S2: #8: Gaming: How are multibillion-dollar businesses making your child addicted and, may be, creating compulsive gamblers?

0:09 Speaker 1 Welcome to this special edition of Pink Lyco Sociologist. In this new edition we are going to talk about an insightful topic. Gaming Doctor Varma is inviting an IT specialist and gaming expert who is going to talk on the issue and give his insights. 0:29 So emphasis will be on power, political economy, inequality and regulation when it comes to gaming. So as you may already know, gaming is everywhere today. While begin as a simple form of leisure, has rapidly evolved into one of the most powerful industries of our time, spanning consoles, mobile phones, online platforms and global communities. 0:54 Games are no longer just something we play in our free time. They are indeed carefully engineered digital environments designed to capture attention, shape behaviour and generate profit at an unprecedented scale. 1:10 For many people, gaming is enjoyable, social and creative, but alongside this growth come serious concerns. Endless game play, persuasive design and subtle monetization system can pull players, especially children and teenagers, into pattern of overuse. 1:31 Sleepless night, emotional distress, financial arm and strained family relationships are increasingly reported, yet responsibility is often placed on individuals rather than the system surrounding them. 1:47 As I told you, Doctor Varma, I will speak to Devesh Bhajan, who has considerable experience in the field. 1:58 Speaker 2 We have Dilvesh here. We're going to talk about gaming today. It's a very controversial topic as you heard it from my colleague earlier. Dilesh, can you tell me a little bit your background, where you hail from, what you have been doing? 2:14 And then what is your knowledge of the sector to sit in extent? 2:19 Speaker 3 OK, my name is Dilesh. I used to work in the industry as a network engineer mostly. I did like industrial network engineers, sensors etc. I studied bachelor of computer applications in India. I worked for AT&T for a few years as network engineer. 2:37 I've been gaming since I was a kid. I've owned like most platforms ever made. I collect them. I have a huge backlog of games on Steam. That's because I want to become a game developer. It's been a dream of mine because I like the coding part of it and the infrastructure behind it, the network infrastructure that you need for multiplayer games. 3:01 And I also like to like make my own handheld games on systems. I like to build them like use an Arduino, use a Raspberry Pi, add controls and create something out of it. So that's how I know a lot about the industry because I've been gaming since very long and I looked at how to make games myself using tools. 3:23 Speaker 2 OK, that's very interesting. We are more concerned about what is gaming and maybe the threats of going into it unknown and how does this whole gaming function and what are the and how the youngsters are getting into gaming nowadays. 3:39 And probably what would be the negative aspects of gaming to the next and how it could be used probably in a positive way because nothing is is only negative, also positive aspects of everything. But we are here to caution a little bit of of youngsters or parents or people around what is gaming, how it has developed, where it has reached, and what are the challenges that we face if we go into it without knowledge of what is behind the scene. 4:08 So let's start with first an observation and a question. From a social perspective, gaming has moved from a leisure to a massive industry. How would you describe what gaming is today, technically and economically? 4:25 Speaker 3 OK, if I have to say there's a big change in gaming since like the 2000 tens, there used to be a lot of problems. We packaged all these problems into a type of game called live service games, and the industry is dominated nowadays by live service games. 4:42 Sony's running behind these games, Ubisoft is running behind these games. He is making a lot of these games. And these are the main problem. These are everything that's wrong with gaming. You can sum it up with live service gaming. 4:58 Speaker 2 What is? What is exactly? Can you be a bit more explicit with live service games? Yes. 5:02 Speaker 3 Before we had like problems in gaming, like you had microtransactions. You buy a game, you have to keep on paying more for little more stuff. Then we had like subscription services, we had loot boxes, all of these. We package it into games that never end. 5:19 So a live service game never ends. The best example, the most famous one is Fortnite. Fortnite has seasons. Once you're done with the season, the next one starts. You're never done. It keeps on going and going and going. So you're always playing and they're always making money out of you. 5:35 Speaker 2 I recall, you know, I'm talking about 2000, early 2000 when my son was playing some games on it used to come in his CD like Lara Croft and all those things. And then you start and then you finish and then that's that's done. I don't think it was so much of A like you have to go on and go on and go on the next season, next season. 