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Current Trends: What comes next for our children?
66 Plays1 day ago
Andrew, a father of two and lifelong gamer, teams up with Brandon, a consumer psychologist and ex-pro video game coach, to cover video games, the way they are designed and how these design decisions impact the children that play them.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Dopamine Slot Machine'
00:00:07
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 that your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked?
00:00:19
Andrew Wilmot
How do they make money from your children? And what can you do to make sure that your child's relationship with the video games is a positive one?
Meet Andrew and Brandon
00:00:26
Andrew Wilmot
My name is Andrew. I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer.
00:00:30
Bdizzle
And I'm Brandon, a consumer research psychologist and an ex-professional video game coach.
Future of Children and Gaming
00:00:36
Andrew Wilmot
This week, we're going to be making some predictions on what children's relationship with gaming could look like in 10 years' time, based off of the trends that we see today. So just setting the scene at the moment, if you've been listening for a while, you'll know that we're a little bit concerned about some of the most popular games and the sort of blind spot that parents have dealing with them. We're talking Fortnite, we're talking Roblox, other games which are perhaps a little less...
00:01:06
Andrew Wilmot
less malicious. You've got Minecraft, you've got Zelda.
Impact of Dual Working Parents on Socialization
00:01:09
Andrew Wilmot
um But there's a reason why these digital third spaces, that is spaces that are outside of school or the home, have become more and more important to children over the last few years.
00:01:21
Andrew Wilmot
So we've seen a rise, for instance, in the number of households which have both parents working. At the moment, in households which are what's called couple families, which is defined as either married, civil partnered, or cohabiting adults with dependent children.
00:01:38
Andrew Wilmot
Almost three quarters of those have both parents in employment. For single parents, nearly seven in ten single parents are employed, and over half of those then employed full-time.
00:01:51
Andrew Wilmot
And yeah you take a take a single parent, like it's difficult enough for me and my partner when to to manage, to just manage a household with kids, with us both working full time, let alone making it a, giving them fulfilling experiences, making sure that they're well socialised. That makes them sound like dogs, but it's important, you know, having that out of school socialisation time with peers.
00:02:24
Andrew Wilmot
it's It's hard enough us. I can't imagine what it's like to juggle as as a single parent. um if you If you're a parent, you'll know you'll have seen the degradation of playgrounds over the last few years.
00:02:39
Andrew Wilmot
the just I don't have any figures in terms of funding, but all the ones locally, for us, they feel like they're falling apart. the Things just aren't getting fixed.
00:02:50
Andrew Wilmot
and they're just getting more and more abused.
Decline in Youth Club Funding in the UK
00:02:54
Andrew Wilmot
I've got one stat here, which I think Brandon will probably be able to talk a little bit more about here. Not so much the stat itself, but the implications, and that's youth club funding.
00:03:02
Andrew Wilmot
So youth club funding in the past 10 years has more than halved. So not even adjusting for inflation. So it's even worse if you make it ah you know real funding, but adjust it for inflation.
00:03:15
Andrew Wilmot
It's halved from 1 billion to about 400 million. And yeah for kids who, particularly from deprived backgrounds, and again, I'll pass over to yourself, Brandon, in just a second, that's such a huge space that's just disappeared.
00:03:34
Bdizzle
Yeah, ah correct, Andrew. And it's ah it's a strange one is' a strange bone in regard because what we're finding is ah with all of these budget cuts, we're kind of removing not only for ah ah children that have some tough backgrounds, but almost for everyone, um the ability to kind of meet for local community events or community rituals, right?
00:03:57
Bdizzle
In whatever form that will be, ah whether that's going to the park to play football or... going to a youth club um just to, I guess, maintain or start that kind of relationship with broader social connection.
00:04:11
Bdizzle
um And it's it's a worrying trend and is reflected in loneliness statistics with young men young women. It's reflected in a huge wealth wealth of data, to be honest
The Paradox of Virtual Connectivity and Loneliness
00:04:24
Bdizzle
with you. that ah we Although the internet and these digital platforms have given us the ability to connect in ways that previously would have been akin to magic, we're more isolated than ever.
