A San Francisco lawsuit against Epic and Roblox has the potential to be extremely interesting for the gaming industry at large, should it ever go to trial. 23-year-old Dawson Little is claiming damages for what the filing describes as “operant conditioning,” arguing that games like Fortnite and those on Roblox “weaponize a video game for the unethical, reckless, and/or negligent application of this psychological technique to encourage a negative response as to the gamer and the positive outcome of increased revenue for the defendants.” In other words, he’s claiming they deliberately exploit video game addiction.
Little, it seems, is claiming that having played both Fortnite and Roblox as a “minor” (listed as “at approximately 15 years old”), he now suffers from “severe emotional distress, anxiety, depression, diminished social interactions, lack of interest in other hobbies, and withdrawal symptoms such as rage, anger, and physical outbursts, and a drastic decline in his grades which led to academic dismissal from school.” This is, the suit argues, because companies Epic and Roblox exposed him to “behavior modification systems” which, “as foreseen and intended,” resulted in “physiological and psychological results and resulted in a disordered relationship with, and addiction to, video games.”
Addiction Affliction
In decades past, innumerous claims of gaming addiction have been made based on spurious evidence and a lack of understanding of what addiction actually entails. But times have changed, and in the last decade games have undeniably employed techniques directly lifted from gambling in ways that have little to do with being inherently compelling or all-consuming. That’s what makes this specific case, as outrageously far-reaching and over-ambitious as it clearly is, so much more interesting in 2026.
However, it’s important to note that the claims in this filing go far beyond being a stretch. In accusing the corporations of deliberately using psychological techniques and “behavioral modification systems,” the paperwork immediately begins misusing terms like “Cognitive Behavior Therapy” in wildly inappropriate ways, and invokes spurious and under-researched conditions like “Internet Gaming Disorder” as if they’re accepted medical terms. (The DSM-5 describes IGD as “included in the section recommending conditions for further research, along with caffeine use disorder,” and only as something “proposed” and certainly not recognized.)
In fact, the suit very quickly descends into frankly woo-woo-level nonsense like “While Defendants have profited from the addiction and disordered behavior caused by behavior medication systems they employ, generating billions of dollars of profits, the gamers—particularly minors—have been left to bear the burden of the damages resulting from this public health crisis.” In addition to failing to provide evidence for any such crisis, we’re left kind of hoping that “behavior medication systems” is an error and should read “modification.” In any case, the filing is deeply sloppy work.
We don’t need another heroin
The lengthy filing eventually begins to read like a conspiracist’s manifesto, explaining how the developers have found an evil mirror-world version of CBT that reprograms our minds, gives a bizarre condensed history of video gaming, and repeatedly makes the claim that games developers have “failed to disclose” the hiring of psychologists, while linking to the public profiles of psychologists hired by games developers. This gets even weirder when it starts describing Roblox as a specific game with specific features, rather than a platform used to create thousands upon thousands of games, and randomly includes complete nonsense like “Video game addiction has been suggested to be as addictive as heroin.”
There are tens of thousands of words of this, some of them communicating extremely interesting thoughts, others absolute nonsense, in a deeply difficult-to-follow and painfully repetitive way. The text regularly leaps between topics, conflating claims of Fortnite‘s “near miss effect” (which apparently creates conditions for players to nearly win a match in order to make them want to try again) with its use of “bright and vibrant colors” in some apparently nefarious way. It then goes on to list painstakingly detailed, incredibly specific reasons why Fortnite is good rather than exploitative, (“the mechanics of the game inject elements of variety, allowing players to find ideal hiding spots, loot drops, explore the entire map, build towers and forts using resources, and more,”) to demonstrate its unfair appeal.
This is all such a shame, because a coherent and informed claim about the deliberate use of the techniques also exploited in gambling, one that forces a deeper public investigation into the compulsion loops being put into many games aimed at children, could have been deeply informative. Such spotlights, even if unsuccessful, tend to cause developers to feel a level of scrutiny that’s too often lacking. But this case is hopeless. It demands a jury trial which, were it to go ahead, could be fascinating as experts for and against were presented, but it seems most likely that Roblox and Epic will successfully get this thrown out. Should they fail, however, it’d be interesting to see how Little could possibly afford to stand up to them, or whether the companies might just settle without prejudice so as to pay him to go away.