5:55 I don't know what has happened to it now, but it seems now gaming is is driven into a, like we said, a billion dollar corporation with teams of behavioural scientist, the UX, you know, user experience engineers, data analyst, whose job is to maximise engagement. 6:14 And therefore, given all these people behind gaming, how unequal is the power relationship between only players, especially children, and these companies, these companies designing the system? 6:29 Speaker 3 So if you have to understand it, you have to understand that gaming makes more money than the music industry and the film industry put together. That's a big industry. Let's take the example of Fortnite. Fortnite makes an enormous amount of money. 6:45 It's ridiculous how much money they make, and to make that kind of money, we have to keep you engaged with one game that they make, Fortnite. So we put a lot of money on designing the best games ever. And Fortnite, for example, right now, they just added the Kardashian. 7:03 Before that we added The Simpsons. We keep on adding new stuff from normal pop culture to keep you hooked and on. So we have a lot of people working on these things, coordinating, adding stuff constantly to the game to keep you attached to the game all the time. 7:21 So everything about the game is designed towards addiction and keeping you hooked to a single game. 7:27 Speaker 2 So can we talk about free choices than in gaming? But instead when one side is a child and the other side is an enterprise which is optimising behaviour at scale? So what about free choice? 7:41 Speaker 3 I mean, the games are free, but in the industry was saying if a game is free then you have a product. So they're making money, a lot of money by manipulating kids and to keep on playing. And they have been doing that for a very long time, since 2010. 7:59 And they've got a really good at it. And they're bypassing every law, every group that's monitoring them. They are very good at bypassing that. And the kids stand no chance. These are companies that are making more than the money some countries make in a year. 8:15 They have a resources, we have a power, we have the people, we have knowledge. We have AI systems nowadays to do that too. And if you're a kid against what? You don't even know what you're up against. Your stuff. 8:28 Speaker 2 So I was reading about it a bit. I saw that there is a lot of data tracking. There is things that we call AB testing to test different versions, which one performs better? There's psychological profiling and all this which the ordinary user is not aware of. 8:45 So do you think that the players understand what they are up? 8:50 Speaker 3 Against we all the players understand. Because on Reddit or other social media platforms, all gamers are always talking. They're monitoring us. We don't like that. But the young ones, they don't know about that. They grew up with mobile phones and with mobile phones you just accept when no games are like that and they just click accept. 9:11 They don't know what's being tracked. They don't know what information they're giving. They were born into that world. They don't know what how it was before and they're just used to giving up their data. They keep on giving telemetric data nowadays. They keep on giving videos of themselves, pictures of themselves and voice their voices and they don't even think about it because we were born into this world like that. 9:35 Speaker 2 So we often hear like gaming is simply a matter of personal choice, but can we really talk about free choice when behaviour is continuously optimised by powerful companies? And this is what you have been saying. So I'll leave this for the listeners to think about. 9:53 Let's go to the next segment where we talk about addiction is engineered, not accidental, so people often blame addictive personalities. From a technical standpoint, how much of excessive gaming is built into game design itself? 10:14 Speaker 3 Actually, if we have to speak about addiction and gaming addiction, the big problem nowadays are two things, loot boxes and gotcha. So loot boxes, it's basically gambling. You get a box, you don't know what's inside the box, you have to unlock the box, You get something random and you long time before you mentioned Lara Croft. 10:37 I play one level, I unlock the next level, I unlock the next level and the game is over. Nowadays you get loop boxes you keep on unlocking loop boxes you keep on going randomly like that. 10:50 Speaker 2 And. 10:51 Speaker 3 200 loop boxes, 300 loop boxes, and it never ends. You're addicted, you're stuck to that. And we have another system that's even worse called the Gotcha system. A lot of Chinese games use that nowadays, the Western games, to use that, they lock the characters behind a pay wall. 11:08 You always have to pay and and play to unlock more of a game. It's not like before where you just play the game and you unlock the game. Nowadays there's luck, there's chance and there's money involved. 