00:04:37
Andrew Wilmot
Yeah, I mean, and in many ways, ah we talk now virtually more than we ever would have been able to physically. And it's great in in that sense, but it's completely displacing, partly due to parental commitments and partly due to just the the lack of suitable places to have that sort of third place socialization.
00:05:01
Andrew Wilmot
There's got to be implications, right?
00:05:04
Bdizzle
Well, yeah, it's it's worrying. Like, so even though that our relationship, Andrew, because we werere were in different parts of the UK, don't giggle at that. We're good friends. I'm going to call it a relationship.
00:05:15
Bdizzle
um
00:05:16
Andrew Wilmot
No, I agree. I agree.
00:05:17
Bdizzle
Well, yeah, no, we're really fantastic friends for like, must be six, seven years now. um But what what kind of makes our situation unique is that it's it's almost like what I'd regard it as is is as a complex social relationship.
00:05:32
Bdizzle
So and I understand what's going on in Andrew's life. Andrew knows what's going on in my life. ah We can meet up very, very occasionally. Like there's no time that shifted between us as a byproduct of this. it's It's very good.
00:05:47
Bdizzle
The problem with a lot of digital media, and we'll probably go into this in greater detail and ah later on in this podcast, but the problem is is that these platforms aren't designed for sophisticated communication. and They're not designed for sophisticated versions of community or anything, let's say three-dimensional or character building.
Roblox and the Future of Communication
00:06:08
Bdizzle
um And that's, you know on the on the topic of where things are going, that's that's kind of what worries me, but I'm sure we'll dig into that later on in this podcast.
00:06:17
Andrew Wilmot
There was really interesting quote, I think is the best word for it, the most diplomatic word for it, at least, from ah Roblox CEO Dave Bazzucchi.
00:06:28
Andrew Wilmot
where he described his intentions of for Roblox to be the future of communication. Now, putting aside the fact that that's just a bit of a pithy one-liner in a BBC article, which was almost entirely to try and soften Roblox's image, let's be honest.
00:06:44
Andrew Wilmot
i I did get a little bit cross about it in the previous episodes. Putting aside the fact that it's PR, I think there's there's a lot to unpack there, actually, when we talk about how much of kids' communication has shifted to these spaces, right?
00:07:01
Bdizzle
Yeah, 100%. And it's my personal opinion. It's it's just that's not that's not the guy's... That's not Roblox's pipeline. Because if it was their pipeline ah with the age of the platform, what you'd find is that their average age would be increasing exponentially.
00:07:18
Bdizzle
It's because you kind of get this weighted response towards players that have been integrated into these really deep, rich communities that are enriching their lives for prolonged periods of time. um But that's not happening.
00:07:30
Bdizzle
And the attrition is because they're moving on to other things. And the argument is, is that I almost guarantee when you map this, those other things a lot the time aren't good. So if you try to draw a linear regression between roadblocks and let's say ah early engagement and slot machines, I guarantee you like there'll be a response. and i And I'm not sure if this research exists just for those at home. um but But my intuition says it will be be pretty clear there's a relationship there.
00:08:03
Andrew Wilmot
I mean, we're we're just in completely uncharted territory is what you're saying, right?
00:08:06
Bdizzle
Yeah, basically. well And that's a great clarification point, Andrew, is we're in inal uncharted territory, but all the information that we have is that the general trend is really not good.
00:08:18
Bdizzle
And you only leave you you you only need to like link into the politicians speaking about the space, even if they're blocking regulation, and even they acknowledge. So there's a really, really clear negative detrimental impact to engagement in these platforms. They're just choosing not to regulate it, which is a really wild situation to be in.
00:08:40
Andrew Wilmot
I find it really interesting to compare to a decade ago when we were in university and sort of gaming trends there. I think of the sort of mega smash hit games at that point, the the sort of ones that people did sink time into.
00:08:55
Andrew Wilmot
they One, they were all sort of more aimed towards that older age, so Call Duty, Dota, League of Legends, Counter-Strike. Those are sorts games that people sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours in. They weren't aimed at children. There might have been some children playing them.
00:09:13
Andrew Wilmot
But again, you go to Fortnite, you go to Roblox, it is so explicitly targeting young children. That's been, I think, the biggest shift in the past 10 years.
