Reply to post: Re: It didn't help my studies much either

Re: It didn't help my studies much either

To be fair, you were a programmer who happened to make games rather than a gamer per se (well, as far as I can tell from post). Although D&D can be played with a computer, it is a game played with friends rather than a solitary game. That being said, I had to be told to stop playing AD&D when I was 15, my marks before the Inter Cert were beginning to suffer on account of the amount of time I was putting into it.

Smartphones are incredibly addictive and should be treated as such. Children shouldn't have access to them and be allowed only to adults (and, even then, the populace as a whole needs a lot of education about them). Once you've given a child a smartphone, even with parental controls (that are often not so great although Apple's aren't bad), getting them off it is hard.

You could try not giving them a smartphone and then they are the only teen in their class without one. Who wants to be the child in the class who isn't allowed to eat meat because their parents are strict vegetarians? Who wants to be the only child in the class not on Instagram, SnapChat & WhatsApp?

To the critics above, personal responsibility is always the argument trotted out with dealing with dangerously addictive things. It is *your* fault, but not the industry's fault. In your opinion, the Food Industry shares none of the blame for the stuff it puts into the food that you can't help buying. The oil companies share no blame in destroying the climate because you chose to drive to work or you chose to heat your home. Too many regulations eh? You probably pine for the good old days when Reagan was president.

Yes, personal responsibility has a role to play as does the role the government has to protect us from dangerously addictive substances as does the industry in question a duty of care towards its end-users. Think about Oxycontin and what should have been done to prevent all of those poor people becoming addicted to opioids.