> Gambling tends to spur much greater ethical concern and regulatory scrutiny, yet overlap – in practice and even game design – is becoming increasingly evident.
This seems like the understatement of all understatements. These games are almost exactly like casino games in all ways, visually, game mechanics, incentives, except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling and therefore not regulated by gambling laws? Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
> except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling
Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
I think this comment oversimplifies gambling addiction. Yes, chasing losses is a behaviour common to many gamblers, and yes, winning money provides an incentive to gamble in the first place, but many (most?) gambling addicts have different motivations.
Here are some quotes from _Addiction by Design_, by Natasha Dow Shüll -- a book I highly recommend if you're interested in this subject:
> Julie explains: "If it's a moderate day - win, lose, win, lose - you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone." [...] "You're not playing for money," says Julie, "you're playing for credit -- credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It's not about winning, it's about continuing to play."
> [Pete says:] After sitting at the machine for fourteen hours, so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, no money in my pocket, no gas in my car, and no groceries at home, I still can't leave because I have four hundred credits in the machine. So I sit there for another hour until it's all gone, praying for me to lose: "Please God take this money so I can get up and go home." You might ask, "Why didn't you hit the cash out button?" That never occurred to me -- that was not an option.
I don't think the importance of the monetary payout is particularly clear-cut. The payin is what does the financial damage, by moving money out of the player's control. The incentives and reinforcement are what get the player hooked -- but perhaps those don't have to be financial? I won't discount the importance of the payout entirely; maybe it's critical to get hooked in the first place? But I also wouldn't be surprised if gambling addiction can arise in games which don't provide to ability to cash out.
> Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The actual bug is that some humans get a tremendously powerful positive reinforcement for success in their brain, no matter what form the "success" takes and they're addicted to that feeling. You're thinking it's about money, but money is just one possible form of success. Winning at a video game is also success.
These people were very useful two thousand years ago, because you can set "Find out what's on the other side of that dangerous mountain pass" as the success criteria. They were somewhat useful a hundred years ago, though there were fewer opportunities, in 1923 nobody had gone to space, but they had gone to the South Pole (although only fairly recently, and one group all died on the way back because their strategy was bad and they got unlucky). Such people are not needed in anywhere near the volume they're available today. So they're going to get addicted to things with success - e.g. video games, and we should try to ensure that the game publishers don't exploit them too much, just as we prevent gambling firms from exploiting this same defect.
Although I do agree with what you're saying, it's worth noting that even though there are no orthodox ways to turn virtual currency/winnings in video games most of the time, there are plenty of under the table ways to sell virtual assets for real money.
A cynical part of me wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers was actually that it could run around this problem and provide a more direct way to allow monetary payouts without running into issues with regulations on gambling.
> In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone
This isn't really true for any games that I'm aware of. Some games allow you to sell the skins for money (CS:GO), and for the rest you can sell the account. It's likely against ToS, but unlikely to be enforced. People selling WoW accounts with high-level characters and top-end equipment has existed since I can remember.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more.
That's just someone rationalizing an addiction. It's probably a better rationalization than the people making in-game purchases they can't afford have, but both groups would almost have to be addicted first to even tell themselves something like that.
I don't believe a rational person without an addiction would gamble with their rent money. I definitely don't believe that they could then be convinced the best way to get out of the hole is to keep doing the thing that got them into the hole in the first place.
Once someone has gotten to that point, the money doesn't matter. They'll gamble with money they don't have, and they won't stop if they somehow manage to win enough to break even. It doesn't matter whether they're up or down, the answer is always gambling.
Anyone who has passed a middle school math class knows that gambling is as much of a money pit as in-game purchases, there's just more steps involved. The house always wins, after all.
No, you fundamentally do not understand the problem. You are willing to abstract everything from the equation apart from the outcome, and that is so wrong.
Money is a specific representation of the 'want' that drives gambling. That the outcome is getting more money or more some other representation does not matter. All that matters to the human brain is that the 'want' is satisfied.
Gambling becomes a problem when a person is willing to spend a harmful amount of 'input': usually time and/or money. This is either due to a personality flaw or due to manipulation of people into believing that the odds are in their favor, making them increase their input.
There is only not a problem when either of the following conditions is met:
- The 'input' is not at risk of damaging anyone.
- The chance of obtaining the 'want' does not modify the 'input' to become harmful.
It might be worth noting that GPs premise that money isn't being moved is not necessarily true. Counter Strike, for example, has a massive market for items that are dealt with real currency. A particularly lucky unbox could win you over ten grand. The money element absolutely does come into play with some games (not all, of course).
> The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
I think this point is missing the evolution of virtual clout. As a thirty year old I can agree with your point that these rewards are valueless - but I can also see the younger generation that measures social value through virtual presence where skins and appearance can be vital to self esteem. I don't think it's correct to downplay the value that some people see in the reward of these loot boxes and other chance games.
If you align your identity with your virtual presence then failing to keep up appearances can be extremely dire - that's incredibly unhealthy, but it's the way a fair number of folks operate.
This does not align with what I've heard from people who work on mobile games: they're driven by whales who are either independently wealthy or destroying their lives. You can even use your credit card to play!
People also get addicted to things that cost no money and still ruin their lives.
But the argument here is that game devs are clearly exploiting behaviors of addiction for their monetary gain, at the expense of the addicts bank account. I think the takeaway is that it doesn't even require potential monetary gain to trap people with addictive behaviors.
I do see what you're saying, I just think you are misunderstanding addiction, it isn't logical in the first place. Gamblers do know the house wins, they still gamble. People know they shouldn't spend all their money online shopping but they do etc.