11:21 Speaker 2 So the games are re advertised as free games, but it seems that there are hidden extraction behind, like we just said, the modern game monetization system, the way it works with loot boxes and you talk about something else after that. 11:40 And then how do the system often lead to heavy spending, sometimes by children, even when individual positions at the start looks very small? 11:52 Speaker 3 OK, let me give you a simple example. Let's say there's a loot box. There's a season in one game. You want one specific weapon you want like I'll just say you want, you want an MP5 that's yellow, they're selling it, it's golden. You want that. 12:07 So you pay like simple amount like $1.00. The entry fees always very little. You pay $1.00 and you unlock a few boxes, but you don't get your gun now. You're already locked in, you're already paid $1.00, so you feel like you should pay more to get the gun. 12:23 So you pay $5 now, and now you get more keys to unlock more loot boxes, but you still don't get the MP5. So now you deal. Let me pay $10. I pay $10, I get 200 boxes. I unlock them. I'm nearly there, but they tell me I still don't have the MP5. 12:41 But if I try 10 more times, I get the MP5. So now I've spent $1.00, five dollars, $10 and after that you can't buy the $1.00 login. You have to spend like $10 or more. You pay $10 more, you unlock the gun so but in all you spend more $120.00. 12:58 Speaker 2 So this loot loot boxes can often be compared to gambling. 13:05 Speaker 3 It is gambling. The EU try to sue the main culprit of gaming. Who invented that? EA. It's electronic games and EA says it's fun boxes. It's not loot boxes, but actually it is gambling. 13:19 Speaker 2 Oh my God. So sometimes they say that it is the failure of the parenting. You know, it's parents who should look after the children. Is it a failure of parenting or is it a success or monetization design? 13:34 Speaker 3 I think they invest a lot of money into making parents think that you have to check if a game has sex. 13:41 Speaker 2 Or violence. 13:42 Speaker 3 That's all. And once you do these two things, that's all. And they get away with that. They campaign. A lot of this game is above 18. We're censoring this game. This game has violence, we're censoring this. But they never talk about the other part. They make parents feel safe. Like if you want to block your child from playing games, there are ratings on game, but there's no rating showing you the addiction level. 14:04 The dog systems that's implemented in the game, the parents feel safe because oh I avoided this game, but they don't know about the childish looking game. That's the worst one because there's a lot of gambling involved. 14:18 Speaker 2 But Children's Games often looks harmless. Like you said, bright colours, cartoons, family friendly branding. From a design perspective, are these interfaces truly neutral? 14:34 Speaker 3 No, they're not. They're intentionally designed like that. If you look at Fortnite, it looks like Disney movie. If you look at all the other games, they put lots of bright colours. They put lots of animation. They put lots of pop culture references, like I just said for I just put the Kardashians and before that they put The Simpsons. 14:55 So they use a lot of stuff not just in the interface, but they use a lot of stuff from culture itself. They know the kids are interested some girls in Kardashian. We know many boys are interested in The Simpsons, so we try to target as much as we can to lure the kids in. 15:11 These games are not 18 rated. We have no violence, we have no sex. But they have a lot of issues. A lot. 15:19 Speaker 2 Of, like, addiction behind them, you know, that's the thing. Do you think parents understand what the children are being exposed to inside these games? 15:28 Speaker 3 No, not even parents, not even the politicians, not even many people know about this because you have to be a gamer. You have to get into the details of a game to know that. And sometimes we do like really bad stuff. Like there's Call of Duty. 15:44 Call of Duty is like the number one first person shooter on the planet. When they release the game, the game doesn't have all these bad things. So the parents look at it the first time, no problem. The reviewers look at the game, no problem. But then after one month, they keep on adding these things later, they add it later. 16:01 So after one month you didn't finish the game, you didn't finish the multiplayer port, you're still hooked. Then we start editing it. So it bypasses the reviewers, it bypasses the initial scrutiny of appearance. 16:13 Speaker 2 So you mean that if you're a reviewer, you have to be playing it and go through all that different segments of it and reach there, then only you'll understand. You cannot just look at it at the surface and then come to a conclusion that is right or wrong. 16:29 Speaker 3 Yes, but also there's a lot of problems in the review space of games. Like most of these companies, we are paid by the game companies so we're all in the same industry. They all have the same vested interest to sell the game. 16:45 So you can't really trust for non independent reviewers. 16:49 Speaker 2 Oh my God. So the assumption is usually, you know what they say that parents should simply monitor better, but it's realistic to expect families to out manage, like you said, these global tech companies. 