 Hey everyone, I've noticed something that's bothered me in the last week or so on YouTube. I've watched as a bunch of YouTubers have applauded a feckless Luddite politicians legislation that would ban loot boxes and pay to win mechanics and games. And even though I am quite positive the bill has a snowball chance in hell of a coming law, today I'm going to explain why I think asking politicians to save us from loot boxes isn't just a bad idea, it's a deeply immoral one. After the logo. Let's start with this. I absolutely agree that loot boxes have been bad for game design, even though I fully admit that RNG and a game's reward system can be fun. Opening treasure chests in games can be a thrill. Picking the lock on a box in Fallout 4 and finding something useful is nice. It's not the RNG nature of the mechanics that's the problem with loot boxes. It's what AAA and free to play designers have put in the boxes that's the problem. Games like Overwatch charged a full premium price for the game and then pulled out all of the customization items that have historically been rewarded in-game for achieving things and instead put them in digital baseball card packs. Pay to win elements in games are always troublesome because they chip away at the foundation of video games as they've always existed. Games are fun because you overcome challenges through skill or cleverness or intimate familiarity with their systems. Portal 2 and Portal 2 are amazing games because when you complete a puzzle you get a rush and feel smart and accomplished. If Portal 2 had a pay 5 portal gems to complete puzzle button that then asked you to enter a credit card number it wouldn't be quite as fun. So my main concern with loot boxes, microtransactions and pay to win elements has always been and remains today mainly that they changed game design for the worst in almost all instances. But that's not my only problem. I have a particular loathing for loot boxes because I think their shitty value to the customer. I didn't like when microtransactions first appeared in World of Warcraft all those years ago but I eventually found a couple of pets and one mount that I thought was cool enough and the cost low enough to actually pay money for them. What I can't see myself paying money for is a random chance to get the mount I want. A perfect example is Destiny vs Destiny 2. When Destiny first introduced emotes that you could buy with real money it annoyed me but many of them were cool enough that I ended up buying a few. I'd have preferred these emotes to be unlocked through gameplay challenges but I liked the product enough and found the price reasonable enough to buy a few. I never spent one solitary dollar at the D2 Everrestor however because I personally don't like gambling. I have no problem with people who do like gambling, you do you man but I work hard for my money and I only spend it on things I actually want not a small undisclosed chance to get the thing I actually want. So these changes to game design are in my opinion bad for games. Some are kinda gross but not bad enough to keep me from occasionally spending a few bucks and some are so bad I simply won't buy them and some are so grotesquely bad like Star Wars Battlefront 2 that I refuse to buy the game at all. And that is the proper response to this problem. If your problem with loot boxes is that they are ruining the design of games there's a ready made solution to that issue. It's the most powerful weapon available to you, even more powerful than government regulation because companies are quite accomplished at getting around regulation or failing that challenging it in court. Don't buy the games you think are being ruined by loot boxes it is just that simple. The most damage a person can do to a product is to simply refuse to buy it. If enough people don't like a particular product that product will quickly and I mean very very quickly go away. Loot boxes are in games to make more money. If enough people stopped buying games with loot boxes they would disappear. How do I know this? Because loot boxes have already started to disappear haven't they? The Star Wars Battlefront 2 debacle gave loot boxes such a bad name that companies are now advertising the lack of loot boxes as a feature. Fallout 76 was without any doubt at all designs with loot boxes in mind. The perk cards are clearly designs like Hearthstone packs with snazzy explosive opening animations, duplicate cards, card leveling by combining duplicates and data mining has revealed the presence of loot boxes that were to be sold in the Atom shop yet the outcry around loot boxes was so great and sales of Star Wars Battlefront 2 so disappointing that those plans were scrapped. The 2002's Eververse loot boxes almost drowned the game in controversy at launch. There was a huge player outcry and call for the total removal of the Eververse store. So much so that one of my earliest videos was about Bungie's response to that controversy. As a result of consumer anger and poor sales Bungie ended up giving players so many gameplay avenues to their contents that there was no longer any reason to buy the loot boxes at all. For the most part this problem is already solved through the magic of enough customers speaking out and voting with their wallets. Are there still loot boxes in some games? Yes, free to play titles like Apex Legends have them because if you're going to give a game away for free you've got to come up with a way to make money. Players have never had much of a problem with loot boxes in games that don't cost $60. Call of Duty, FIFA and Madden have them but those are games that appeal to a very poorly informed audience. They're games that sell to millions of casual customers who don't spend much time thinking about the intricacy of game design or making reddit threads detailing how long it will take to unlock a