interesting

[solarbird]

5 creepy ways video games are trying to get you addicted.

How to keep someone with you forever.

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

While everybody else is worrying about banking oligopolies and secretly Kenyan Muslim presidents and bisphenol-A in their food and water and peak oil? I'm worried that the billions of dollars that the casino, advertising, and software industries are investing in social psychology, environmental psychology, and situational psychology will find a reliable un-defeatable ways to subvert free will.

you mean like this

[solarbird]

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

The video game analysis is pretty awesome - and really it boils down to the one sentence somewhere about how they need you to play for thousands of hours but they can't afford to make thousands of hours worth of actual content. Or to put it into advice: don't play subscription-based (or 'free-to-play') online games. (Oh, and Animal Crossing.)

I wonder if we'll get past this - the real solution is to find ways to make it cheaper to actually create thousands of hours of compelling content. (Without using the cheap cop-out of 'oh you interact with real people so that'll be different all the time' - yeah, no.)

Of course if they ever do figure that out (AI-assisted content creation, some kind of similarly-intelligent automated testing within robust frameworks to ensure that nobody ever needs to manually test stuff, etc.) then, well, you'd probably end up with people playing games for thousands of hours *without* the cheap rat tricks. In other words, people would be *rationally* gaming for thousands of hours. Is that better or worse? Hmmm...

[ravyngyngvar.livejournal.com]

After accepting a friend request on Facebook, I've now found my wall full of "Farmville" posts. Looks like the same posts over and over. Sure seems like I've found an addict.

[solarbird]

Click on the Farmville link, then at the Farmville page, click the "block this application" link in the left hand column. I do this regularly and it makes Facebook much more tolerable.