00:09:25
Bdizzle
Yeah, I completely... well it's so It's about the pipeline, right? It's a business pipeline. you You get them young, you know? and Let's convince young children that Air Jordans are a status symbol but status symbol as early as possible.
00:09:42
Bdizzle
And let's pay a premium to do that.
00:09:42
Andrew Wilmot
And not just Air Jordans, but virtual ones.
00:09:46
Bdizzle
Yeah, correct.
00:09:46
Andrew Wilmot
Air Jordans for your avatar.
00:09:46
Bdizzle
and Yeah, that's the important thing that matters. And and there's ah there is a body of research looking into that. And our digital selves are an extension of ourselves to a certain degree, right?
00:09:58
Bdizzle
And we can all kind of fill that in the way that we put ah photos up on social media or we get received comments or whatever. And the problem is, is teach your...
00:10:09
Bdizzle
you you put a young child that's fairly very malleable in these situations and immediately they're exposed to status symbols that are associated with commercialization that the foundationally just doesn't actually make a lot of sense.
00:10:25
Bdizzle
If you're prepared to spend eight pounds on something that like makes you look a certain way in a digital environment, 60, 70 pounds spend suddenly feels pretty soft.
00:10:37
Bdizzle
You know, saying that that's genuinely the pipeline. um And that's how works.
00:10:41
Andrew Wilmot
It's that foot in the door, the thin edge of the wedge.
00:10:45
Bdizzle
Correct.
00:10:45
Andrew Wilmot
um Now, looking ahead, 10 years' time, at at this point, I think we're starting to see the maturation of some of the techniques that we're talking about.
00:10:59
Andrew Wilmot
We've gone from the sort of experimentation phase where we're starting to apply this sort of thing to we know that if you want to maximise your
00:11:10
Andrew Wilmot
extraction of money for an audience, particularly children, that you use an obfuscated currency like V-Bucks, like Robux. That's known now. but That's just industry knowledge.
00:11:23
Andrew Wilmot
Five years ago, that would have still been up for debate. Now it's not. So what's 10 years' time?
Concerns on Unregulated Gaming Future
00:11:29
Andrew Wilmot
ah The way things are going, let's let's make some spurious predictions.
00:11:35
Andrew Wilmot
I'll let you make the first one then, Brandon.
00:11:37
Bdizzle
you you That's a hard ask. You're asking me to almost bet against God, right? It's very complicated. So in my in my mind, there's only although it's quite abstract, there's two avenues, right?
00:11:50
Bdizzle
So one avenue is nothing happens and it continues on its it's ridiculous path that it's already on. So for some reason, it doesn't get regulated.
00:12:01
Bdizzle
um in the way that nicotine or tobacco products or alcohol gets regulated and it just continues on its path. And I really think what we'll see is a massive uptake and ah massive uptake in everything that's tangential to immediate gratification and the problems that comes with. it So ah gambling addiction, depression, anxiety, ability to like engage with the outside world because the more normalized these functions of communication come,
00:12:31
Bdizzle
not because it's a video game video games can be positive i i'm a huge believer in that but the popularity and the uh i guess unrestrictedness of like a lot of these major corporations it's it's as malicious as anything that you can think of with instagram but its target audience is below the age 13.
00:12:53
Bdizzle
like it's absolutely wild we need uh similar massive conversations about uh you know in the same way that instagram filters are bad because it makes anyone look perfect this is that on a far more ground root scale in terms of its its potential long-term impact and what we know about ah long-term predictions of stuff when it comes to kids is that ah the earlier the mo the earlier it is, the more dangerous it is. So if you look at like yeah alcohol abuse in any way, it's one of its key predictors is that you start doing it at a very young age. So you start binge drinking at like 14, right?
