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Comment on Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law

MudMan@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Said this elsewhere, but it seems to me a bigger story that it also mandates age verification for 18 plus content, including porn and at the platform level.

Steam needs to verify your age now if it wants to carry porn games.

And I do have problems with loot boxes, in that it doesn't qualify the boxes having to be paid, so technically Diablo II should be a 18+ game, along with every single RPG in existence. I have to assume courts or downstream definitions will do a sanity check on that, because the law they passed makes zero qualifiers, it just says "loot boxes".

So... maybe look into what they passed before being too celebratory about it?

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Goodeye8@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I had to translate the law but it does seem to define lootboxes as something you purchase. But legal texts are very specifically worded so I can’t be sure some nuance didn’t get lost in translation.

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- MudMan@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I wrote a first response referencing the one mention I had found of loot boxes, but you are correct, I missed that they did include one in the definitions section.
  
  IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;
  
  So yeah, you are right, they do define it as paid. Carry on.
  
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- MudMan@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Art. 20. São vedadas as caixas de recompensa (loot boxes) oferecidas em jogos eletrônicos direcionados a crianças e a adolescentes ou de acesso provável por eles, nos termos da respectiva classificação indicativa.
  
  Not as far as I can tell. This translates to "Loot boxes offered in electronic games aimed at children and teenagers or likely to be accessed by them, in the terms of the corresponding age rating".
  
  You can argue that "offered" here specifically implies "offered for purchase", but... I mean, my Brazilian Portuguese isn't perfect, but I don't think that's explicitly the case, the word means what you think it means in English. It'd be a problem of hermeneutics at that point.
  
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