In games like CS:GO or DotA there are lootboxes that you need to spend real money to open with the chance of getting a super rare skin that you can sell for real money on certain platforms. And to make things worse most of those platforms are online casinos that allow players to bet their skins to win skins in even more perverse ways. Those platforms offer small rewards for players that advertise them in their game nicks, e.g.: `Player Name | csgobettingsite.net`. And is common to find those kind of players in matches.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
Plenty of retirees flock to casinos as soon as their Social Security check clears, then spend it all and go home without selling their grandchildren into sex trafficking. There is a difference between poor people and gambling addicts. A subset of all gamblers (addicts) struggle with rationality and will reach for someone else's wallet when theirs is empty-- and eventually find themselves encased in concrete at the bottom of what's left of Lake Mead. They would do this to obtain more heroin or meth just the same.
You're describing a worst-case scenario. Most gamblers are just poor people, who are poor because they make poor choices with money (like spending it at casinos). The type who trade in functional cars and finance a new truck every time they get a raise, or buy new appliances that cost exactly as much as their tax refund check. Money burns a hole in their pocket, but they don't become the neighborhood firebug. Ironically winning the lottery usually ruins the lives of them and everyone connected to them, since their spending scales linearly with available resources. They're just cows that consume until nothing is left, then they switch from pleasure-seeking to subsistence. They're not intelligent, but they are rational.
Kids don't have vaults full of money, and they have no equity worth loan-sharking for. Their rationality is up for debate, but there's no money to be made in kneecapping or drowning child debtors. What they do have is a surplus of attention. So you keep them engaged through all means available and milk them for quarters as long as you can. Dopamine derived from playing the game is the payout children get. Casino "games" are fucking lame beyond all comprehension, so casinos have to give adults some incentive to play the push-this-button-and-leave-nothing-to-your-children game.
To me, I don't see the situation being any different than traditional arcade machines (some games had owner-adjustable difficulty settings, and I swear some games outright cheated), and yet the current state of things feels more exploitative. Maybe it's the RNG-dependence and not skill...at least you could earn extended time and rewards if you were good at the game. Everything is gacha-crap these days.
I've always been amused that the Spice channel and the like were 100% scrambled by default. Seems like they could have done way better showing the non-explicit parts of movies/shows as a "free sample," then only scrambling the signal with a quick-activation hotline overlay the second the sexy parts start.
I've wondered many times how close videogame companies are to accidentally repeating the Pinball Prohibition. There was a period of time when all pinball machines were forbidden, because lawmakers throughout the US couldn't easily enough tell the difference between which ones were gambling and which ones weren't. (That was an extinction level event that bankrupted a bunch of pinball manufacturers and nearly ended several industries.)
On the one hand, a lot of the specific loopholes that games claim come directly out of the results of the Pinball Prohibition and contest laws (can't win cash back, must have winning odds posted but it can be in the fine print, things like that) so it is unlikely to repeat exactly like it happened before. But on the other hand, some of what is going on with current whales is so blatant that some have been famously referred to gambling addiction counseling and we do seem close to that political brink that "somebody must do something" and if it happens as the wrong sort of mob mentality panic, politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
(I sometimes worry, too, about the role that Steam's Trading Cards and Inventory items play into their Auctions might impact any sort of "videogames are gambling panic". Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes, though you can't actually cash it out and it is more of a gift card. [Though gift card-based gambling/embezzling is another potential panic of its own.] It's hard not to imagine politicians preferring a sledgehammer when even the largest, most trusted videogame store on personal computers wasn't immune to adding gambling-like elements and making extra money from whales.)
> Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes
Uh... it's actually very, very common to cash back from Steam. There is a subreddit for CSGO's real money trading[1]. It has 230k subscribers. And it's just a single game, not the whole steam.
> politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
This is unlikely simply due to the size of the market. Video games are played by >60% of the population and generate more revenue than movies with hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake.
For those who had never heard of the Pinball Prohibition, here is an article about it[0]. Features a great photo of the authorities smashing machines like it was the 1930s and eliminating a speak easy.
I think Hoyoverse (formerly Mihoyo) has the formula down. You don't have to spend money on their games. They play just fine without. But you think "wouldn't it be nice to have Ganyu or Hu Tao". I think the drop rates are better than FGO at least.
I've spent irresponsibly in FGO in the past. I still play, but for the last three years I only spend $15 twice a year. Gambling is seductive, and it's clear that the lack of a monetary payout doesn't make it any less dangerous.
As hobbies go, I've come to find that gacha game spendings aren't that out of line. Most hobbies are expensive, it's just that gacha games are one of the more obvious examples of our time and our world view.
If you're doubting me, take a look at hobbies like ham radio or cars or golf or whatever really strikes your fancy. The vast majority of hobbies are expensive, they will make your eyes water if you aren't used to throwing wads of money around for fun. Even a gaming computer can run you a few thousand dollars, not to mention the games themselves, and I think gaming is a hobby most of us can relate to.
Another thing I've come to find, from keeping a journal of my own spendings, is that while the total sum might seem ridiculous it's actually nothing unusual when considering the length of time that money was spent over.
To use myself as an example, I've spent somewhere around $12,000 on FGO over a span of about 7 years now. Is $12,000 a huge sum of money? Yes, absolutely. But according to my Excel spreadsheet it's also about $1,700 a year or $140 a month or just under $5 a day averaged out. I spend more than that per month on just costs of living, even just eating out a couple times will cost as much per month. And remember, that's averaged out: I can go for weeks and months without spending anything if the game doesn't interest me.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a lot of the anti-video game and anti-gambling crowd have started to sound more like a certain segment of people demanding others shouldn't have fun. It almost sounds like a new spin on "Video games are making violent children!" because that topic has gotten stale.
Is gambling addiction a thing? Yes, and it is unfortunate; some people really do need help from themselves. Irresponsible parents and children who don't know better also inevitably exist, and they too need some safety wheels so they don't trip over too hard.
