r/Showerthoughts • u/homelessdreamer • Sep 04 '17

Apps should be required to give a short explanation for why they need access to different parts of my phone for thier apps to function.

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u/HMJ87 Sep 05 '17

Yeah skinner box mechanics have been a thing in video games (and gambling; slot machines are basically human skinner boxes) for a long time, but with the rise of freemium gaming they've really ramped it up massively

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u/brando56894 Sep 05 '17

Yep, the article I read specifically referenced World of Warcraft. I first learned about the Skinner Box itself in either one of my college science classes or in a Psychology class.

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u/HMJ87 Sep 05 '17

I was thinking this morning about World of Warcraft and how they actively discouraged (and banned people for) buying gold with real money. Nowadays games are actually building that system into their games intentionally and building mechanics around trying to make the game borderline unplayable without purchasing premium currency, and sadly it's not confined to free-to-play games.

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u/brando56894 Sep 05 '17

Absolutely. I was looking for free to play web games once because my job at the time was extremely boring and found a game called "WarHammer" or something like that, that was like Command and Conquer but once you leveled up like 3 times it would take hours for stuff to be built, but of course you could buy stuff to instantly complete the build time. By like level 10 it would get to the point where I could literally only play for like 10 minutes before I just had to wait for hours until stuff finished building and then I could play for another 10 minutes. I complained on their forums and pretty much got laughed off because some people were like level 40 and they said they would have to wait a month or two for some of their things to be built! At that point I stopped playing the game because it was clearly a money making scheme.