Bangkok Teens Explain the Game Mechanics Now Facing Lawsuits

When a new season of student hosts at Students Incorporated sat down to explain why video games are built to be hard to put down, they reached for a specific vocabulary: core loops, variable rewards, the "near-miss effect." It's psychology-class language, drawn from decades of research on operant conditioning. It's also, as of 2026, the language showing up in federal lawsuits and new laws written to rein in the gaming industry that uses it.

On the International Community School of Bangkok's weekly podcast, host Mr. Jason opened Season 5 alongside new team members Midnight (also known as Dorcas), Lucy, and Yachi with an episode built around a single question: what actually makes a game addictive? The answer they arrived at tracks almost exactly with what plaintiffs' attorneys and regulators on three continents have spent the past year arguing in less casual settings.

The Loop Behind the Screen

Mr. Jason walked the team through what game designers call the core loop: action, reward, upgrade, repeat, a four-beat cycle engineered to trigger a small dopamine hit every time a player completes it. Layered on top of that loop is randomness. Fixed rewards, he explained, get boring fast because they're predictable; variable rewards keep players guessing, which produces anticipation instead of satisfaction. Then there's the "near-miss effect": landing a result close enough to a jackpot to feel like almost winning, which the brain reads as a reason to try again rather than a reason to stop.

None of this is new science. It traces back to B.F. Skinner and Charles Ferster's operant-conditioning experiments with pigeons in the 1950s, later published in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement. Skinner found that animals rewarded on a fixed schedule pressed a lever only when hungry, but animals rewarded on an unpredictable, variable-ratio schedule pressed it compulsively, producing the highest and most persistent response rates of any reward pattern he tested, and the strongest resistance to ever stopping. Skinner was reportedly confident enough in the effect that he claimed he could turn a pigeon into a pathological gambler using nothing but a variable-ratio feeder. Yachi made the same connection without needing the citation, describing her brother's habit of chasing loot boxes:

"It's the same thing that made Labubu so addictive."

Lucy, for her part, tied the pull of an unfinished game session to the Zeigarnik effect, the well-documented tendency for incomplete tasks to occupy more mental space than finished ones. It's the reason a stalled ranking or an unopened chest can loop in a player's head for days.

A Reward System on Trial

That loop, once mostly discussed in psychology seminars and game-design conferences, is now central to one of the largest pieces of litigation in the industry's history. In December 2025, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated dozens of federal cases into MDL No. 3166, In re: Roblox Corporation Child Sexual Exploitation and Assault Litigation, filed in the Northern District of California. What began with roughly 80 cases had grown to more than 170 by August 2026. Alongside claims involving predatory contact with minors, the consolidated complaints allege something closer to what the Students Incorporated team spent their episode describing in neutral terms: that Roblox hired behavioral scientists and deployed AI-driven feedback loops and "gambling-style mechanics" specifically to keep children engaged. Discord, the chat platform many of the same young players use alongside Roblox, faces its own suit from New Jersey's attorney general, filed in April 2025, alleging the company marketed itself as a safe space for kids while its lax settings turned it into what the filing calls "a prime hunting ground" for predators.

Regulators have moved on the design mechanics themselves, not just the safety failures around them. Belgium and the Netherlands have already classified paid loot boxes as illegal gambling and banned them outright. The European Union's Digital Fairness Act, expected to take effect in late 2025 or early 2026, is expected to extend a version of that ban to any game accessible to minors across the bloc. In the United States, no federal loot-box law exists yet, but New York's legislature introduced Assembly Bill A9044 in its current session, part of a growing pattern of states requiring disclosure of randomized purchase odds. Brazil went further than most: its president signed legislation in 2025 banning loot box sales to anyone under 18, taking effect this past March.

Brazil, Twice in One Year

Brazil surfaced again in the episode's closing news roundup, in a story the hosts read cold off a BBC headline: Discord ordered to suspend live streams in Brazil. The order, issued by Brazil's National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) in mid-August, gave Discord three business days to shut down its "Go Live" streaming feature after a 13-year-old girl in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul died by suicide following a livestream in which authorities say other users encouraged her to harm herself. Five teenagers were arrested in connection with her death, and police separately intervened in another livestream where a second girl was preparing to do the same. The ANPD said it had found "robust evidence" that Discord failed to take reasonable steps to protect minors from content promoting self-harm; the suspension stands until the company can show adequate safeguards are in place.

It's a grim coincidence that the same country banning loot box sales to minors this year is also the one that just forced a major platform offline over harm to a child, except it isn't really a coincidence. Brazil has spent 2026 becoming a proving ground for platform accountability. Its newly regulated sports-betting framework, ANGB, generated $4.5 billion in its first year and helped drive a 38 percent surge in Latin American gambling revenue, according to a 2026 industry report from Track360, the same research firm the Students Incorporated hosts cited for their global gaming-revenue figures (global gross gaming revenue hit $115 billion in 2026, up 12 percent year-over-year). A country moving simultaneously to regulate real-money gambling, restrict loot boxes for kids, and police livestreaming platforms is a country treating "games," "gambling," and "social platforms" as points on the same spectrum, not separate categories. The episode's hosts, without using that framing, spent forty-five minutes describing exactly why that spectrum exists.

The Other Side of the Loop

To the team's credit, the episode didn't stop at the case against game design. After a mid-show break, they turned deliberately to counter-evidence: stress relief, problem-solving under pressure, and community-building were all raised as real, documented benefits of play, not just industry talking points. That balance matches where the research has actually landed. The World Health Organization added "gaming disorder" to the ICD-11 in 2018, defining it as gaming behavior so persistent it crowds out other life activities despite clear negative consequences, but recent meta-analyses put its prevalence at roughly 4.6 percent among adolescents, a real but minority share of players, with a separate estimate from 2025 to 2026 finding about 6.1 percent among adults aged 18 to 35. Most people who play the games engineered around these loops, in other words, play them the way the hosts described playing Angry Birds or Mario Kart: for fun, with friends, without losing control of the loop.

The show also worked through a top-10 list of the world's most-played games, an ordinary-looking segment that ended on a startling scale: the ten titles named, from Roblox at number one down to Among Us at number ten, collectively claim more than 1.5 billion active players, close to one-fifth of the planet. That's the actual size of the audience the loop was built for, and the reason a mechanic a group of Bangkok teenagers can explain in a single episode has become one of the more consequential design questions the tech industry is now being asked to answer in court.

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