But responsible adults spending significant sums of money for fun is not and should not be a problem by itself.
I think it's even more nefarious to have games that /don't/ resemble gambling but utilize the same psychological tricks.
I got taken by legend Richard Garriott on a slippery slide of feeling like I was supporting a historic studio, making digital investments, holding onto key digital real estate, and being part of an exclusive gaming club, all while being coerced into 5 payments per month and incessantly repeating the same in game activities for hours per day. It took 8k for me to never trust game developers ever again. I can't even buy battle passes without feeling like a sucker now.
100% agree. My youngest son got hooked into a game called Mech Arena. By the time I realized he had spent 200 dollars (my fault 100%). Games like this should be forbidden or made forbidden for people under 18 years old.
Lost about $100 a while back because my 8-year-old didn't realize he was spending real money in some F2P game on an at-the-time unlocked PS5 (though I didn't realize it was so unlocked that you didn't need a password to make purchases—I do most on my phone, for all consoles, because it's much smoother than wrestling with on-console game stores).
Shame on me for not locking it sooner. Shame on every goddamn company that knows for a fact this is happening—probably a lot—and prefers to keep robbing people rather than do something about it (say, something ethical—like shut down their company). $100 doesn't mean much to me (like, I'm not well-off enough that I don't think a thing of spending $100, but unexpectedly losing that much every now and then has basically zero effect on my life) fortunately, but that could really screw over a lot of people, in a ruin-their-whole-month kind of way ("why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!" PS4s are pretty cheap, used, or may have been handed-down for free or very cheap from a better-off relative or friend, and have basically the same store and most of the same games—besides, a planned expense is very different from an unplanned one)
My (at the time) 9 year old daughter once bought $7,200 worth of dragon in game content on her Kindle Fire (before amazon had parental controls to stop this). The good new is that Amazon INSTANTLY refunded all of it as soon as I explained 9 year old daughter to their support team. I'm sure there's a game publisher that is still disappointed that their whale was more of a guppy.
I'm not a parent myself so maybe I'm talking out of my ass here.
but how is this even possible? my parents never gave me direct access to a credit card as a child. eventually I got a debit card to spend my own allowance chore money, but if I blew it all in something dumb that was my own problem. no pizza/movies with friends until I built it back up
> My youngest son got hooked into a game called Mech Arena. By the time I realized he had spent 200 dollars (my fault 100%). Games like this should be forbidden or made forbidden for people under 18 years old.
I actually think the opposite. Spending $200 as a kid and having nothing to show for it is a lesson you won't forget in a hurry, but not life altering. We should let kids experience the risks and consequences of gambling while they still have a safety net, rather than setting them loose at 18 when it's for real.
Virtual slot machines are not fun games, and Apple and Google could ban them with a stroke of a pen. They certainly should. Apple, Meta and Google could also prevent developers from advertising them, again with the stroke of a pen. You don't have a right to make them, and they are doing little for the gaming and app ecosystems by having them around.
Slot machine victims and politics are poorly aligned. Something like 1/11 of the top grossing apps on the App Store are virtual slot machines. Nonetheless the number of active users total across all virtual slot machines globally may number as low as the hundreds of thousands. This is from my experience as a game developer and publisher.
What to do in this scenario: extremely high revenue but few users? As other commenters have said, Apple's deep seeded indifference to gaming has created this beast. Apple Arcade, while generally publishing good games, is a financial and ecosystem failure: there are no breakout hits, and everyone who publishes into Apple Arcade had finished their game before showing it to Apple or had previously successful games, so they didn't help anything come to be that would have come to be already.
There are dozens of commenters here complaining about their kids buying IAP. Personally, I find the assignment of blame for something that pisses you off kind of a moot point. You wouldn't give a fuck if there weren't real money involved, indeed there are maybe even a billion people on this planet playing some kind of free game and having fun. The worst that they are doing is wasting time. But Apple could give you a refund - it is, after all, imaginary, there's no scarcity - but they don't. It's their store. Steam gives refunds. So how about write some angry e-mails to Tim Cook, or run for office.
As a game developer, I would love for virtual slot machines to go away. The law can do that, if not Apple. But nobody can force Apple to take real risks with Apple Arcade, or force users to pay for my game. There is the problem.
It's not helping that Apple - of all companies - is making banks off softcore porn lootbox games. They had war on gaming, and got lootbox gaming eat out the platform. Congratulations, Mr. Jobs.
> 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
I don't understand how monetary pay-in's without payouts is less scrutinized than with payouts, as at least in the latter the consumer could (with a low likelihood, but still) get something out of the transaction. In contrast, just pay-in means that only the company makes money and the consumer gets nothing, besides some virtual garbage.
I fear it might be the other way around. The ingame rewards are real while the payout pretty much doesn't happen. It's a carrot on a stick, the donkey gets nothing. It seems to me that one can have a much greater sense of progress if there is actual progress.
The ingame rewards are real only until the game goes dark, your device is no longer supported, or their servers shut down and suddenly you're left with nothing. At least real life gambling can leave you with something tangible.
I'd like to see some numbers about how many people struggling with gambling addictions compared to how many people struggle with in-game-purchase addictions. Both share the negative reinforcement of spending money. In exchange one gives you the positive reinforcement of playing a game. Another gives you the positive reinforcement of money. I have the feeling money is a 10x more potent reward.
This is to say, the gaming industry makes games that are a problem for some people but I'd like to see some hard numbers comparing it to gambling before I would say the product is as dangerous as gambling on a population level.
It's not just the winning that is addicting to gamblers. More often, it's the losing. Losing recapitulates the feelings of deep shame that they feel, but don't feel are necessarily justified. So in order to re-justify those feelings, they gamble away money and "act shamefully" so to speak.
