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00:00:01
Myself, From Gaming Addict to Digital Campaigner
80 Plays1 month ago
In this week's episode, Andrew takes the opportunity to explore his own relationship with video games, and how it has changed over the years, whilst reflecting on the risks he was exposed to.
Andrew, a father of two and lifelong gamer, teams up with Brandon, a consumer psychologist and ex-pro video game coach, to uncover how Roblox hooks young players. They explore its addictive design, in-game currency (Robux), and the potential risks, from overspending to inappropriate content.
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Transcript
Introduction to Gaming's Impact on Children
00:00:08
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening. Whenever you are, welcome to the dopamine slot machine, the podcast that discusses what you need to know about the video games your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked? How do they make money from your children? And what you can do to make your child's relationship with video games a positive one.
Andrew's Gaming Journey Begins
00:00:27
Andrew Wilmot
My name is Andrew. I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer. And this time we're doing something slightly different. Brand can make it this week. We are still going to be talking about microtransactions next week. I know that that is something that a few of you are very interested in, but I thought I would take the opportunity to talk a little bit about my journey, all the way from my early experiences with video games as a child, to to my passionate awareness raising of the way games are now designed to trap children.
00:00:54
Andrew Wilmot
so I was born in the mid-90s, and some of my first memories, actually, of playing in inverted commas, games like Duke Nukem and Doom, my parents weren't gamers, really, despite this. My dad still gets his digital kicks as a programmer, and has never been my mum's thing. But my best friend in primary school, now his passion parents were passionate gamers. They got a PlayStation 2 when he was about five, and I got one when I was six.
00:01:23
Andrew Wilmot
And, oh boy, it was love at first button press. As I say all of this, by the way, I want you to keep something in mind. The games I'm about to talk about were not designed explicitly to be habit forming. Now I'd say the vast majority of mainstream video games are. If your children play Roblox, Fortnite, Call of Duty, FIFA, let alone any of the free games you'll find on tablets, they are playing games that are designed to be habit forming.
00:01:53
Andrew Wilmot
But even without explicitly habit-forming design, we were hooked. We were both bright children, but it definitely impacted our education and probably also our social and emotional development. I remember getting caught sneaking up to play the classic Star Wars X-Wing game late at night.
Transformation of the Internet and Gaming
00:02:13
Andrew Wilmot
And don't get me wrong, we still engaged in normal childhood play. We still had clubs and activities, but our default position was sat in front of the PlayStation.
00:02:22
Andrew Wilmot
It's easy from the perspective of being in the 2020s to ask why didn't our parents do anything, but at that time we had even less evidence and less awareness of the issues surrounding gaming. And as long as we were doing well enough in school and had other clubs, who cared if we as friends primarily bonded over video games?
00:02:43
Andrew Wilmot
I was a teenager when the internet really transitioned from being a place you went to at a family or bedroom computer to an extension of yourself that follows you from bedroom to bathroom, from car to classroom, and from work to winding down. So I missed a lot of the first wave of mobile games. Roblox, whilst extremely popular now, actually appeared about 2008. But what I did get into was online gaming.
00:03:13
Andrew Wilmot
specifically round-based games versus other people. And if I found the single-player or living room multiplayer type game that I've been playing up until this point compelling, wow boy, this supercharged it. Introducing a competitive element meant that I wasn't just beating a game, but beating somebody else. It also meant that if I lost, I wasn't just losing in a game, but performing worse than someone else.
00:03:39
Andrew Wilmot
You can imagine that this leads to the exact sort of, oh, just one last game type behavior that we sometimes talk about, the the inability to pause it, the inability to take a break. Because if you're finishing on a loss, well, you don't want to finish on a negative note. And if you finish on a win, oh, you've got that dopamine kick, so you want to do it again. But that sort of game, that's small fry.
00:04:06
Andrew Wilmot
I saw friends of mine at this time prioritize a type of game called an MMO, massively multiplayer online, over the real world. They withdrew from the real world as much as as possible. They failed classes as they should have passed and could have passed if they put in the bare minimum effort. And the reason they did that, ultimately, is these games produced a facsimile of social worth and success.