17:07 Speaker 3 No, but you have to make parents aware of these issues. Parents don't know, you know, parents just want to protect their kids. They so they look at the screen time, they look at sex and violence, only these three things. Most of them are not even aware why their kids are being addicted to games. 17:26 The best example I can give you this year, there's a game out, it's called Metroid Prime 4. In the game, there's one point of a game where there's no music in the game. And to get the music, you have to buy like a a toy separately. 17:42 You connect the toy to your Nintendo Switch when you get the music. So a lot of kids have been asking their parents for Christmas, can I get this toy? It's called an Amibu to get the sound in the game, But they don't really need that Amibu. They just want that Amibu to get the sound in the game. 17:57 And the parents are surprised. Why does my kid wants like a small figurine? He never wanted that. So they're manipulated like that. The parents don't know why. 18:06 Speaker 2 I was looking at somebody buying games in his shop and then the guy was trying to demonstrate to him this is what you will get. So he was, it looks like he was adding different, different modules into it. What I didn't understand really what was going on, but I suspected that it was a marketing and the boy was happy that he's getting all these different components. 18:27 And the mother also ended, OK, it's Christmas now, so I think I should get it for you. Do you have any idea what that? 18:35 Speaker 3 There are a lot of peripherals with your console or your PC you can buy. I own a lot of them, so I can talk about that. And it gets expensive, a lot like if you're into racing, if you're into simulation racing, you have to buy a wheel or wheel in Mauritius, like ₹15,000. 18:53 And then you need a shifter. A shifter is like ₹5000 more. And then you realise your desk is not enough. You need a specialised desk and a specialised seat that's 20,000 rupee ₹25,000 more. So by the end, you spend ₹40,000 just to play your SIM racing game. 19:09 And most kids, like my niece, bought one, she played two or three times and then she never played again. So the parents have to be aware what their kids want, what peripherals are viable and which one they really need. They don't need all that stuff. 19:23 Speaker 2 So who's going to teach the parents? 19:26 Speaker 3 That's a problem you have. You have to be a gamer for very long to know what what are useful gaming peripherals and what are very wasteful ones. For example, I used to own like APS Four and the controller used to break every six months. 19:42 So in all I've spent more in controllers than the actual full price of APS. 4 itself in Vienna just threw the PS4 away and no more spending on that. 19:53 Speaker 2 Oh my God, now you know there has been awareness and sometimes even health bodies now recognise gaming disorder. From your experience, when does gaming cross from enjoyment into harm? 20:09 Speaker 3 I think a lot of kids, they play these games not for enjoyment. There's a trick in these games where they always give you like 80% of a fun. They know how to do that. They show you like once, oh, you won once, then you keep on losing, then you win. 20:27 Just when you're about to quit, you win. They make these things and it's like a carrot and a donkey. They're just pushing you to play more, to play. 20:36 Speaker 2 More and on. It's like the casino, you know, the slot machine where you start getting and say, OK, let me try it. It goes on that and then there's other issue. You must have seen you also in the teaching profession. So you know, the sleep deprivation is common among heavy gamers. 20:52 And how much is this driven by the game design rather than individual responsibility? 20:59 Speaker 3 OK, let's use the example. You said your kid used to play Lara Croft. You're playing Lara Croft, you want to stop and go to sleep. You just save your game and you go to sleep. That's it. You want to play 5 minutes, play 5 minutes. You want to play 30 minutes, play 30 minutes. 21:15 Let me give you the example. Call of Duty came out the latest one. Every year there's a new Call of Duty. By the way, this Call of Duty in the single player campaign, you cannot pause. So if you close that game, you lose all your progress. 21:32 So that child will not want to stop playing until he gets to the next part. He's stuck for like 1 hour or like one hour, 30 minutes playing that. Because there's no saving system and multiplayer games. You cannot save in multiplayer games. That's a problem. 21:47 If you go into a battle Royale game like Pub G or Fortnite, there's like 100 people fighting each other. You can't pause. If you can't pause, you have to play the whole thing whole match, and a match can take like one hour and you're stuck that whole hour. 22:05 That's a problem with that. You can't yourself. You can't define the amount of time you want to play with these games. The game tells you how much you should play. 22:14 Speaker 2 What about what about the other thing which where where you get coins or something? What was that called? 