particular skin or player. My advice would be to never buy one of those games for yourself or your kids. Again, problem solved. But there are, of course, two other reasons people give for wanting loot boxes banned. The fact that children might be exposed to them and the fact that certain customers might end up spending more than they should because they're currently experiencing poor impulse control for any number of legitimate and quite serious reasons. As I've said before, children don't have credit cards, so if you're worried about children being exposed to loot boxes, don't buy your children loot boxes. But let's take a look at that other valid reason to not like them and find out why government intervention isn't just misguided, it is absolutely wrong to even try. To bring this to light, I'm going to have to first get a little bit personal and then a little bit philosophical. I'm the one you're trying to protect. If there's already a very good solution, the problem with loot boxes hurting game design, don't buy games with that design, there is, at first glance, less of a solution to the problem of people with impulse control issues and even addictions. It is perfectly natural and absolutely just to feel empathy and want to help people who are having these problems. We've all read the story about the person who spent $30,000 on Mass Effect 3 loot boxes or seen an article about some kid who stole his parents' credit card and went nuts on loot boxes. But banning loot boxes will not help these people. At all. In fact, it is very, very likely to hurt these people. To understand why, you've got to know at least a little bit about addiction and sad to say, I know a lot more than a little. This isn't the place to go through my whole sorry story, but it's enough to say I started drinking before school in 7th grade. And as I got older, things did not improve. By 18, I was addicted to heroin and I'd deal with that and cocaine and anything else I got my hands on for almost 15 years. That's not the important part though, the important part is this. I have known many, many people who have done heroin and not become addicted to it. Heroin is habit-forming, but the chemical itself isn't innately addictive. It is dependence-forming. There's a huge difference between chemical dependence and addiction. Dependence means you will get sick if you do not keep taking your medicine. Millions and millions of people are dependent upon their antidepressants or their pain medicine or their benzodiazepine or any number of other classes of medicines. If they ever stop taking that medicine, they will need to be slowly weaned by a physician to avoid an extremely unpleasant and often quite dangerous withdrawal syndrome. Addiction means you take the entire bottle and then rob a Walgreens to get another bottle. Millions of people a year are prescribed enough opiate medication to become dependent and millions more will use an opiate recreationally. And do you know what percentage of them will become addicted? Experience active addiction? Between 5 and 9% depending on which study you think has the best methodology. How can this be? Well, it can be because heroin is no more addictive than loot boxes in and of themselves. Addiction is the result of someone in despair coming into contact with something that becomes an obsession. You can give 100 people heroin or crack once and the odds that anyone becomes addicted is minuscule. But if you give those 100 people heroin once a month for a year between 5 and 9 of them will get a hit of heroin at just the right moment in their lives where it chases away all their loneliness and anger and replaces it with a warm fuzzy sense of detached indifference. This is why we have 86% of Americans who have gotten drunk, 70% who have gotten drunk in the last year, and 56% who have gotten drunk in the last month. And yet, how many alcoholics do you know? Guess what? The highest number you will find is 12% of Americans have a problem with alcohol. And the number of actual clinical alcoholics is between 5 and 9% depending on which study you like. So yes, a certain percentage of people are going to get addicted to loot boxes. Well, Pliny, you might say, if that's the case wouldn't banning them help those people? No. No, it would not. Because again, it's not the loot boxes that have caused the addiction, it's the person and their particular circumstances. Addiction was already banned when I became addicted, but let's imagine a perfect dystopian America where there are no illegal drugs. Do I go onto Harvard and never have an addiction? No. I'd have become addicted to alcohol or gambling or sex or huffing gas or overeating. I was at high risk for addiction and something would have come along. People become addicted to cutting themselves with razor blades. They become addicted to masturbating. They become addicted to washing their hands. You can't protect people from themselves. Let me get something controversial out of the way here. Heroin is an amazing thing. In some ancient cultures, poppy was considered a gift from the gods and for good reason. It has an amazing ability to make a person feel good, to not care about their pain. After overcoming my addiction, I did do heroin again. It was great. I never got addicted again though because the circumstances that led to that addiction were overcome through some hard one introspection. But 95% of people who try an opiate are going to have a grand old time and never be the worst for wear. Alcohol, opiates, MDMA, gambling, sex, these things are all quite popular for a reason. Because they are totally awesome and make people feel good for a little while as they traverse this plane of tears. If something harms 5% of the population but is absolutely great for 95% of people, is it right to deprive the 95 to save the 5 from themselves? The answer is complex but ends