Control over our Smartphone? And, is it Legal?

    We would hope that we would have better control over our smartphone usage right? I mean a device really should not have a huge hold over our lives as we should be able to monitor our screentime and push our notifications to the side without much thought. That just does not happen though. When you have experts in the field of psychology and business pushing the variable reward ideology onto you with posts and notifications, it becomes nearly impossible to resist the temptation to use the phone. You are probably either using it right now to read this blog or you have become so bored and done reading about how you have little control over your smartphone that you are now trying to shove as far away from you to disprove the notion that we overuse our smartphone. I get it. Consider however how often you use your phone and when you use your phone as we move forward with the blog post.

    Ok so let us back up a bit and reevaluate how you are able to see how much you use your phone. You should be able to see it in the settings or through an app. Don't be shy about it, I'll even share a snippet of my app usage below. I used an app called, App Usage - Manage/Track Usage by Sam Lu which gives a detailed view and timeline over how much you are using your phone and what you are using the phone for and for how many hours. With that said, are you surprised with your results?

Yes, I may be addicted to YouTube a little bit... (Screenshot is mine)

    Maybe you do not have nearly as many hours as I do for your phone and it is probably healthier you do not. In my defense though, I do put on YouTube videos when I am going to sleep or for background noise too! I must give credit to the book, Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi. We are currently reading her book for our social media class and taking upon her challenges with this being the first challenge (I'm not sure I can do the one that requires you to delete one of your favorite apps though). So why did you use the apps that you used? Was it truly out of necessity or did you get a notification and wanted to check out what the buzz was all about? Maybe like me you got bored and decided to start playing a mobile game again as you can see in the app that is second place to YouTube, Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle. This is an interesting game that I believe needs to be examined more because it may not be as ethical or even truly legal as it should be along with multiple other freemium games.

    The concept of freemium is simple, the base game is free, but you can purchase in-game items or currency to use for boosts, characters, cosmetics, etc. Now, I love Dokkan Battle, it is probably one of my favorite mobile games because there are actual smooth animations implemented in it and it has a plethora of Dragon Ball characters that I know and love from the show and many others spinoff series and games. It's basically the culmination of all things Dragon Ball so any fan of Dragon Ball, from the Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Super, would more than likely take interest in this game. However, something... off lies within the start screen of our phone that makes me rethink the intentions of this app and many other freemium-style games.

Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle's start-up screen you must click through every time

  

    If the image is a bit hard to read for you, it basically states that it is a free-to-play game but that there are in-app purchases that you can make. That's all well and good until you get to the last line of the first paragraph that states "You must be 14 years of age or older to download or play". Now the reason why this should be more controversial is that this game actually has gambling as the main mechanic and it would be fairly impossible to do many of the challenges and modes without gambling for good characters unless of course, you visit a certain YouTuber's page called JPhanta that goes over how to get free units and not pay for them in the game. The temptation is there though and it is easy to get sucked into the game and then spend money on it. I remember that I told myself I would never spend money on mobile games... until I found this one. It started off with $5, then another $5, then another $5, until now where I just bought a subscription to get the in-game currency, "dragon stones". where I get 5 for 30 days. Crazy right? And I am an adult who should have better self-control! Now imagine if little Timmy got his credit card info from his parents and went wild because he was desperately trying to summon a character he really wanted. I should mention that the ranking goes from N, R, SR, SSR, UR, and LR respectively with LR being the current rarest type of cards you can get. With a multi-summon that costs 50 dragon stones for 10 units summoned, you are only guaranteed one SSR and the rest could be Rs and SRs. You can see why spending money can become addicting if you are a huge fan and really want a certain unit.

    

    After that long ramble, you may be wondering where the issue is. Well, it lies in the wording that I brought up earlier with being at least 14 years old. You cannot gamble in the U.S. at casinos until you are 18 or even in some cases at 21, yet 14-year-olds can play this game and constantly shell out money for summons and potentially never "win big" as you are not guaranteed to get the unit you want with each summons. Seems quite strange, doesn't it? That we give free passes to mobile freemium games for this but limit physical gambling extensively. This is where the idea of having a "Designer's Oath" comes from in James Williams's book, Stand out of our Light. We need to hold designers accountable for their actions and how they try to use apps to wire out brains into wanting more. If we can practically have a whole casino in our hands, then shouldn't that signify that we need designers of apps to be more ethical? That is not even addressing the whole issue of underage gambling either, which is illegal. See, we think we have freedom over our smartphone, that we can not use it ever again if we were told to do so for a reason and some of us might, but for many of us that are simply not the case. We are constantly bombarded by posts and notifications to buy this or see this and it can get overwhelming, even if we control it. There has to be a better way to go about this. We should be able to utilize our phone that we own and the apps that we chose to download and also find a way to make sure that designers of apps are mindful of who is playing their games or their apps and find better preventative measures of enticing minors to pay for purchases through what is essentially phone ads.