This same pattern is behind a lot (if not all) addictions. It's not just a physical addiction or a dopamine rush, and it's not generally the upside that addicts are addicted to.
China banned under-18s from playing online games more than an hour a day, and only on Fri/Sat/Sun and holidays. Online games are far more addicting in my experience, but it's always easy to waste hours offline as my 90s childhood shows.
That's from a recent article - not sure if it changed since.
> Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
Lawmakers are actively pandering to the gambling companies, as the likes of Epic successfully push to make it illegal to have controls on gaming devices under the rubric of "breaking walled gardens" and such.
Video games have been gambling adjacent since the arcade era. A lot of casinos even used to have a casino floor for adults and an arcade floor for the kids
Reading the article about the addicted woman, she's perfectly aware of what she's doing and she's perfectly aware she's blowing money away on nothing. There's nothing to be regulated. Conscious adults can make their own decisions.
How ridiculous is it for her to ask Zynga to close her account and then still try to log into it later? This isn't a regulatory issue, it's a willpower issue. Might as well regulate how much/what food you can buy so people don't get fat.
> Gambling tends to spur much greater ethical concern and regulatory scrutiny, yet overlap – in practice and even game design – is becoming increasingly evident.
The government hates competition. They want to be the only ones that can swindle money out of whales via state lotteries.
State lotteries were actually specifically designed to discourage whales and big spending. That is why tickets are relatively low priced and there are no high priced super tickets. It is very difficult to impulse buy a mass amount of tickets.
They were also designed to replace numbers -- a similar game run by mobsters that took money from the poor. The rates of return of lotteries are much better than the old numbers games.
Of course some states have gotten greedy and have changed the rules to encourage more impulse spending.
It's insane that we are permitting tactics that are already sketchy when applied to gambling addicts to be used to target teenagers and other young individuals who are still developing. We are enabling behaviours in video games that will shape lifelong addictions and other huge problems all because we are unwilling to call loot boxes gambling because of half-baked analogies to opening a pack of baseball cards.
Simply put: technology is one step ahead of the law. All of these ‘tricks’ should be regulated as gambling for the same reasons gambling is regulated: they’re addictive, they disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, they extract large sums of money from these groups and enrich some large companies in the process.
When viewed in that light, perhaps even existing gambling regulations don’t go far enough because there are plenty of people who suffer from gambling addiction and even ruin their lives in the process.
As for the people who oppose all of this regulation on the basis of individual freedom (and perhaps don’t care about gambling addicts), here is the issue: externalities. People with severe gambling addiction can do tremendous damage to society as well as enable and enrich organized crime groups. It’s well documented that people with gambling addiction can and do commit thefts and even murders to fuel their addiction.
Now you might also argue that regulation does not prevent gambling addiction but that is only evidence against the current set of regulations, not proof that all regulation is ineffective. Trying to determine the right regulations to minimize the harms of gambling addiction while balancing personal freedoms is the hard part of policy debates.
The war on drugs has very little to do with drugs so this is a bad analogy. So long as you are white and don't look poor you can do whatever drugs you want and the law won't get in your way. I have literally done a bump of K with an on duty cop at a music festival.
The push for legalization isn't about people making their own choices, it's because it's not possible for the government to have this power and not abuse it and harm reduction via regulated production (taking away choices, clearly) and medical supervision.
This argument doesn't apply to video game gambling. Nobody is getting their hit of digital lootboxes from their dealer and the government isn't arresting players for Fortnite possession. You can have all the thrill of random drops without it being tied to your credit card, there are still recovering WoW addicts.
If people en masse suddenly started spending ruinous amounts of money on Yu-Gi-Oh that's a pretty strong case against them. Regulation follows the harm not the principles.
No, they're not. For all intents and purposes the industry has moved on from loot boxes. The top grossing mobile games aren't using them, and AAA/F2P games have for the most part moved on from them. There's a few holdouts (notably Fifa Ultimate Team), but everyone else has moved on. The article does a really good job of explaining what the _actual_ model is now.
Now that's some hyperbole, government regulations are some of the best tools we have in creating a reasonable society that is desirable to live in.
For example, your nanny state comment could easily be modified to describe chemical waste dumping.
"What's insane is that some want to replace the irresponsible CEO's and C-suite execs of those workers with a nanny state."
Well fucking hell yes I do, I want the government to have to power to ruin companies if they negligently damaged or destroyed the environment we all share, for profit, stupidity or laziness.
Government regulations are the only reason we the workers have it as good as we do today. 5 day work week, EPA restrictions, etc.
I don't care if you blow your money on casinos and crack, I just want the Google Play games section to not be 99%+ casinowares with the aesthetics of children's games.
Money is not the only problem. Allthough my mom mostly plays "f2p", she is still a farmville (and candy crush to a degree) addict. She spends a big part of her daily life on those two games. And that is what I observe when she is with me, she probably spends even more when she is at her house.
The worst part I see is "water rush" or whatever that is called on farmville. The water is basically the premium currency you only slowly gain if you are playing free. But on that rush time you gain a lot more and it is 6 hours or so. My mom pretty much plays that game for 6 straight hours when that rush is available
I tried hooking her to other hobbies but it doesn't really work. Farmville's claws are hooked too deep on her
I wonder if a really good clone of farmville that slowly detoxes players would work.
Slowly remove the dopamine hits or mistime them to be less effective. Push the player to play and check in less to gain more ("Kittens" has this mechanic - you gain resources faster by being offline).
>Zynga’s vice-president of player succcess, Gemma Doyle, referred unabashedly to internal models that identify people who are on course to spend high sums. Should they reduce their outlay, she told GamesIndustry.biz, the company would “reach out and call them to find out what’s wrong”
That is just so actively evil, it should be criminal.
