theremover

They do have warnings or laws governing things that have high potential to interfere with your health or life in some major way. Coffee and food are labeled in different ways with extra warnings if it presents a unique health risk or something.

Those other things you mentioned aren't engineered specifically for addiction. There's a difference between people becoming addicted to random things, and people falling prey to things designed to hook them.

I'm not saying I have any answers, I just don't think people should be dismissing this guy as an idiot so quickly, and that whatever it looks like, the companies designing these things should at least be held accountable in some practical way.

Lots of people are prone to addiction for whatever reason, a large percentage of the population - not just a few "weirdos".

Games like WoW are very insideous, they draw you in with simple appearances, and it's not until you're completely tangled into it all, already personally invested into it with hours and hours of gameplay and attached to your character(s) that you realize that they've basically set up the random number generators and raid lockouts and everything to consume unbelieveable amounts of time and keep you busy so you don't walk away, get bored and cancel your subscription.

Yes, the user needs to be responsible for their own actions, but someone who is fragile in the first place may go into it with good intentions and have no idea what they're getting themselves into. Publishers of these titles should be free to do as they please, but if they're going to design something where their business model is based on what is more or less, addiction... they need to be responsible about it.

I kind of agree with this, at least to the point that companies should at least be providing a web link to resources for managing any sort of extreme habit forming, and some sort of related disclaimer. Plenty of less addicting things are required by law to do so.

The game looks fun and i'm curious about what the book will be like.

what's not positive about all the other articles?

pirates and scammers and so forth are playing a game and having fun, the freedom to do so IS one of the positives in Eve.

No offense intended to game fans,
but no, it's because the games are not good. Sure, maybe you love them, along with a large group of people, but at the end of the day... there are a LOT of amazing games out there, and all these "hey, look at us too" outfits that are doing the MMO equivalent of a B-movie are going to end up broke or out of business or something. Costs associated with producing games don't scale differently with niche markets and things.

How is this an "issue" ?

Why is it ok for movies to portray anything and everything known to man, but as soon as it's in a game, the witchhunt is on?

There's nothing forcing you to buy these in-game items. Infact, the people who chose to buy and sell these can do so securely outside of the game through a legal web-based system that Eve/CCP maintain. It's a blunder on the pilot's side, and that's it.

It's not a little detail.
It's the biggest detail. It's a game about planets, space and the spacefaring races that inhabit them.

It's an incredibly important aspect of the game if it's to be included at all.

"Piracy is a major issue in selling PC games"
There's no empirical data to support this in any industry.


"According to the developer's blog site, " ... only 5-15% of Machinarium players actually paid for the game." "

On the blog, it said this was "estimated from feedback they received"... which doesn't really mean anything. It's a made up statistic.

Don't get me wrong, I bought my copy when it came out, but these are rather ridiculous assertions.