00:13:35
Bdizzle
right and what these a lot of these platforms basically provide is the ability to binge drink when it comes to immediate gratification in a very unique tailored and forced upon way it's not like it's designed to try to drag as many people into that hole so in terms of the next 10 years i kind of look at it in that kind of dystopian way well at some point we'll we'll wake up and realize that man maybe covid wasn't the main driver for this massive rise in mental health problems but we'll be too late because it will already be happening so that's one future the second future is is that we approach and
00:14:19
Bdizzle
ah ah these digital platforms video games virtual dating in the same way that we approach common sense things that are a danger to public health so When you think of um alcohol consumption, it's taxed in a particular way to try to
Potential Positives of Regulated Gaming
00:14:36
Bdizzle
discourage use. When you think of ah cigarettes, it's taxed in a very violent way to discourage use. And when when we got on top of the cigarette taxation problems, what you found was was that these large large corporations with millions millions and millions and millions of pounds of funding for for research and development, what you found was is that they pivoted towards solutions that were healthier.
00:15:00
Bdizzle
you you know And that's why vaping is taken off in the way that it has, in particular with like the north of England. Still not great, still not good.
00:15:09
Bdizzle
But you can see how regulation and actual proactive approach from basically government can change behavior when engaging with these platforms. And what we need to do is it if we incentivize these, like Roblox, as Andrew said, we incentivize these big corporations to actually give like somewhat of a dam about ah the children accessing that platform, they will magically start creating ah digital environments that enrich them.
00:15:42
Bdizzle
But currently we keep weirdly passing the buck. um and But if we do regulate it, it becomes a force for good. We can start leveraging the fact that we can communicate in in new and novel ways. we can Instead of socializing for 30 minutes on the high school playground or the the primary school playground, you can communicate for hours per day as social skills go up. and As a bioprocar, that anxiety goes down, depression goes down, people build really solid foundational networks in terms of the way that they engage with the local community. there's like that that the Basically, the world is to play for, but the key instrument here is um whether or not it's regulated in the same regard that carcinogens or things that may cause you cancer is regulated with flavor enhancers in microwave food.
00:16:33
Bdizzle
why Why are we not engaging with this like it's a public health problem when we know it's going to basically force ah or ah force or increase the likelihood of thousands of suicides? And and that really worries me.
00:16:52
Andrew Wilmot
Something that ah I've seen put forward a few times. And by the way, shout out to smartphone free childhood for being, yeah, real.
00:16:57
Bdizzle
Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, yeah, 100%. Sorry. oh That was a long rant, Andrew. I apologize. i was i was I was there for a second. I apologize.
00:17:05
Andrew Wilmot
Oh, you were in the zone and every every word of it was brilliant. But no, smartphone free charters is really proving to be a tour de force political movement in the UK. And I know there's similar movements around the world.
00:17:18
Andrew Wilmot
ah But one of the bits of pushback that they've had that I've seen is this idea that we shouldn't be telling other parents how to parent. And for me, I find that wild, right? Like,
00:17:31
Andrew Wilmot
People will you know might silently judge if I let my three-year-old play videos or games on my phone or full volume on the bus.
00:17:42
Andrew Wilmot
But you can be sure as hell they'll say something if I gave them a vape to ah pacify them. why why what's What's different about this? And i really try to take the stance of I'm not going to judge other parents on this.
00:17:59
Andrew Wilmot
because I'm much more immersed in this than most parents. ah I'm sure most of our listeners are in a similar boat. But at the same time, even putting aside what I know from my educational professional background, I remember...
00:18:18
Andrew Wilmot
I remember the seeing the difference when our eldest was much younger um when we switched Cocomelon off. Cocomelon for me was that sort of trigger point, seeing there's something weird going on here, compared to slower shows.
00:18:38
Andrew Wilmot
I just don't understand how parents can't observe their own kids and see what's happening to some degree. Now, I appreciate that Roblox, and I keep going back to Roblox, I know, Roblox looks benign. It looks childish. It looks cartoony.
00:18:54
Andrew Wilmot
And I can appreciate the parents who have never played a game in their life, really, aren't going to be able to tell the what's going on there. But don't don't they see it in their children's behaviour?
00:19:07
Andrew Wilmot
I don't it's a tough one for me.
00:19:08
Bdizzle
way It's a tough one because it's really multifaceted, right? So the reason why psychology and the research into these spaces are slow-moving based is because it's a confluence of factors.
00:19:20
Bdizzle
And that, like... That really impedes the general adoption of... It's not as linear as someone tries this thing and then they have x percentage likelihood of developing x condition, right? So it's not like healthcare care in that regard because...