Oh yea that’s been super common in the gambling industry for a while. For casino games, losers will get comped a night, maybe a weekend even to encourage them back. In betting, losers get incentivized back into the habit by receiving “free play” or “free bets.” It’s all based on their internal LTV calculations and shit it’s nuts.
It’s already beyond fucked up but imagine how infuriating it is for anyone with a clue that does this. If u show the slightest indication that u possess >= 1 functioning brain cell ur done. Eg my max bet at Pointsbet was limited to a couple bucks fairly quickly (my account was literally negative too lol! Altho there were some pretty obvious tells: brand new American account immediately starts exclusively betting obscure stuff like Bulgarian basketball) and similarly at draftkings (tho they were more lenient).
It’s pretty trivial to churn out a 7-12% ROI as side income until it isn’t! I get it but that obviously doesn’t make it any better. It’s so predatory and coupled with how conservative they r about anyone that might win it’s just disgusting
I guess it'd offer you some little free game coins or something? Just like when you unsubscribe from Adobe CC it offers you a month of free subscription?
Casino Hosts, aka Casino Marketing Executives, do this too. Probably where they got the idea. Although my hosts have never been pushy. But by Vegas standards I'm a guppy, so I don't think they care to waste too much time on me. I bet things are different for the guys whose trips can make or break a quarter.
I worked in a small casino. The cockiest players were the Hold Em poker players. Most were in their 20s. They saw it as a skill not gambling and certainly not an addiction at least any I spoke to didnt.
The slots players were never satified. They were excited to spend $100 and win $10. Or win many small wins and play it all away since it wasn't real money to them. It was staggering at times to see people in one evening spend $100K casually and could no problems. Others not so much but the majority just dabbled.
I gave up computer gaming before the loot box trend. But I could see its popularity. I went back to school and many 18 - 25 year old guys talked about it constantly. It was very obvious in its popularity.
With slots just like US military training is stimulus response reward. I've been caught up in simple games from their hold a past time a dopamine rush. It's that 3% of people who can't turn it off that get hit the worst.
Poker is a skill. It's one of the only casino games where you can consistently make money. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other people. There's no such thing as a professional lottery player, or a professional slot machine player.
If you're really good at poker, it can be a source of income. You have to be really, really good though.
Why would someone would spend $100K at a small casino vs. somewhere like Caesars Palace or Bellagio? At least you will get some nice comps. Was it better odds?
People just like playing slots. We had a crowd who just liked to spend lots and they won lots too since higher denominations had a higher payback compared to lower denomination. Usually 88% for penny slots but $1, $5, $10 (per line played mind you!!) are 96% to 98%.
I recall we had a few good looking people regulars who were in movies or TV or models not sure. One woman had on jeans that cost more than I made in a year. Actual diamonds for the decoration on them. They spent piles of money and on drinks.
It was amazing to see especially in small town Canada with a population of no more than 70,000.
And yes our comps sucked mainly due to laws on free booze or encouraging gambling. The odds/payback are industry standard it's all highly regulated here as other casinos. PAR sheets only allow so much adjustment.
I dont think hold em is equivalent to gambling. It is definitely a skill/game. It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling
Hold’em (assuming the bets are money, obviously friendly games are possible) is 100% gambling.
> It is definitely a skill/game.
While some regulatory regimes either treat gambling different or not-gambling where a particular criterion for skill involvement is met, that’s not really material outside of consideration of the application of those regulatory regimes.
> It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling
Betting money on board games (whether or not you are also playing and betting on yourself), even those with no random element in the game itself (or nothing beyond side/turn-order selection), is gambling, too.
Where there is randomness, even if the game is largely skill-based on its face, playing for real stakes and the selection process it creates will result in games tending to be more dominated by chance than the game structure itself would suggest unless participation is mandatory and matching is random. (Even when there is not randomness in the game on ita face, as random and out-of-game events that effect player performance can’t be eliminated.)
I love poker, and it is definitely a skill game. It's also definitely gambling though. It just doesn't have the same addictive feedback loop that slots do.
It has become more difficult, at least for me, to find games without gambling components as a main design elwment in recent years.
On the one hand this lead me down a quite enjoyable route of (re)discovering single player indie games and retro tutles but on the other hand it also made me avoid most modern, AAA-level games.
My current recommandation would be, if anyone is also looking for tutles like this, Cloudpunk, an athmospheric, indie, simple driving game in a cyberpunk-ish dystopia. The game runs great on Linux w/ Steam.
> Cloudpunk, an athmospheric, indie, simple driving game in a cyberpunk-ish dystopia.
I liked the game and was looking for exactly that as something to replace post-endgame Death Stranding (I just want to get high, drive around and deliver packages), but did not find Cloudpunk simple-- while it was fun, it was confusing, depressing and unrewarding.
This sounds negative but I can't articulate the "feel" of it any other way-- it's a beautiful-yet-sterile corporate dystopia so soulless (Harry Canyon's cyberpunk future, with none of the edginess and grit), in-game suicide would have been a reward worth grinding for...not because "this game sucks," but because "this character's life sucks." Like living inside Reddit rendered in VRML. As much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't bring myself to care to progress her in that world anymore. Not even Dark Souls made me feel this much despair.
Atmospheric indeed. The descriptions of it being a desktop wallpaper engine are on point.
Playstation exclusive/Sony published (single player) AAAs are a pretty safe bet. I can't think of any that have bad faith paid content - just mini expansion/story dlc type stuff.
Spiderman, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon are all recent-ish ones that I really liked.
Anything From Software puts out is great too - Elden Ring being the most recent example.
Just avoid anything published by Activision, Ubisoft and EA. (Although you'd be missing out on some titles that are still pretty good amongst the microtransactiony stuff)
You should try Halls of Torment. It’s $5 on Steam. It’s a fantastic example of a neat game with a great gameplay loop that has no gambling or in-game store. There’s many examples but this is the one I’m currently playing.
