When I was eight, I spent hundreds of dollars of my parents’ money on Habbo Hotel. I wanted to be a Habbo Club member, you see, and the game made it so easy for me to purchase credits just by sending an SMS to a specified number. Sure, they limited the number of credits I could buy per day, and thank God for that – my still-developing frontal lobe didn’t have any understanding of the real🧸-world value of money, or the good sense to exercise any restraint. My parents found out just how much I’d spent when they got the phone bill, and I got hell for it. That’s not even including the credits I bought on pre-loaded cards at the 7-11 every week with my allowance.

Almost a decade later, my pre-teen brother repeated the cycle. I lent him my debit card to buy some Steam credits for his birthday, which he promptly saved in his account. He then drained my bank account and asked for my supplementary credit card, which I gave him without realising that my savings had already been spent. He maxed out that credit card too, though thankfully it had a fairly low limit as it was mostly to be used in emergencies. That meant about a thousand dollars down the drain in a week. When I realised I was inexplicably out of money and asked him about it, he confessed. What did he spend that money on? League skins. He spent a grand on League of Legends skins.

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Don’t worry, we’ve both learned our lessons. We are now fully-functional adults with developed frontal lobes, and are much, much better at handling our money. But the As🃏sociation for UK Interactive Entertainment’s (or UKIE’s) ne🍸w guidelines around loot boxes in video games have me thinking about the lack of guidelines globally about marketing to and profiting off of children. For a family that couldn’t afford ridiculous, unplanned, and unnecessaryඣ expenses like the ones my brother and I unloaded on them, a thousand dollars or even a few hundred could have been disastrous. It wasn’t a life-changing expense for my parents, but for many people, it could be.

Loot boxes

UKIE’s guidelines aren’t legally binding, but could result in government pushback if developers breach them. Guidelines stipulate that developers should restrict the purchasing of loot boxes for under 18-year-olds, make refunding more lenient, and to disclose odds before purchase. Thiꦏs is to try and mitigate the chances of children and teenagers developing problem gambling in adulthood, as according to UKIE, research found “a correlation between loot box expenditure and problem gambling”. It’s also to ensure that parents of minors purchasing loot boxes without parental consent will have a route towards getting refunds for money spent without their knowledge. Children everywhere do this all the time, to such expense that it can .

The problem is not just that children can buy loot boxes, but that so many games marketed towards children even have these options at all. The world of child-targeted advertising is extremely ethically murky, but it skews hard into pure unethicality when you’re making it easy for children to spend 𒀰thousands of dollars on games, in the knowledge that they don’t know better. It’s not just loot boxes, either – it’s all microtransactions. Children simply don’t have the ability to make informed financial decisions about whether they need character skins on League. They see something and buy it. UKIE is right in pressuring developers to protect children from developing an early gambling habit, but it should be going further. Children shouldn’t be easily allowed to make transactions on video games at all. The sugges𒐪ted refund policy is a good first step towards providing recourse for money spent, but maybe we should even consider that games meant for minors shouldn’t have those options at all.

Standing with a shovel in front of zomies in Zombie Wars Tycoon on Roblox

Sure, that’𝓡s a bit extreme. Adults play games commonly marketed to kids too, and can spend their money on whatever they like. But games marketed specifically to children are explicitly using predatory tactics by encouraging children to purchase in-game items, and protecting vulnerable families from sneaky corporate marketing is more important than letting big corporations profit off children’s mistakes. I’m hoping to see mor🐎e guidelines like this enacted in proper legislation, because developers have been banking on shady marketing practices for far too long. Children should be able to have games where they aren’t offered shiny things to purchase with mummy’s credit card every fifteen minutes.

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