I am going to do my best to make this short and sweet. Well, perhaps not sweet. One of the top recommendations I make to parents who are worried about their childs video gaming, is this: Pay for your games. The rationale is simple. Be the customer the game developer is trying to satisfy.
Most free games operate on a business model that can only make money one of three ways:
- Pay to win
- Addictive investment
- Monetizing attention
Pay To Win
Freemium games rely on a variety of techniques that give players an advantage when they purchase special items. One of the most hotly contested and reviled add-ons is the "loot crate." Loot crates, like trading cards, give you some common items, but occasionally a player will get a rare item. If this sounds like gambling, that's because it is. You are paying for a random chance to win something valuable.
These "drops" use the infamous variable-ratio reward schedule to reinforce the behavior of making in-game purchases more desirable to the players. Unlike games like Minecraft that sell digital downloads which help you decorate your world in a new and novel theme, pay-to-win games are selling more than eye candy; they are giving players an advantage when they spend money with the developer.
Most gamers hate the pay-to-win model, but it is often introduced after a gaming community has been established and players are invested in the title. (Sadly, it is not only the freemium games that offer overpowered (OP) items in loot crates or downloadable packs, but those are the games where it occurs the most.)
The other way developers support pay-to-win strategies is to sell "shortcuts" to powerful upgrades. While the main or "core" game is free, purchased upgrades, or buying completed items that take time to craft can give players a signficant advantage in competitive play.
When my son was in middle school, he stopped playing his "free" tablet game because an opponent deployed $200 in _real money_ worth of upgrades on him in a few minutes, wiping out his base. It would have taken him tens or hundres of hours of "real time" to accumulate a similar level of firepower if he played for free. But in a few minutes a player with a credit card had access to "months" worth of weapons. Needless to day. They paid. They won. It was such a ludicrous amount of money to spend, it never even occurred to my son to ask me to buy him any in-game add-ons.
Why would anyone do this? Why not just switch games? Because they almost can't. I'll explain below the techniques developers use, but they are powerful and addictive.
However, what you need to know first is this:
Paying for your games is a good start, but it may not be enough. To make it easier to keep your kids safe, you can follow my second rule: select games that do not require and internet connection to play.
Youc an combine this into one short rule: buy games that don't require an internet connection.
Why? Because then the developer has a much harder time selling you those in-game add-ons. Now, why are people buying these add on's anyway, especially when they do not help the player win?
Now it is time to look into the second way publishers make money in freemium games.
Addictive Investment
In 1984, Robert Cialdini was among the first psychology professors to publish a layman's guide explaining how sales professionals hack human psychology to influence buyers. (This book is still a great read 40 years later). His landmark book is Influence. Twenty years after Cialdini published his book, Professor B.J. Fogg at Stanford University wrote a book titled Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.
In his book The Anxious Generation, Author Jonathan Haidt shows how Fogg's work laid the foundation for howmany tech companies would now design software. By 2014, Nir Eyal dubbed this type of technology psychology manipulation as, The Hooked Model in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
As a former (some would say recovering) software engineer, I know that "hooking" a program involves intercepting a function call to alter the software's behavior. Modern social media applications and some video games are designed to do the same thing, only with our brains and behaviors. Companies implement the Hooked Model to keep users engaged, using variable rewards and social validation to make it challenging for users to disengage.
The Hooked Model has four parts:
- A trigger
- An action
- The incentive or variable reward / social validation
- Investment (this is key)
These four are arranged in a loop as follows:
Now, here's the key. Most mammals will willingly respond to just three of these. Trigger → Action → Variable reward. But humans enhance the effectiveness of this behavior and thought-altering model when they invest part of themselves into the platform. This can be through generating content, or modifying their character with skins in a video game.
Once the user customizes the experience to their own liking, they become even more committed to using the platform. And in these instances, this is when the loop really becomes harmful to kids. Think about it. What is the first thing nearly every app you install on your phone or tablet asks you to do? Turn on notifications! This is step one in the Hooked Model. It is the trigger. However, when a player becomes invested in the platform, they can self-trigger. They no longer depend upon the notifications to cause them to want to engage with the software.
