What happened to your friend with his daughter is unfortunate but other than the remedy noted by you ie control strictly access to credit cards for minors, there is no other way. This is the unavoidable dark side of the freemium model.
Just like the phenomenon of say ‘gaming addiction’. MMORPGs can be fun if played with a sense of proportion but unfortunately people both minors and adults can sometimes get lost in MMORPGs and start neglecting their real life. The only thing that can be done about this is for people to get help when afflicted by such.
EDIT: The only other thing I can think in the case of your friend’s situation possibly to use debit card and keep a low bank balance? That way there is some kind of limit possible
Actually, Apple offers a few ways to work around it. For one, they have a system of “allowances” that you can set on an account, ideal if you want to tell your kid he can only use up 20 or 10 bucks a month and still pay with a credit card.
You can also use parental controls to entirely turn off all In App Purchases.
Another way is to just not attach a credit card and instead just use iTunes Gift Cards.
The problem with all the above is that Apple does not make it very easy to discover any of these options. They are intentionally kept in obscurity because they rather motivate everyone to have a fully functional, credit card backed, iTunes Account. And it’s not only Apple, Google is going the same path (and has next to no parental control options.)
Interesting, Amazon added an insanely robust parental control system to the latest wave of Kindle Fires, one that puts everyone else in the industry to shame (big jump from having zero parental control features in the first version.) I do think it would be very good for everyone to have these companies (especially Apple) be very loud about the parental control options to prevent these kind of incidents. It should be marketed. It should be in a big manual in the box. Apple Store employees should tell ALL customers buying an iOS device about it. And it setting it up should be a forced part of the setup wizard.
At that point, I actually would not care if someone really was irresponsible enough to not know this.
What happened is no different from the child taking $200 from the dad’s wallet and going on a shopping spree. You need to teach your kids about the value of money. I’m 22, I still remember being a kid (hell I still am sometimes) and I never did anything like that. Blaming the developer for this is absurd.
Parental controls don’t work, I think you need to set up a trusting relation between you and your kid. I mean come on, the girl actually tried to figure out the dad’s password. That is NOT ok.
There is a problem when the device (and the game, especially the game) itself do their best to obfuscate you are dealing with real money, though.
After the incident there was a family gathering, some punishments AND an obligatory talk about that being real money the kid spent (kid was not aware of this, despite knowing what money is.)
See, it’s not as simple as that. The kid was simply trying to play the game, the game kept asking for the device password. She guessed the password (think she saw mom entering it once, actually.)
And mind you: even if everyone involved “understand”, there is a reason why a lot of financial and legal actions are not allowed under the age of 18. There are some concepts you just can’t expect to be well grasped by kids of certain age. There is no standard there either (18 is used mainly because by that point everyone should get it.)
Again, as I said, it’s the kind of thing anyone would say “it’s his fault” unless you actually witness the entire chain of events and know everyone involved.
In the physical world, certain goods (guns, alcohol, drugs, even credit cards) are not sold to people under certain age. The reasons are a bit obvious and I think there should be ways to setup similar structure in the digital world, where users are for the most part faceless.
#3 paid is simpsons tapped out another non-game, but yet thats what people like. I wonder why you dont see more unity developers actually making a game like that.
Well, if you dig deep enough: the app store is FULL of these type of farmville-like apps.
Also, as much as everyone here wants to make money, everyone wants to do something they themselves love. I can’t think of many people that would call a Farmville clone their “dream project”.
What I would like to know is, are these games more popular with females or males?
I always assumed females were the ones addicted to farmville. Cause farmville seems alot like the sims and the sim (turned out to be) a girls game. Something about being able to make little people, dress them up, watch them go around and do stuff, watch them grow, make little houses and things. It’s like playing with dolls and doll houses, only for older females. The whole thing is just silly, farmville kind of pisses me off. Seriously how can someone make so much money off just setting up a framework to make women wear out their natural desire to build a homely plot of land and grow plants? Really it seems like if you want to make a bunch of money off this, you should identify some untapped impulsive female instinct and make a game out of it. I was really amazed at how addicted my sister got to World of Warcraft, and not because she liked the gameplay, no she played only to dress up her character and get new clothes for it. There was some guy who philosophized that women’s innate nature to impulsively shop and gather endless amounts of little bits and things comes from the fact that in ancient tribal set ups they were the gatherers. They would gather nuts, fruits and whatever, ingrained deep in females is this unconscious impulse to just gather things out of a survival instinct. They feel most in their prime when gathering lots of stuff. Whereas men were in the prime when hunting down and killing large beasts. Actually come to think of it, when humans became agricultural it was women who also primarily gathered the seeds to plant, managed the crops, and even initially named the plant species. Thats why farmville is so popular, it tapped into that deep instinctual impulse of women. They feel in their prime and like their accomplishing something when they’re growing and tending to plants because of their evolutionarily ingrained instincts. There has to be some other game concept that taps into and feeds off habitual needs ingrained in women from their evolutionary ancestry… has anyone made a game where you just raise a baby? Babyville? (trademarked you must contact me if you make this game )
Now clash of the clans looks kind of awesome actually. Build up a base with weaponry of all sorts and have it defend itself from attackers. Thats really good idea, I can totally see why that would become so popular.
