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The Bridge: The video game industry is out of the golden age and into some murkier waters. From issues like gambling addiction to literal radicalization, the once-innocent gaming community has some trying times ahead.
🎰 The House Always Wins 🎰
There’s something sad about a beloved pass time causing harm to its players – a game that starts out fun but spirals out of control before anyone knows what’s happening. Parents that have young kids with access to an iPad might know this particular frustration: when a child discovers that they can make in-app purchases and racks up hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in charges is enough to make anyone cringe.
There are fail safes in place to make sure this risk is minimal, in most cases. Parental controls are industry standard, after all.
But what happens when the impulse to play becomes pathological? Combine that with loose regulations and real-world money, and you have the sticky world of Twitch gambling. 💰🔥
Twitch, the most popular platform for game streaming, is a place for millions of game fans and their idols to interact and play nice. But where competition exists, there’s also the inevitable rise of sideline betting. A handful of streamers have risen up together in solidarity with one of their fellow influencers to speak out against the harm of gambling addiction. #TwitchStopGambling has been trending, along with calls for the platform to denounce and shut down Crypto Gambling.
Gambling was all but sanctioned by Twitch, who hosted specific gambling channels that thousands of users regularly watched.
There’s no question that platforms are incentivized to hook and maintain users, and those users are getting hooked younger and younger.
The good news is that Twitch took swift and decisive action, implementing a policy that formal gambling would no longer be welcome on their site. But without the few that stood up to oppose it, would the change have occurred at all?
Radical Gamers
More troubling than the rise of underage gambling is the possibility that the spaces that host young and impressionable audiences are becoming the targets of extreme ideologues. Gaming platforms simply can’t keep up with moderation standards, leaving some kids vulnerable to hate groups and terrorist organizations looking to recruit.
But here’s more good news: The Department of Homeland Security will be spending nearly a million dollars to stem the tide of radicalization within the gaming industry. So efforts are underway to make gamer communities safer – so we’ll hopefully be seeing the next generation of gamers enjoy themselves without the threat of danger.
