I recently purchased "Star Wars Battlefront 2", a game that has been mired in controversy since its release. The anger is mostly around EA's inclusion of loot boxes. In a nutshell, if you don't want to grind and take hours to unlock perks with in-game currency, you can just buy them with real money instead. This would give gamers a competitive edge in the game simply because they had more money lying around than their opponent. The outrage was so severe that EA temporarily removed these loot boxes from the game, but has said they plan on putting them back in at a future time.

The outrage around what EA has been doing has even spread to Congress, but not for the same reasons that people were angry on Reddit. Lawmakers in the United States and Belgium have called for an investigation into in-game purchases in video games on the grounds that it is a sort of trap; you pay full price for a game, and then get screwed out of more of your money to unlock more stuff.

There is also an argument to be made that it is a sort of gambling. If anyone reading this has ever played Counter-Strike, you'll know what I'm talking about. Each crate is loaded with random items. You could either get something really good, something fine or a dud. The more money you put into it, the more likely you are to get a big reward. If this is sounding a bit like a slot machine to you, it should, because it is.

While buying these crates is voluntary, so is roulette, and that doesn't stop people. The worst part about it is that it's being perfectly aimed at EA's biggest audience: children and young adults. These demographics play the most video games, and their brains are also much more affected by quick rewards than adults. When something good happens, it activates the reward center of your brain, and your brain releases a hormone called dopamine, which makes you feel very good. It's the same hormone that makes drugs like cocaine and heroin so addictive.

Children and young people are much more likely to go for a quick reward than adults, whose brains are more developed, and are willing to wait for good things. By including these loot boxes in their games, EA is essentially creating a gambling service on their game, a game which is mostly played by young people, and as good gamblers, they know when to stop: never (sarcasm).

Apart from the competitive divide, these boxes create, the secondary concern of gambling is the much bigger issue, at least to me personally. EA is using and exploiting the psychology of children to make money, and that is unacceptable. I have the patience (at least for now) to not buy any of those godforsaken crates, but for some, it may not be as much of a choice as it is a compulsion. Microtransactions in games such as this not only create a pay to win system, but are essentially gambling markets open to anyone who can find it, and that shouldn't be the case anywhere.