Following on from yesterdays blog, I wanted to talk about another issue that's been in the news lately, and how that ties in with something I experienced this week. The story that's been popping up is about addressing the problem of kids buying game add-ons in supposedly free apps/games.
For people that haven't heard about these stories there have been an increasingly large number of parents allowing their children to go on what they believe to be free apps and games on their phones and ipads etc... However several weeks later they then discover that they have a bill often for several hundred pounds, and in one case I heard of thousands of pounds, because their child has bought in-game weapons or coins that actually cost real money. Now the problem is that all the parent see's is the word free written under the app and so assumes that the entire thing is free, but having already given your child your password or allowing your device to remember it, the child is easily able to click buy as many times as they like without the parent noticing.
I've come across this problem numerous times, primarily on Facebook when I was going through my phase of playing games like farmville, when just paying a few pounds would save you having to wait ten hours before your crops were ready or something along those lines. I'll quickly say that i did always resist the temptation, but to an eight year old, who probably doesn't understand that its costing real money, theres very little stopping them for spending all their parents money.
These news stories have now brought this issue to all the app makers and game makers out there asking for more openness about whether there products are actually 'free' or not. To an extent I do agree that perhaps there should be a quick disclaimer which is easy to see at the beginning of a game just so I can decide early on whether to waste my time or not, however I actually think that a lot of the blame should be with the parents. There are often options in the settings of your ipads, etc... that allow none of these in-game purchases to occur, or you could just not give out your password, or perhaps write it in yourself, or failing all of that you could just occasionally glance over at what your child is doing. By not doing some of these really simple things, as people have found out, can often turn into a pricey mistake.
These stories lead nicely into an experience I had this week, which was a first for me, of which I guess probably won't happen that often, and that was to be paid to play a video game. After wandering around Reddit for a while I came across a guy in America wanting volunteers to help participate in a study for his thesis work. I'm not quite sure what his actual thesis was about, however this section was aimed at the free game Team Fortress 2 and their in-game items, which you had to pay for to buy. In order to participate I firstly had to meet certain requirements, namely that I'd already played the game for a certain amount of hours, and that I hadn't yet bought any of the in-game items. Meeting these requirements the guy said he'd pay me $2 to play on his specific server for 30 minutes whenever it suited me, and then answer a questionnaire.
The next day when I had some spare time, I logged on to my computer, opened up the game and just played as normal for about an hour on the designated server. Upon doing this I then went to the online questionnaire, where I was asked the question, how would you like to be compensated for your help? A) By receiving the two dollars through PayPal, or B) By receiving a code for an in-game item valued at over two dollars.
This was a question that I was not prepared for and actually made me think for a few minutes, on one side I had two dollars, cash in hand (electronic hand), or I could instead decide to receive the code and get an item worth more then two dollars, but could only be of use in this particular game. As I said I'm not that sure what the guys thesis was about, however by throwing this question in at the beginning of what seemed like a fairly simple questionnaire, drew my to think that this could be part of the thesis's focus, and not about how many hours I play games and other routine questionnaire questions. In the end I decided I'd just take the two dollars, as so far I'd never needed to buy any of the items, and having the cash would be more useful to me, even if once you convert it into pounds and pence I only received £1.26. In the end I helped this guy out, I still got paid to play video games, I'm now £1.26 up and I can tick off another box on my list of things I'd like to do.
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