Your comment made me think of the most recent indie-ish game I've discovered (albeit late to the party) which is Hades.
Looking at it in light of this discussion, it would have been way too easy to include microtransacations. Make it a little harder, make the elements you invest into building your character a little more scarce, sell the weapon aspects... It's an absolute blessing really that it didn't happen that way.
any game which has random loot drops or really any sort of randomness is fundamentally designed around the same things that make gambling fun. its unavoidable
This is a really disgusting phenomenon in modern society.
We all know how ghastly it is when an adult loses their mind with gambling, but when I realized my nephew (12) is already being strung out by these same mechanics through 'games' on his phone, I felt a sort of despair and psychological darkness descend over me and it's like the world is a little bit less bright, permanently.
Instead of thinking about his bright future now it just seems like a matter of time till he can get dragged down further. And I wonder what percent of kids are getting sucked into it too. Is half a percent too pessimistic? A gambling addiction is inculcated in one out of 200 kids before they're even old enough to work?
And as I'm sure you all can imagine, the desperate pleas and arguments of a kid who needs more 'coins' or whatever have a negative impact on the whole family dynamic. All a parent can do is block the kid from installing new apps on their phone and try to weather the storm of withdrawal, knowing that once they can't protect their child anymore, the kid will also be old enough to do real & permanent damage to their own life.
If you step back, it's really sad how much of our society is based even partially on chance and gambling.
1. College admissions: There are not enough seats for everyone who wants to go to school at a top college, so colleges filter via things like merit and race, but also random chance lotteries.
2. Applying for jobs is a form of lottery. You typically apply for many jobs and hope one or two get back to you.
3. Savings: The only place normal people have access to get decent returns is the Stock Market Roulette wheel
4. Business Success: Often boils down to right place, right time, and massively overindexes on luck.
5. Housing: Leverage up and buy a house for perpetual asset growth. But watch out for the once-a-decade collapse that will put you underwater and in foreclosure!
It's like we've permanently decided that rewarding risk is the only way for a society to function.
I can also think of some social functions that I think random chance is appropriate for:
Most Western, democratic countries select jurors for a trial by one’s peers by lottery and I consider this to be an important aspect of having a more “just” justice system – particularly compared to what preceded this system: trial by one’s betters (a magistrate).
6. Shopping: Sales, promotions, and coupons are all designed to induce more frequent and varied consumption. Pricing for the same item can be wildly different depending on the store or the day of the week. Attempting to secure the best price is a gamble even after carefully researching your options and making price comparisons.
Investing in the stock market is hardly a roulette wheel. Unlike gambling, stocks are a positive sum game. If you had purchased a broad based stock index fund at any point since the creation of the modern US financial system in 1971 and held it for 30 years then you would have made a profit.
As for housing, a collapse in residential real estate values doesn't equate to foreclosure. Lenders can't call in mortgage loans and borrowers have the option to continue paying even if they are underwater.
Why should we not reward risk taking in general? The alternative would be militant conservatism (not in the right wing sense, but in the societal stagnation sense)
Readit News
This seems like the understatement of all understatements. These games are almost exactly like casino games in all ways, visually, game mechanics, incentives, except there's actually no monetary payout so suddenly it's not gambling and therefore not regulated by gambling laws? Lawmakers around the world are asleep at the wheel.
Yes, and it is extremely important. The monetary payout is what ruins lives instead of "just" wasting time and disposable income.
The added monetary payout creates an incentive to play even more to cover for the losses. In video games, when you make an in-game purchase for instance, the money is gone, so if you do that instead of paying the bills, you know you won't be able to pay the bills, this is usually enough to limit the spending.
If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
Here are some quotes from _Addiction by Design_, by Natasha Dow Shüll -- a book I highly recommend if you're interested in this subject:
> Julie explains: "If it's a moderate day - win, lose, win, lose - you keep the same pace. But if you win big, it can prevent you from staying in the zone." [...] "You're not playing for money," says Julie, "you're playing for credit -- credit so you can sit there longer, which is the goal. It's not about winning, it's about continuing to play."
> [Pete says:] After sitting at the machine for fourteen hours, so tired I can barely keep my eyes open, no money in my pocket, no gas in my car, and no groceries at home, I still can't leave because I have four hundred credits in the machine. So I sit there for another hour until it's all gone, praying for me to lose: "Please God take this money so I can get up and go home." You might ask, "Why didn't you hit the cash out button?" That never occurred to me -- that was not an option.
I don't think the importance of the monetary payout is particularly clear-cut. The payin is what does the financial damage, by moving money out of the player's control. The incentives and reinforcement are what get the player hooked -- but perhaps those don't have to be financial? I won't discount the importance of the payout entirely; maybe it's critical to get hooked in the first place? But I also wouldn't be surprised if gambling addiction can arise in games which don't provide to ability to cash out.
The actual bug is that some humans get a tremendously powerful positive reinforcement for success in their brain, no matter what form the "success" takes and they're addicted to that feeling. You're thinking it's about money, but money is just one possible form of success. Winning at a video game is also success.
These people were very useful two thousand years ago, because you can set "Find out what's on the other side of that dangerous mountain pass" as the success criteria. They were somewhat useful a hundred years ago, though there were fewer opportunities, in 1923 nobody had gone to space, but they had gone to the South Pole (although only fairly recently, and one group all died on the way back because their strategy was bad and they got unlucky). Such people are not needed in anywhere near the volume they're available today. So they're going to get addicted to things with success - e.g. video games, and we should try to ensure that the game publishers don't exploit them too much, just as we prevent gambling firms from exploiting this same defect.
A cynical part of me wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers was actually that it could run around this problem and provide a more direct way to allow monetary payouts without running into issues with regulations on gambling.