00:19:38
Bdizzle
ah Well, not completely unlike healthcare, but it's so much more multifaceted. You have like ah your genetic baseline, where you're from, your show to socioeconomic status. You have all of these factors that mold in and because of that, it can get very, very convoluted very, very quickly. So it's complicated.
00:19:57
Bdizzle
But the thing I would always like to think about in terms of the way that we culturally engage with like these types of big questions is, um so the reason why we, when you're on the bus, Andrew, and if you imagine passing your youngest a cigarette, right?
00:20:12
Bdizzle
So hypothetically, it's,
00:20:14
Andrew Wilmot
Yeah, we we we go well we'll go twos on it.
00:20:15
Bdizzle
it Yeah, it's ah it's an absurd situation, an absolutely absurd situation. And that's because foundationally in terms of a problem statement, it's because cigarette smoking lowers the life expectancy of your child.
00:20:29
Bdizzle
Terrible thing to do. And the problem with these types of platforms is they don't lower your life expectancy of your child. But my God, they were they almost definitively change the life direction of your child.
00:20:43
Bdizzle
And I just feel like that kind of acknowledgement lacking from the entire space. If you spend ah six hours a day on a slot machine from the age of 10, by the time you get to 20, do you think you'll have group? Will you be an adaptive, like a functional, adaptive, ah flexible member of society?
00:21:07
Bdizzle
No. You just won't be. and and like that that's kind of what just haunts me intrinsically about the space person, Andrew.
00:21:17
Bdizzle
Sorry if I went on another tangent there.
00:21:18
Andrew Wilmot
you you you touch on You touch on something that I feel like I'm starting to observe now, although it might just be my own personal biases. And that is that there's increasingly a sort of wealth divide between the parents who are aware of the issues surrounding, and I'm not just talking about ah video games here, but smartphones and addictive design and algorithmic-driven content.
Digital Awareness Divide Among Parents
00:21:48
Andrew Wilmot
in general, between the parents who are aware of that and those that aren't. And one of the things that came out of COVID, right, is the impacts of COVID and lockdown were are disproportionately concentrated amongst families who are lower income. um And whether whether that's because they had they're effectively confined in much smaller spaces, or whether it's because they're exposed to more stressors being more likely to be key workers, ah less likely to be able to work from home, less likely to be furloughed.
00:22:25
Andrew Wilmot
I don't know, right? I'm just completely spitballing here, but I feel like I'm starting to see a lot more concern perhaps amongst quite middle-class parents And again, looking forward to 10 years, wondering how this manifests in terms of inequality in educational attainment, ah further disparities in terms of social achievement and you know just being, you know if you're more impulsive, you're going to get you're more likely to be in get in trouble with the police, right?
00:23:00
Bdizzle
Andrew, do we have a hot take alert button? Because if we don't, be sure to subscribe to this podcast so that we can one day afford a hot take alert button. So I'm really cautious about talking about this.
00:23:15
Bdizzle
um But I think it's the biggest threat to social mobility um maybe ever in terms of like the middle class.
00:23:18
Andrew Wilmot
Thank you.
00:23:25
Bdizzle
I really do believe that. Because if you personally, if you're listening to this, like look internally into your life, everything has been defined by your ability to pay attention, arguably.
00:23:37
Bdizzle
like like from your ability to learn skills uh do your job effectively form really meaning like think about your romantic relationships it's like you pay attention to your wife or your partner um you know you had a bad day at work you had a good day at work you you uh change your haircut anything right it all kind of manifests in this idea of like are you very very present and paying attention to the world around you and what these digital platforms do a lot of the time from a very, very young age is try to steal all of that attention to you from you in a immediate gratification way.
Impact of Short-form Content on Attention Span
00:24:15
Bdizzle
um So ah the the exercise I'd give people that listening is that your friends that use TikTok a lot, ask them when was the last time they read a book.
00:24:23
Bdizzle
How hard they find it. do Do they think that TikTok has limited their ability to pay attention, let's say, for like 45 minutes in terms of reading a book? And a lot of them will come back and say, yeah, like it's it's not fast paced enough for me anymore. You know, I hear stories about people losing the ability to watch TV shows as a byproduct of this.