22:19 Speaker 3 OK. All these games, we have a monetization system and when you play, they give you some of their currency. And I've played a lot of these games, by the way, and you never get enough. You really get enough to buy something significant. 22:35 For example, if you're selling something for $5, you play with their coins. You get just enough to buy all the bad things that nobody wants in the store. And then you you have to spend like 5 or 10 more dollars and then you get the good stuff. So the coins we're always a trap. 22:51 We're always like a fake reward to make you buy the real stuff. 22:54 Speaker 2 There's some, there's somebody I was talking to the other day. She told me that her daughter has started gaming programming and all the age of nine, but the age of 13, she had developed games which two or three million people are playing. 23:11 It's on some, I forgot what, what platform it is. And now she is so much hooked on to this game. Now she, she, she speaks another language, you know, like she's in the metaverse all the time. And the the strange thing about it is that this girl needed counselling, then she needed psychiatric help, then she needed more advanced test. 23:36 So the things in her brain, the spikes or whatever, it happens in the brain, she doesn't like to to mix with people. But the problem is that she has got so much hooked on and now the parents are wondering how to get this child out of this. And she's just thirteen years old. 23:51 Speaker 3 13 years, That's really young. If you say she's 13 years and she's like using the game to create more games, that's most probably Roblox. There's a category of game where you can create meta games, you can create small games inside the game. 24:09 So they make it really easy. Initially it was a good idea like how to teach kids to create games, how to teach kids to code. But they realise they can become like a metaverse, like a virtual world. And that's actually what are the worst things. 24:25 That's even worse than live service gaming because Roblox has been accused of paedophilia. Lots of wrong things because there's no separate space for adults and kids on these platforms. So usually in the real world, we tell our kids don't go speaking to strangers and in games with strangers, invite them to private rooms to talk. 24:47 Like if you like, create a character in Roblox and you go around, you're growing in the world's that other players have created. And it gets weird sometimes. I saw things like they asked players to get rid of their clothes in underwear. 25:05 It's all blocky. It's all like made in blocks. But the intent, you can see the intent of a people, of these people, it's not good. Let's say you want to prevent your child from paying addictive violent games. So you have a control for violent games. Don't let my kid play 18 plus games, that's OK. 25:23 But the addictive games for games for live service games, for games with elude boxes and capture games, they don't fall into that category. So whatever system you're using to block these games on the platform, they're not blocking Fortnite, they're not blocking Roblox, they're not blocking Pub G. 25:41 These games don't have violence and sex. They bypass these systems. They're still given to kids. So the inbuilt protection method given by the companies themselves is not good enough. We need the governments to step up and regulate these more. 25:57 Like I think many countries have started suing and blocking Roblox. That's one step forward. But Roblox makes a lot of money and we we can fight back. 26:10 Speaker 2 The next aspect is that of control, which is so difficult. Why are why is control so difficult? You know, parents often told to use screen limits and parental control. Technically speaking, how effective are these tools in reality? 26:30 Speaker 3 Yeah, it's really hard and I think each country has to take their responsibility and blocking their own countries. One of the best examples is China. China bans games all the time. They block access to it overnight if they see something is problematic and they block Roblox. 26:48 We block all these games and I know China, we shouldn't follow them all the time, but in that case we're really well, they do it really well and we should do the same too. 26:57 Speaker 2 So there are a lot of resistance on the part of the industries when government attempt to regulate features like loot boxes for instance, like. 27:06 Speaker 3 We should not be expecting Roblox to fix their own game. We should block the game. Once we fix it, then we'll let the kids play the game again. 27:15 Speaker 2 And you know, these companies, they operate across countries and legal systems, so it's difficult to control these, regulate these gaming companies on a global scale. This is what I get the impression by listening to you. 27:34 Speaker 3 Yeah, the main culprit in that one was EA Electronic Games. It still is EA Electronic Games and the EU tried to like stop it. And I watched their whole lawyers talk about it online. And they have a big lobbyist group, They have lots of lawyers and they can defend themselves even against the EU. 27:56 They're really strong, so. 28:01 Speaker 2 The lack of regulation due to is it lack of evidence or lack of political will to challenge the powerful corporations, You know, these are things that we should ask ourselves, but we may not have the answers immediately. 