This isn't really true for any games that I'm aware of. Some games allow you to sell the skins for money (CS:GO), and for the rest you can sell the account. It's likely against ToS, but unlikely to be enforced. People selling WoW accounts with high-level characters and top-end equipment has existed since I can remember.
> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more.
That's just someone rationalizing an addiction. It's probably a better rationalization than the people making in-game purchases they can't afford have, but both groups would almost have to be addicted first to even tell themselves something like that.
I don't believe a rational person without an addiction would gamble with their rent money. I definitely don't believe that they could then be convinced the best way to get out of the hole is to keep doing the thing that got them into the hole in the first place.
Once someone has gotten to that point, the money doesn't matter. They'll gamble with money they don't have, and they won't stop if they somehow manage to win enough to break even. It doesn't matter whether they're up or down, the answer is always gambling.
Anyone who has passed a middle school math class knows that gambling is as much of a money pit as in-game purchases, there's just more steps involved. The house always wins, after all.
Money is a specific representation of the 'want' that drives gambling. That the outcome is getting more money or more some other representation does not matter. All that matters to the human brain is that the 'want' is satisfied.
Gambling becomes a problem when a person is willing to spend a harmful amount of 'input': usually time and/or money. This is either due to a personality flaw or due to manipulation of people into believing that the odds are in their favor, making them increase their input.
There is only not a problem when either of the following conditions is met:
- The 'input' is not at risk of damaging anyone.
- The chance of obtaining the 'want' does not modify the 'input' to become harmful.
- The 'want' is not interesting to anyone.
I think this point is missing the evolution of virtual clout. As a thirty year old I can agree with your point that these rewards are valueless - but I can also see the younger generation that measures social value through virtual presence where skins and appearance can be vital to self esteem. I don't think it's correct to downplay the value that some people see in the reward of these loot boxes and other chance games.
If you align your identity with your virtual presence then failing to keep up appearances can be extremely dire - that's incredibly unhealthy, but it's the way a fair number of folks operate.
But the argument here is that game devs are clearly exploiting behaviors of addiction for their monetary gain, at the expense of the addicts bank account. I think the takeaway is that it doesn't even require potential monetary gain to trap people with addictive behaviors.
I do see what you're saying, I just think you are misunderstanding addiction, it isn't logical in the first place. Gamblers do know the house wins, they still gamble. People know they shouldn't spend all their money online shopping but they do etc.
Plenty of retirees flock to casinos as soon as their Social Security check clears, then spend it all and go home without selling their grandchildren into sex trafficking. There is a difference between poor people and gambling addicts. A subset of all gamblers (addicts) struggle with rationality and will reach for someone else's wallet when theirs is empty-- and eventually find themselves encased in concrete at the bottom of what's left of Lake Mead. They would do this to obtain more heroin or meth just the same.
You're describing a worst-case scenario. Most gamblers are just poor people, who are poor because they make poor choices with money (like spending it at casinos). The type who trade in functional cars and finance a new truck every time they get a raise, or buy new appliances that cost exactly as much as their tax refund check. Money burns a hole in their pocket, but they don't become the neighborhood firebug. Ironically winning the lottery usually ruins the lives of them and everyone connected to them, since their spending scales linearly with available resources. They're just cows that consume until nothing is left, then they switch from pleasure-seeking to subsistence. They're not intelligent, but they are rational.
Kids don't have vaults full of money, and they have no equity worth loan-sharking for. Their rationality is up for debate, but there's no money to be made in kneecapping or drowning child debtors. What they do have is a surplus of attention. So you keep them engaged through all means available and milk them for quarters as long as you can. Dopamine derived from playing the game is the payout children get. Casino "games" are fucking lame beyond all comprehension, so casinos have to give adults some incentive to play the push-this-button-and-leave-nothing-to-your-children game.
To me, I don't see the situation being any different than traditional arcade machines (some games had owner-adjustable difficulty settings, and I swear some games outright cheated), and yet the current state of things feels more exploitative. Maybe it's the RNG-dependence and not skill...at least you could earn extended time and rewards if you were good at the game. Everything is gacha-crap these days.
I've always been amused that the Spice channel and the like were 100% scrambled by default. Seems like they could have done way better showing the non-explicit parts of movies/shows as a "free sample," then only scrambling the signal with a quick-activation hotline overlay the second the sexy parts start.
On the one hand, a lot of the specific loopholes that games claim come directly out of the results of the Pinball Prohibition and contest laws (can't win cash back, must have winning odds posted but it can be in the fine print, things like that) so it is unlikely to repeat exactly like it happened before. But on the other hand, some of what is going on with current whales is so blatant that some have been famously referred to gambling addiction counseling and we do seem close to that political brink that "somebody must do something" and if it happens as the wrong sort of mob mentality panic, politicians are just as likely to use a sledgehammer to the entire industry than a scalpel to the worst offenders just like the Pinball Prohibition.
(I sometimes worry, too, about the role that Steam's Trading Cards and Inventory items play into their Auctions might impact any sort of "videogames are gambling panic". Those systems' interaction with Steam Wallet is even dangerously close to feeling like "cash back" sometimes, though you can't actually cash it out and it is more of a gift card. [Though gift card-based gambling/embezzling is another potential panic of its own.] It's hard not to imagine politicians preferring a sledgehammer when even the largest, most trusted videogame store on personal computers wasn't immune to adding gambling-like elements and making extra money from whales.)
Uh... it's actually very, very common to cash back from Steam. There is a subreddit for CSGO's real money trading[1]. It has 230k subscribers. And it's just a single game, not the whole steam.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensiveTrade/
This is unlikely simply due to the size of the market. Video games are played by >60% of the population and generate more revenue than movies with hundreds of thousands of jobs at stake.
