I'll never understand how people get this into loot boxes.
Apologies in advance for what it's certainly going to seem like an unwarranted picking apart of your post; I'm not aiming the following specifically at you, but at the sentiment you express, one perpetually echoed over and over in lootbox threads, and in my opinion, one of the biggest hurdles in the discussion.
You see, "I don't understand people that fall for this" is really shorthand for a variety of different but related sentiments:
- "I can't empathize with (put myself in the place of) these people."
- "I don't much
care to empathize with these people."
- "These people have mental issues that make them different from myself."
- "These people behave irrationally, and therefore deserve what happens to them."
- "I don't care for learning about the multiple psychological traps that these games exploit (because I will never be in a position where that matters specifically to me)."
This separation of "us" from "them", and the implication that they are fundamentally alien, irrational agents (as opposed to perfectly normal people that have fallen into an addiction), leads to a very convenient compartimentalization that allows us not to care about what happens to them in the least.
In a fundamentally visceral way, I can't understand why people get into smoking, knowing as they do what it does to you. But on a rational level I can understand that people fall into addictions for all sorts of environment factors like social pressure or emotional vulnerability; and having understood that, I can at least empathize with them and wish to help them instead of blaming them.