00:04:34
Andrew Wilmot
There's a beautiful documentary on Netflix, The Remarkable Life of Ibalin, which is about the digital life through a game called World of Warcraft of a man with muscular dystrophy. And it is a beautiful film. It touches on some of the positives these games can have. But from a behavioral regulation point of view, from a parental point of view, a digital world that can so thoroughly to displace the real one is a danger.
00:05:05
Andrew Wilmot
The games that I see aimed at children now are very deliberate in the way they attach social value to players' in-game identities. Make the players care about their in-game identities as much as you might about real-world ones.
00:05:21
Andrew Wilmot
They do this through skins, that being know the clothes your character might wear. Achievements. And you know ultimately, the buzzword metaverse you might have seen on the news, less so at the moment, but more so a few years ago, means exactly that. World of Warcraft, famously addictive, did this almost accidentally. Roblox, Fortnite, and the rest of the live service crop of games that are popular with children are doing this deliberately with psychologists on the payroll to maximise that effect.
Balancing Gaming with Life Responsibilities
00:05:58
Andrew Wilmot
I finished school with good grades, although could have been better had I put a fraction of the time I did gaming into studying.
00:06:06
Andrew Wilmot
I went to university, and it was a similar story. I actually failed a year, but let's not talk about that. Once I entered the workplace, the the structure of work and adult life did force me to build a healthier relationship with video games. And two children later, I enjoy an hour or so bed most nights when my partner watches TV. To this day, I do stay away from multiplayer games, though.
00:06:29
Andrew Wilmot
Last year, I came across smartphone-free childhood, which is, if you're in the UK, it's ah it's a UK-based group of parents that started off or committing to delay giving their children smartphones.
00:06:45
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I was already appalled at this time at the proliferation of smartphones and tablets for children. You know, when you see a child with a tablet two inches from their face whilst in a buggy whilst their parent scrolls on their phone. And for me, my wake-up moment had actually happened a few years prior to this reading about Elsa gate which was I say an incident it is ongoing it's just fallen out of focus but where YouTube kids had effectively had its algorithm hijacked because content creators on YouTube get paid right and they get paid based on how many views and how long people spend viewing them and so
00:07:32
Andrew Wilmot
with With Elsa-gate, a bunch of creators figured out that they could churn out really low quality, but actually quite captivating stuff that at times was completely inappropriate. And the inappropriateness, the the childish inappropriateness. I'm talking stuff like Spider-Man and Elsa playing together, and they chop Spider-Man's head off, and it's, oh, a load of blood coming out. oh You know, creepy images, kind of thing that an adult will look at and think is silly, but a child will click on. They're financially incentivized to do this. It's a big scandal. YouTube apparently cracked down on it. It's nonsense. YouTube Kids is still completely inappropriate for children. it's It's not a curated platform. Anyway, so
00:08:20
Andrew Wilmot
I come across Smartphone Free Childhood and I'm just so relieved that there are other parents who feel the same way that I do.
Parental Guidance and Understanding of Games
00:08:29
Andrew Wilmot
That feels as if the world is going mad that looking around this is not acceptable. but Now look, I am fully on board with Smartphone Free Childhood's message and mission. It is the smartphones. It is the screen time. Sure, there's related issues. The fact that it's harder than ever to have a single working parent doesn't help.
00:08:48
Andrew Wilmot
the decline in quality clubs and playgrounds, but both the symptom and the disease really is the smartphone dependence. But most parents I've spoken to, even those who are very heavily involved in smartphone free childhood, they have a blind spot. They're not gamers. They've never been gamers. They've never played a video game in their life. if you read, if you can read, you know that there's a difference between reading Hello Magazine and the Financial Times.
00:09:17
Andrew Wilmot
I'm not saying that to to insult people who who enjoy a celebrity mag. But if you were reading that six hours a day, I mean, to be fair, if you were reading the Financial Times six hours a day, that would be a concern. But we know that there is a difference. We've watched films, so we know there's a difference between Citizen Kane and Sharknado 3.
