek out later on when they've made their fifteen-millionth video about it. It makes sense when you get down to it cause their incessant milking of the subject for views is what caused these governments to notice in the first place so it only makes sense that they would then pivot to nanny state advocacy to solve their problem.

Honestly when you get down to it the "think of the children" argument doesn't even make practical sense here cause it is brain dead easy to prevent children from being able to buy loot boxes. You hear about the notion that a kid could rack up credit card debt without their parents knowledge, but honestly that L is fully on the parents. If you as a parent have any notion that your kid might use your card without your knowledge don't fucking leave the information on the console where it can be easily used. That is literally all you need to do. If the situation is really so bad that doing that wouldn't be enough you have a way bigger problem that you can't reasonably expect the government to regulate away. Sure go ahead and call out companies for being shitty and probably targeting children in their monetization strategies, but the ten year old trying to buy shit in their game isn't going to be able to without their parents in all likelihood.

The other thing I usually see get brought up is the whole oh we need to regulate it like gambling cause of people with addictions or whatever. For one you can't really paint this with the same brush as gambling, but more importantly why are we so concerned with legislating away people's ability to make poor decisions? These people need help for their addiction so we should be pushing for awareness of that highlighting the shitty way companies exploit them for profit to try and get them help and in return decrease the profit margins for those practices. Again it's another one of these things that's clearly being said by people who get all their info from news headlines without thinking of the practical reality of how you could help solve these issues.

At the end of the day people really need to look at what they're asking for. Video games have been fairly successful in batting away attempts at government overreach and regulation, and now you have people in the community who are generally reasonable holding the door open for the feds to come in and fuck everything down the line. You may think that's an overreaction, but go look at all the bullshit that the government does that starts with one (supposedly) reasonable regulation that conveniently holds the door open for them to come fuck your ass raw in a few years (spoilers it's basically all of them).

If you ask me, what we should be doing about loot boxes is singling out the parts that are actually an issue and showing people what the better choice is. You're gonna have a hard time with the addicts, but that's life you can't make them get help if they don't want to. Also people buying them because they want to is not a real problem and people acting like it's a reasonable thing to try and get the fed to stop people doing a thing you don't like is clownery of the highest order. All I want is for people to be able to solve the problems in their own communities instead of running to daddy government to """""solve""""" the problem for them. I can only hope people realize the better path before it's too late.