up at no. If you could protect those 5 people by preventing something from being invented, but banning drugs or alcohol or gambling requires the government to use force and violence. The only way to prevent the use of drugs is to kill or imprison those who sell them and shame and imprison those who want them. The government uses violence to protect me from myself. A person dies of an overdose and we all curse the drug. A person dies in prison in a feeble and useless effort to prevent the overdose and nobody gives a shit. Well, I give a shit. The government, my government that works for me, has no business telling me what I can drink or feel or think. Any effort to do that deprives me of my free will. It deprives me of my right to decide what I will do with my body, my mind, and my soul. It deprives me of my right to make my own mistakes and learn from them. I refuse to cede sovereignty over my mind to a distance out of touch government. I don't need a government to tell me what risks I can take. Beyond that, we need to examine the value of safety and why we are so obsessed with violently imposing one kind of safety but have absolutely zero interest in imposing other kinds of safety. Whenever I discuss this, I like to point to another incredibly dangerous thing that nobody would even consider banning. Driving is extremely dangerous. At least one and a quarter million people die in car accidents every year. Almost 4,000 every single day. This, unlike drugs and alcohol, is an entirely modern and technological phenomenon. Banning cars would save the lives of almost all of those people, instantly and completely. And unlike banning cocaine, there would be no other thing to immediately replace that danger. I'm willing to bet you know more people seriously hurt in car accidents than seriously hurt by drugs. Studies have shown the speed limit is directly tied to fatality rates. A 5 mile an hour decrease in the maximum speed limit is associated with an 8% decrease in deaths. So lowering the speed limit from 65 to 55 would mean thousands of saved lives a year. But we're not going to do that are we? Why would we ban one dangerous thing and not the other? Because society is making a philosophical value judgment. Driving is seen as crucial to production. It makes you and others money. You go to work. You go shopping. This is right and proper. Drugs make you feel good. And you're never supposed to feel good except in the missionary position with your wife only while conceiving a child who will productively and dangerously drive to work one day. Or in a church. People have their lives and the lives of their families absolutely crushed by debt. High interest rate loans and credit cards can completely bury a family. Debt is almost certainly a large factor in many suicides. Eliminating credit would almost certainly decrease misery. Having the government protect you from taking on debt would make you safer. But we've decided that you can be responsible enough to take that risk for you and your family if you choose. Here's the other final nail in the coffin for the argument that the government should ban loot boxes to protect people from themselves. What if there are people who like loot boxes? I bought a few Overlock's loot boxes and gotten a couple of cool skins. I enjoyed it. I got my $2 worth. Loot boxes are being sold and because only a tiny fraction of people are addicts they are mostly being sold to people who are doing it because they want to do it. Who are we to tell these people they can't buy loot boxes? I'm not interested in telling someone what they can do with their life if it doesn't affect me and you shouldn't be either. I refuse to believe there is some massive, compelling societal cost to loot boxes. Even the people who are addicted to them are not going to be saved by banning them. They're simply moving their addiction to something else. Maybe it'll only be a moderately harmful addiction like religion or maybe it'll be something like a shopping addiction or maybe they'll get hooked on betting on football or on booze or on coke. Your effort to save the loot box addict might create a meth addict because loot boxes in and of themselves are not addictive. The person is an addict that finds something to become addicted to and none of this even touches on how hilariously garbage the government is at regulating anything or how grotesquely ironic it is that this particular politician is intent on banning abortions and loot boxes but is insistent that any restrictions on firearms or increasing capital gains taxes would be an outrageous government overreach. It's kind of important to know a politician's motives before we sing the praises of his legislation. There has been no proof that any government ever has successfully legislated against vice. It always ends in either total failure or catastrophic unintended consequences. The prohibition of alcohol, pot, and opiates has had precisely the opposite intended effect. More powerful drugs, the creation of millions of violent gangsters, more overdoses, more broke users as the price of drugs exploded upwards, millions of lives wasted away in nightmarish prisons. What it didn't do was move the needle on a dictionary to even one measly fucking percentage point because you can't protect people from themselves and even if you could, you're immoral for trying. Liberty is a precious thing. The founders of the Enlightenment believed that the most basic form of happiness was liberty and the most painful thing, a lack of it. Giving it away for no good reason to a government that can't be trusted not to either abuse it or totally fuck it up is always a bad idea. And the most important argument of all, it's none of my business what you buy as long as it doesn't harm somebody else. Alright, thanks for coming. A video about the Epic's Game Store will be up very soon, bye.