00:09:42
Andrew Wilmot
putting aside the difference being that Citizen Kane is actually pretty boring. But this leads to parents not really knowing how to approach video games, which are now endemic. Maybe they tried to keep their kids away from games completely, which, apart from, you know, that's not going to work.
00:10:01
Andrew Wilmot
You're going to turn it into a forbidden fruit, and you're going to have them very left out. But it also deprives them of an entire creative medium that can be as deep as books or film. Maybe they treat all games the same and have strict time controls. You know what? I think time controls are a great idea. But not all games are the same. And if you aren't aware of the differences,
00:10:24
Andrew Wilmot
Well, it's your child effectively playing an hour of slot machine simulator every day. That's going to have a very different impact on a child than, say, having an hour of Animal Crossing, which we haven't covered yet. But we, again, super positive about. It's a game about doing chores and building your island community. And it is slow. And it is calm. And it is not overstimulating. And it's not trying to capture your attention and suck all your money, Joy.
00:10:55
Andrew Wilmot
Well, perhaps the worst is complete ignorance of the dangers of games altogether and simply substituting one drug for another. Sure, we ban smartphones in in this household, but, ah know, Timmy gets home from school and ah plays four hours of Roblox a night, then gets up whilst we're sleeping, and we don't know because we haven't set any sort of controls, to play it more through the night.
00:11:19
Andrew Wilmot
And so, I really wanted to start to bridge that knowledge gap, to equip parents with the tools and knowledge they need to start making informed decisions. And I don't want it to just be, I said i said that Roblox is bad, therefore you should ban it in your house. No, what I would really want the takeaway to be is that You've heard me talk about the dangers of Roblox. Go try it for yourself. Go have a look. Go see the sorts of games that are available on there. Do the same with Fortnite. For the sake of a couple hours night, if if your child is playing Fortnite and you're concerned because we've mentioned it negatively on this,
00:12:06
Andrew Wilmot
go play some games with them. Understand for real, not just scrolling on your phone whilst sat on the sofa next to them whilst they're doing it, but understand for real by getting involved what it's like from the perspective. And so that really is the the mission statement of the dopamine slot machine as a podcast. And it's also something that Brandon i'm I'm so lucky to have Brandon on board, actually. He's going to listen back to this at some point. He doesn't he doesn't know that I've gone ahead and done this, but he's going to listen back to this and I'm i'm hoping, feeling very proud of the way I describe him, but he is brilliant. He has lived and breathed psychology, particularly as it pertains to habit formation for as long as I've known him for over a decade now.
00:12:59
Andrew Wilmot
And so when I started talking to him about some of the issues that we're seeing with smartphones, he is terrified of what what the future is going to be like when you've got this divide between parents who are conscious about these issues and those who aren't. Now, this is normally when I'd Let's highlight a ah ah question that somebody has given us or sent in. I'm actually going to turn things around here and give you a question to think about.
Engaging with Children Through Gaming
00:13:33
Andrew Wilmot
If your child is a gamer, then have a think about this. Imagine you had a private island. What sort of house would you build on it? For me, i'd I'd like a big cabin in the woods. It's a big island.
00:13:50
Andrew Wilmot
Now, think about what you would what sort of house you'd want for a minute, and then go and ask your child or children if they can help you build that in Minecraft. they I can guarantee that that'll be like Christmas Day for them, for you showing an interest in that sort of virtual world. The controls might be tough. It might be a bit strange to work out, and they might even get frustrated at you for not getting it.
00:14:18
Andrew Wilmot
But I think you'll come out of that experience having a much better understanding of video games. And I think it'll give you a closer understanding of your child's existence in these digital worlds. And perhaps most importantly, it'll be a fantastic bonding experience between you and your kids. Now, that's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining me.
00:14:48
Andrew Wilmot
We'd love to have you here with us again in next week's episode, which, as I mentioned, we're going to be taking the time going over microtransactions, the little purchases that can add up to be a big problem. This has been the dopamine slot machine. Thank you and see you soon.