although now that I think about it, it brings up a moral dilemma in my mind.
Is it wrong to design games to purposely try and feed off deeply ingrained uncontrollable instincts in people that do generally no good for the person?
Are games inherently just ‘time-killers’ or can they do something more?
Is there something wrong with postulating that what makes a game enjoyable for someone is that it satisfies some deeply ingrained instinctual need?
I see that as really the only thing we do, we run around trying satisfy our genetics. Maybe a few individuals will develop some genetic mutation that requires them to satisfy some new genetic peculiarity, that may or may not prove valuable and develop into a mainstream instinct, but we are just bio-robots running complex bio-programs.
Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to be sexist. I was just philosophizing off a few base facts about human anthropological developments. I’m not declaring anything as some great truth, just thoughts off in space.
I mean it is well known females were the gatherers.
It is also strongly believed by some (and well argued) that females invented agriculture.
So I just extrapolate these things to assume that females have some deep primal instinct satisfied by gathering things (shopping) and growing things. Hence the popularity of The Sims with females and I’d assume Farmville as well ( I see far more females on my Facebook playing farmville than males ).
I don’t mean it to be sexist.
I mean men were known for going off and killing large wildabeast. I certainly attribute my love of killing large beasts in video games to this deeply ingrained biological instinct from my evolutionary ancestors. I mean I do occasionally just get the uncontrollable need to go out and kill something in a video game.
theres nothing incorrect about the statement that women were gatherers and that women (more than likely) invented agriculture.
Are you female and have I (accidentally) offended you in some way and now your just seeing everything I say as inherently offensive and wrong? I said I’m sorry I didn’t mean to.
My far fetched thought processes concerning game play mechanics, evolutionarily ingrained instincts and whatever else really are not limited to just females. I in no way direct this part of my brain just at females, and I in no way view males as possessing some greater evolutionarily engrained instincts.
I was just curious in this specific instance if the majority of this income supercell is making is coming from females, because at least I’ve had this theory that when it comes to video games for males, all of a males innate instincts are well accounted for in video game scenarios. But females still have many instincts in them that have not been fully exploited, and that market sector is not nearly as saturated as the male counterpart, I would actually say the female side of things is very unsaturated. So there is alot of money to be made in making what are essentially girl games, and its alot easier for relatively bad games (farmville) to get mass appeal just because they aim to fulfill female instincts.
The question I’ve been trying to answer is just really what makes a game more appealing to females? With a fair amount of certainty I have thus far only identified 1) highly customizable characters with lots of accessories, or at least something highly visually customizable 2) ability to grow things. Any game that has been highly successful with females tends to posses one of these characteristics.
And again I must reiterate, this thought process of mine is not limited to females. I mean I literally made a game before where you fly around in a spaceship that is a large drill (metaphored to being a sperm) and try to drill into planets and turn them into cites (metaphored as being eggs and fertilization). You can see here: http://www.wooglie.com/games/Action/Galactic-Insemination
However that was the first thing I ever made in unity and admittedly it is embarrassingly bad. Albeit I do think the gameplay mechanic where you fly a large drill around and ram it into things could be quite good… I’m just saying, I’m not sexist.
@Techmage - I don’t really think it is fair to instantly declare marigold’s thought as innately incorrect. The philosophy is without doubt, a stretch, but without any real data, it is impossible to disprove. You say it is sexist, but do you also think that thinking of men as primarily doing more masculine activities and women as doing primarily more feminine activities is also sexist? I think this idea was what marigold was trying to get at. I believe that this statement is true (men tend towards masculine and females towards feminine activities) and do not see why women would not enjoy a simulation of feminine activities more than men would. I think a report on the gender playing these games would be very interesting. In my life, I have to say I have seen more women playing FarmVille and its offspring than men playing these games; however, I believe it would certainty be eye-opening to learn the exact ratio of the genders playing the games.
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