Investing accelerates and strengthens how the application modifies the users' thinking and behavior. If this sounds like forming a habit, you're not far off. In another post, I'll compare how the Hooked Model compares to James Clear's Habit loop from Atomic Habits, but for now, let's look at the obvious difference. People read Atomic Habits to change their behavior for their own personal improvement. They are consciously and intentionally hacking their own psychology to improve their lives. Companies, in contrast, use the Hooked Model without making this explicitly known to their users (who are not so much their customers as the fuel for their business model).
In short, it is a manipulation, and it is a manipulation with the intent of improving the business first, with little to no regard shown to the end user.
I hear countless stories of kids purchasing hundreds of dollars worth of "skins" for games. When parents cut them off, some become so desperate to customize their characters that they spam total strangers (who have in no way been vetted or age-restricted from contact with juveniles) in the hopes of getting more in-game currency.
Does this sound like harmless fun to you?
When kids go to this length to not only play a game but to continue to invest in it, they have crossed into the third tier of how companies monetize "free products."
Monetizing Attention
Around the beginning of 2025, Roblox as a public company was valued at $27B. Not because they had millions upon millions of satisfied users paying for a service they loved, which delivered the company high margins. No. Their valuation, like most social media companies, was based almost exclusively on user hours. They reported a staggering number of continuous user hours.
Companies use outrageous usage statistics to not only pump up stock prices, but to sell advertising. The critical factor here, is in order to create mind-bogglingly large usage numbers, many (if not all) of these platforms rely on hooking underage kids as users.
The part of the brain that protects humans from distraction is called the Executive Function. It is part of the Prefrontal Cortex, a part of the brain that does not begin to develop until high school and does not finish until about age 25. Literally, children are the most vulnerable segment of the population to these techniques. Companies can be valued on the attention they can steal because there are no consequences for doing it. This has to change.
What You Can Do
The latest challenge for many parents is that big tech companies have started to infiltrate the schools and are now giving children Chromebooks and tablets to use for school lessons. The gateway to addiction is being brought home from school. Although no teacher I spoke to wanted their name mentioned, they believe this is happening because school districts are experiencing intense pressure from above where they see an obsession over controlling the classroom while trying to obtain highly personalized student test scores.
Even families that swore they would never buy a video game console are finding their weekends and weeknights ruined by devices given to their children at school and now used to play free games.
My recommendation is to displace those addictive technologies. Chose quality games that are developed by companies who actually want to entertain your child, not hook a vacuum to their attention.
When you become the customer of the developer, their incentives are aligned with yours. They want to deliver you, their customer, value for money. Consequently, they implement different algorithms than the Hooked Model. Many focus on what is called Self-Determination Theory. In layman's terms, they want you to face hard challenges, develop skills, and persist until you overcome the challenge. These developers prefer that you earn your victories, (not cheat your way to the end by buying them.) As a result, these games, in general, are much easier to put down and pick back up without addiction-inducing side effects.
At the time of this writing, I have found a variety of games that fit this healthier model. A tiny sampling of my favorites include:
- Minecraft
- Mario Kart
- Pokémon
- Madden
- NBA2K
- Gran Tourismo
- Smash Bros Ultimate
- Any Mario Platformer
- Any Zelda Game
- Splatoon
- And a host of story-driven first-person shooter games (Red Dead Revolver 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ratchet and Clank to name just a few.)
I highly recommend games from Nintendo and Sony first-party development. Microsoft, I think, is doing an admirable job of restoring Activision to its "pre-fall" state, but they have a lot of work to do. The main thing with all of these games is that they can be :
- Purchased
- Played multiplayer at home on a big TV in a public space with family or friends
- Played without a live internet connection
Sure, you might want an internet connection to download updates and patches, but the key thing is the games can be played solo or locally with friends.
When it comes to quality games, you have plenty of choices. However, the one choice I would encourage you to make is to avoid attention-stealing platforms, and the simplest and easiest way to do this is to pay for your games, and choose games that do not require an internet connection to play.
I am a passionate believer in the power of play to unite us, however I recognize there are pitfalls out there and some bad actors. Finding the right games is not easy, but if your family is like many of the families I have talked to, then this advice may work for you. It has worked wonders for them.
