Video games have long since become a phenomenon from a relatively niche hobby – today both children and adults spend long hours playing World of Tanks, Fortnite and other Apex Legends. As it turned out, this led to unexpected consequences.
Last year, Norwegian sociologists found that children often face bullying because they do not buy cosmetic items in shareware titles. Julia Clara Reich and Camilla Knutzen Staines interviewed nineteen adolescents aged 10 to 15 years. As it turned out, respondents often spend money on in-game items in FIFA in order to join the team and not experience peer pressure. Those who did not squander their savings were called “beggars.”
Other problems that Reich and Staines highlighted relate to the aggressiveness with which developers and publishers push people (mostly schoolchildren) to make purchases. Since young gamers are not well versed in commercial matters, and, as a result, do not understand how they are being manipulated, scientists consider such behavior on the part of large companies to be, at a minimum, unethical.
It is worth noting that it is too early to draw conclusions: the sample is too small and not representative enough even for Norway, not to mention the whole world. However, such experiments shed light on unusual problems that have arisen since the popularization of online entertainment among children and adolescents.