I was in 1st/2nd grade grade when the big Pokémon boom of the late 90s-early 00s happened. It was HUGE. Every kid was into it and we’d watch the show and play pretend and collect the cards and bring our game boys to school to trade Pokémon during recess. I was lucky to have supportive parents, but I remember how teachers and other adults would scoff and say how tired they were of Pokémon, how annoying and juvenile it was and how they couldn’t wait for us to “get over it already”. I might have been young, but I still remember how much these kinds of comments bummed me out. Why in the world are we being mean to little kids who like Fortnite
Why are you comparing pokemon to fortnite???
Because… Fortnite is very popular amongst children at the moment? And there are adults who dismiss it in the same way other adults did when Pokémon was big, calling it stupid, saying the dances are annoying, how much they can’t wait for the “fad to be over”, etc. It’s pretty much the same scenario.
Fortnite has a lootbox system that is glorified gambling, and can cause patterns of addiction in even adult minds, and that is in fact its intended goal in order for the game to make money from microtransactions. That’s how all games with lootboxes function. That’s how they draw in their customer base and squeeze more money out of them.
Like, I don’t judge kids who enjoy Fortnite. My little cousin plays Fortnite.
But last week, my little cousin also stole his mother’s credit card and spent about a month’s salary on microtransactions without his parents’ knowledge.
Modern gaming has become vile and predatory in ways that we didn’t have to deal with as children.
And we shouldn’t be mean to children about this, but we should definitely be coming down on these companies like a pile of fucking bricks.
Delicious.
Finally, some PROPER FORTNITE CRITICISM
Re lootboxes fortnite vs pokemon.
Trading card packets.
My favourite pokemon was a fucking charizard. And I was into pokemon from the beginning. A 1st edition charizard? 130 dollars. Attempts to buy it via packs? Hundreds of dollars.
Like it’s easier to prey on kids and shit now because online purchases but…. they still preyed on kids back in the pokemon days.
Pokémon was just one link in the chain, albeit a pretty massive one. But… 90s kids! Remember dropping what is, now that you think about it, literal hundreds of dollars on Magic cards about five bucks at a time? Remember how the original rules explicitly encouraged you to gamble your cards against your friends’? Or how about pogs, which did the same thing and had a very strict schoolyard coolness ranking system?
80s kids! Remember these?
Remember how you filled them one pack at a time?
In digging up this image, I found out that the two companies I remember putting these things out had been doing it for decades before, just for sports stuff.
Selling gambling to kids is nothing new. What’s new is finally recognizing it as an evil practice rather than an annoying fad.
either way, loot crates aren’t ok and criticizing the system doesn’t mean that the older way was ok either
last night at the club my friends introduced me to these guys and the guys were like “we’re 22″ and I was like cool and then a minute later they were like “we’re kidding we’re 18″ and I was like 18!!!!! 18!!!!!!!! you’re as young as my youngest siblings now I have to PROTECT you and the one guy was like 6 ft+ and he was like “no you have that wrong, I need to protect you girls” and I was like “okay yeah physically but I have to protect you emotionally” and he was like “oh okay yeah”
like 30 mins later he came back up to me like “I just realized it’s the same age difference between you and me as me and my baby sister and you’re right. you’re so right.”
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