00:24:43
Andrew Wilmot
I mean, I've straight up heard about um writers and directors actively trying to make the content second screen friendly so that you'll you'll find characters announcing what they're doing more with the assumption that the people watching aren't actually watching.
00:25:01
Bdizzle
Exactly. And it it goes even deeper than that. So like if you look at the um editing sequence of media, it's getting shorter and shorter because the more they edit like kind of scenes changing, the higher engagement is. And this has become like a foundational design role in that industry.
00:25:18
Bdizzle
So if you look adverts and television, that's very successful. um And if you want to get really dark about Coco Melon, who has the shortest, by the way, ah scene editing. So if you watch Coco Melon, like every three like three to four seconds, there's like a new scene on it.
00:25:32
Bdizzle
But they know it produces engagement because your brain has to like cognitive process. Okay, this scene's changed. What's going on? But this is the kind of weird thing about the future is that there's all these factors at play and they're not by accident. It's not like, oh, we're we're producing a pair of shoes and they but we we just really care about our product and they last a long time.
00:25:57
Bdizzle
It's people sat around a boardroom table and being like, let's reduce our average editing time by like three three seconds and as a bioprogram that engagement will go up.
00:26:08
Bdizzle
and We don't really care about the long-term time repercussions because we know that it will foster the type of user engagement that means that we can sell advertising, right? And you play that forwards 10 years and people's attention spans are getting lower. They're not capable of processing information in the way that is required to and understand potentially complex subjects.
00:26:30
Bdizzle
And it sounds very, very dystopian, but sincerely, and maybe I'm maybe i'm i'm a warrior, I'm an anxious dog on fireworks night. But sincerely, think about it. When you watch television and adverts, are you teaching, oh are we in a world that fosters attention?
00:26:49
Bdizzle
Because arguably we're not. And if we don't foster attention, we can't foster it anything else. Because everything comes from your ability to cognitively engage with something. Think about university.
00:27:00
Bdizzle
Think about learning new skills. Or... engaging even with like even like problems like problems in a relationship it requires sustained attention and thought and I feel like a lot of these platforms are just designed to almost undermine the way that we engage with these things um and that that worries me um and that's why I think they should look that's why that's the dark future the positive future and as Andrew said shout out to any organization that's just trying to give general visibility to things that we all fundamentally know that are true, which is that social media and the way we engage with it doesn't enrich our lives.
Social Media's Impact and Lack of Regulation
00:27:43
Bdizzle
And now we're giving that this tool that doesn't enrich our lives to our children. Why would we think that as fully formed humans that that wouldn't have negative negative repercussions on our kids? it's It's a strange time to be alive, Andrew.
00:27:59
Andrew Wilmot
Without meaning to sound like um you know that that person who has completed their first full year of being vegan, I, sorry to any vegan listeners, I don't mean to specifically call you out here, I feel so much cognitively cleaner since removing any apps on my phone that have short form video.
Podcast Milestone Celebration
00:28:21
Andrew Wilmot
it's It really feels like night and day to me. Now, this is normally the time where we would read out a question or two that we've had sent in.
00:28:33
Andrew Wilmot
But actually, we've collated a few of them for our next episode because we recently... ah little little round of applause to us here. We recently passed 100 Spotify subscribers and a couple of dozen on Apple Podcasts as well, which is so much more than we ever thought would happen when we started this.
00:28:55
Andrew Wilmot
And so that's also to come along with a thousand ah full listens, right? We've been listened to a thousand times. That's incredible.
Listener Engagement and Interaction Encouragement
00:29:05
Andrew Wilmot
So we're going to skip the questions for now, but if you do have questions for us, or if you or your children have been impacted by the issues we discussed today, please do get in touch with us either on our website, thedopamineslotmachine.co.uk, or find us on the Dopamine Slot Machine Discussion Corner Facebook group.
00:29:24
Andrew Wilmot
All links can be found in our artist profile, but for now, that is all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'd love to have you here with us again in our next episode, which as I mentioned, we're going to be doing as a celebratory one-off where we exclusively cover sent in questions from our listeners.
00:29:43
Andrew Wilmot
This has been the dopamine slot machine. Thank you and see you soon.