ARKANSAS, USA — An Arkansas family has filed a lawsuit against several video game developers including Xbox and Nintendo, accusing them of purposefully causing young people to get addicted to playing their games and spending money.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Arkansas on Nov. 3, 2023, claims the family's 13-year-old son has internet gaming disorder caused by video game companies who "specifically developed and designed" their products to cause the addiction.
The family accuses four games and two cloud-based systems of making it too easy for their son to purchase micro-transactions habitually.
According to the lawsuit, the teen boy is addicted to Fortnite, Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Rainbow Six, spending "approximately 13 hours per day" playing these games across his Xbox and Nintendo Switch consoles.
The lawsuit claims that due to the toll these games took on their son, he now experiences pain in his hands, elbow, and shoulders; increased weight, and morbid obesity; lack of interest in other hobbies; diminished social interaction and lack of friends; and mental anguish, including rage, anger, physical outbursts and more.
The boy is "now homeschooled due to worsening symptoms of lack of impulse control and inability to learn in a traditional classroom setting" which has caused his mother to lose hope in her ability to control her son's gaming and she "fears when she tries to take [the video games] away," the lawsuit said. The only way the teen's father is reportedly able to interact with his son is by playing video games together.
Because of his intense gaming addiction, the lawsuit said the boy has “frequent bouts of gamers’ rage where he throws game controllers and breaks them.”
Microtransactions and easy access to in-game purchasing are also mentioned in the suit, citing the 13-year-old spends $350 a month and has spent $3,000 on in-game transactions and downloadable content (not including the games and consoles themselves) in a year.
According to the lawsuit, because of the gaming companies’ “intentional negligent, deceptive, fraudulent, willful, immoral, reckless, and unlawful acts,” the parents of the boy have “experienced loss of society and companionship” as well as being financially damaged because of their son’s gaming addiction.
The parents accuse the gaming companies of being aware their video games are harmful to young people because they’ve “specifically designed their games to addict.” To bolster the point, the lawsuit claims that video game companies hire behavioral psychologists to help develop games that will “best utilize psychological tactics to keep players engaged for longer periods.”
The list of defendants includes Epic Games, who developed the popular battle-royale game Fortnite, Microsoft, Nintendo Google, and several others.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs ask for a jury trial on all the issues they accuse the companies of, such as negligence in failure to warn, instruct, and in the design of their products to harm the child.
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