if you play games, do not buy microtransaction items or, if possible, games that try to sell them.
If you are a parent, do not let your kids buy microtransaction items or games that try to sell them.
If you know a parent who is not a gamer, share these concepts with them. They won’t have these sorts of things piped into their bubble under any normal circumstances.
My kids, 10 and 14, are very anti corporate greed and I couldn’t be more proud. They also complain when they aren’t on the local WiFi if they are playing mobile games because the ads don’t get blocked. A couple years ago my youngest asked me to turn ads on so he could hatch monsters or something faster, I bypassed his device and a couple months later he was complaining that the game is a time sink full of ads and he doesn’t want to play it anymore and wants ad blocking re-enabled.
They aren’t perfect and I have never tried to preach to them too much. Not really sure where I was going with this but your post reminded me how much I appreciate that my boys actively avoid and protest against playing games with ads and micro transactions at such a young age and I felt like sharing with someone.
FWIW, simply living with an adblocker for a while will inoculate you to a lot of the most predatory BS. My wife had a similar experience. At first she was annoyed by the dual pi-holes I set up, because they broke her sponsored Google search links. Then she learned to skip those first few links and got used to having ads blocked. We recently moved, and I hadn’t had time to set them back up. I have simply been using the new ISP’s modem/router.
Last week, she basically begged me to find some time to set the network stuff back up, because she hated seeing ads now. She got used to the pi-holes, and then they were suddenly gone. She was like “yeah a lot of my favorite sites are basically unusable now. I don’t know how the hell I ever functioned before you set those things up…” What sent her over the edge was when she noticed an ad on our TV’s sleep screen. Not even in the show we were watching. Just on the sleep screen, because the show had been paused for like 15-20 minutes. That one ad was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because even when the device was idle it was still trying to show her ads.
Another little reminder:
My kids, 10 and 14, are very anti corporate greed and I couldn’t be more proud. They also complain when they aren’t on the local WiFi if they are playing mobile games because the ads don’t get blocked. A couple years ago my youngest asked me to turn ads on so he could hatch monsters or something faster, I bypassed his device and a couple months later he was complaining that the game is a time sink full of ads and he doesn’t want to play it anymore and wants ad blocking re-enabled.
They aren’t perfect and I have never tried to preach to them too much. Not really sure where I was going with this but your post reminded me how much I appreciate that my boys actively avoid and protest against playing games with ads and micro transactions at such a young age and I felt like sharing with someone.
FWIW, simply living with an adblocker for a while will inoculate you to a lot of the most predatory BS. My wife had a similar experience. At first she was annoyed by the dual pi-holes I set up, because they broke her sponsored Google search links. Then she learned to skip those first few links and got used to having ads blocked. We recently moved, and I hadn’t had time to set them back up. I have simply been using the new ISP’s modem/router.
Last week, she basically begged me to find some time to set the network stuff back up, because she hated seeing ads now. She got used to the pi-holes, and then they were suddenly gone. She was like “yeah a lot of my favorite sites are basically unusable now. I don’t know how the hell I ever functioned before you set those things up…” What sent her over the edge was when she noticed an ad on our TV’s sleep screen. Not even in the show we were watching. Just on the sleep screen, because the show had been paused for like 15-20 minutes. That one ad was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because even when the device was idle it was still trying to show her ads.
Any tips to get started on in game ad blocking?
PiHole