28:19 But if you have to rethink responsibility, if we step backward back sociologically, is excessive gaming really a parenting issue or a structural issue involving profit, power and weak regulations? 28:36 If you. 28:36 Speaker 3 Ask me about question like 15 years ago, I'll tell you it's because of parents. If you ask me this now, it's totally because of a corporations and the games they're engineering these games to make the kids keep on playing non-stop and it's very addictive. 28:53 These games are very addictive. As soon as you're done with one season, the next season is up with something more interesting and you get hooked, backed in and you spend more and it goes on and on and it never stops. And the parents, they're not aware of this. So parents against corporations. 29:10 You're just two parents and you can't fight against the corporations that big. 29:15 Speaker 2 And they've got psychologist, they've got specialist, they've got UX specialist, we've got everything there behind they have. 29:21 Speaker 3 Lobbies. 29:23 Speaker 2 They have lobbies and everything, even people who review it seems that they are part of the lobbyist as well. Now, if last question, if ethical limits were imposed tomorrow, what game design do you think practises should stop immediately? 29:42 Speaker 3 We should stop with load boxes, micro transactions, gotcha systems. These are the three big things bundled into live services. We should stop these because micro transactions. 29:59 I'll give you an example. You buy a game for $60.00. You don't have the full game. Now you go into the game, the first thing you're presented with is a big banner showing you, hey, you can buy this, you can buy that. So you play the game that's huge and vast for $60.00. 30:17 But now we tell you you need to travel first in the game, there's a horse. It costs $10.00. So now you're spending $10 on a tiny thing like a horse. You spend $70. Next time we tell you now your horse can't fly. We have a flying horse, 10 more dollars. So now you spend $80 and let me tell you, your horse can't go on water. 30:36 We have a horse that can run on water or something aquatic, pay 10 more dollars. So they should stop these microtransaction things. Lara Croft, that game your son used to play, you buy the game, you get the whole game. That's it. No more spending. 30:51 Speaker 2 That I'm talking about 2000, so that is too long for far too far back. So at the end, I think is there anything that you'd like to add which probably we have missed, we should be of interest to parents in Mauritius? 31:07 Speaker 3 If your kid is interested in games, you need to philtre the games out. One easy way to do that is to use ChatGPT. You can just ask ChatGPT of adult buttons of addictive features in this game. If ChatGPT does a really good work at it, it tells you yes we are. 31:25 Don't let your kid play that game. If it's not in there then you may let your kid play the game. 31:31 Speaker 2 So what question do you have to ask ChatGPT exactly? 31:33 Speaker 3 So for example, let's take an example, there's God of War, which is really, really good game that ends. So I'll just ask ChatGPT. Hey, is God of War a good game with no dog patterns and no microtransaction, no loot boxes? 31:49 If ChatGPT says yes and it's a good game. 31:53 Speaker 2 You said dot patterns microtransactions. 31:55 Speaker 3 And systems loot boxes. 31:58 Speaker 2 OK, so these are type of things that parents can inquire before they decide on giving access to the child on one particular game. So that is very interesting, Devesh to chat with you that perhaps the real question is not why children can't stop playing, but why we allow systems designed to make stopping so difficult. 32:22 Thank you. 32:24 Speaker 1 Well, what today's conversation reminds us is that gaming is no longer a small, private pastime taking place in bedrooms or on personal screens. It is a global industry engineered to capture attention, shape behaviour and extract value, often from the youngest and most vulnerable users. 32:46 When games disrupt sleep, learning, family life and financial well-being, the issue cannot be reduced to weak with power or poor parenting alone. The real question is how much responsibility we place on individuals and how much we demand from powerful cooperation and public institutions to act ethically. 33:10 If gaming systems are designed to make stopping difficult, then protecting players, especially children, requires more than awareness. It requires collective responsibility, informed policy and the courage to regulate industries whose profits depends on keeping people hooked. 33:39 Speaker 2 Thank you for joining us on this important conversation. Share this episode with someone who needs this perspective. Maybe a teenager, maybe a parent, maybe a teacher. 33:49 Speaker 1 Until we see you next, stay curious, stay reflective and remember Mauritius is changing, but with understanding we can guide that change. Goodbye. 34:01 Speaker 2 Keep listening to Think like a Sociologist.