[0] https://www.history.com/news/that-time-america-outlawed-pinb...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate/Grand_Order
some fans have such strong connections to the characters that they'll spend that much. One fan spent $70,000
https://www.destructoid.com/a-look-into-a-dude-who-has-spent...
Contrast that to having a $10 a month Love Nikki habit.
I'm not trying to be snarky or anything. I mean it. It's not a newsworthy number when it comes to modern pay-2-win games.
What's newsworthy today? Let me show you: https://www.mmobomb.com/news/player-spent-3-5-million-lineag...
If you're doubting me, take a look at hobbies like ham radio or cars or golf or whatever really strikes your fancy. The vast majority of hobbies are expensive, they will make your eyes water if you aren't used to throwing wads of money around for fun. Even a gaming computer can run you a few thousand dollars, not to mention the games themselves, and I think gaming is a hobby most of us can relate to.
Another thing I've come to find, from keeping a journal of my own spendings, is that while the total sum might seem ridiculous it's actually nothing unusual when considering the length of time that money was spent over.
To use myself as an example, I've spent somewhere around $12,000 on FGO over a span of about 7 years now. Is $12,000 a huge sum of money? Yes, absolutely. But according to my Excel spreadsheet it's also about $1,700 a year or $140 a month or just under $5 a day averaged out. I spend more than that per month on just costs of living, even just eating out a couple times will cost as much per month. And remember, that's averaged out: I can go for weeks and months without spending anything if the game doesn't interest me.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is, a lot of the anti-video game and anti-gambling crowd have started to sound more like a certain segment of people demanding others shouldn't have fun. It almost sounds like a new spin on "Video games are making violent children!" because that topic has gotten stale.
Is gambling addiction a thing? Yes, and it is unfortunate; some people really do need help from themselves. Irresponsible parents and children who don't know better also inevitably exist, and they too need some safety wheels so they don't trip over too hard.
But responsible adults spending significant sums of money for fun is not and should not be a problem by itself.
I got taken by legend Richard Garriott on a slippery slide of feeling like I was supporting a historic studio, making digital investments, holding onto key digital real estate, and being part of an exclusive gaming club, all while being coerced into 5 payments per month and incessantly repeating the same in game activities for hours per day. It took 8k for me to never trust game developers ever again. I can't even buy battle passes without feeling like a sucker now.
Shame on me for not locking it sooner. Shame on every goddamn company that knows for a fact this is happening—probably a lot—and prefers to keep robbing people rather than do something about it (say, something ethical—like shut down their company). $100 doesn't mean much to me (like, I'm not well-off enough that I don't think a thing of spending $100, but unexpectedly losing that much every now and then has basically zero effect on my life) fortunately, but that could really screw over a lot of people, in a ruin-their-whole-month kind of way ("why do they even have a playstation to begin with if $100 can really mess them up?!" PS4s are pretty cheap, used, or may have been handed-down for free or very cheap from a better-off relative or friend, and have basically the same store and most of the same games—besides, a planned expense is very different from an unplanned one)
but how is this even possible? my parents never gave me direct access to a credit card as a child. eventually I got a debit card to spend my own allowance chore money, but if I blew it all in something dumb that was my own problem. no pizza/movies with friends until I built it back up
I actually think the opposite. Spending $200 as a kid and having nothing to show for it is a lesson you won't forget in a hurry, but not life altering. We should let kids experience the risks and consequences of gambling while they still have a safety net, rather than setting them loose at 18 when it's for real.
Slot machine victims and politics are poorly aligned. Something like 1/11 of the top grossing apps on the App Store are virtual slot machines. Nonetheless the number of active users total across all virtual slot machines globally may number as low as the hundreds of thousands. This is from my experience as a game developer and publisher.
What to do in this scenario: extremely high revenue but few users? As other commenters have said, Apple's deep seeded indifference to gaming has created this beast. Apple Arcade, while generally publishing good games, is a financial and ecosystem failure: there are no breakout hits, and everyone who publishes into Apple Arcade had finished their game before showing it to Apple or had previously successful games, so they didn't help anything come to be that would have come to be already.
There are dozens of commenters here complaining about their kids buying IAP. Personally, I find the assignment of blame for something that pisses you off kind of a moot point. You wouldn't give a fuck if there weren't real money involved, indeed there are maybe even a billion people on this planet playing some kind of free game and having fun. The worst that they are doing is wasting time. But Apple could give you a refund - it is, after all, imaginary, there's no scarcity - but they don't. It's their store. Steam gives refunds. So how about write some angry e-mails to Tim Cook, or run for office.
As a game developer, I would love for virtual slot machines to go away. The law can do that, if not Apple. But nobody can force Apple to take real risks with Apple Arcade, or force users to pay for my game. There is the problem.
> 1.1.4 Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
This is to say, the gaming industry makes games that are a problem for some people but I'd like to see some hard numbers comparing it to gambling before I would say the product is as dangerous as gambling on a population level.
This same pattern is behind a lot (if not all) addictions. It's not just a physical addiction or a dopamine rush, and it's not generally the upside that addicts are addicted to.
I'll assert that dopamine is the actual reinforcement in both cases.
I think China banned popular video game websites during certain hours some months ago? Not sure how that worked out.
That's from a recent article - not sure if it changed since.
https://apnews.com/article/gaming-business-children-00db669d...
Lawmakers are actively pandering to the gambling companies, as the likes of Epic successfully push to make it illegal to have controls on gaming devices under the rubric of "breaking walled gardens" and such.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=46MQ1ZMZ-l4 (0m 55s)
Dead Comment
Reading the article about the addicted woman, she's perfectly aware of what she's doing and she's perfectly aware she's blowing money away on nothing. There's nothing to be regulated. Conscious adults can make their own decisions.
How ridiculous is it for her to ask Zynga to close her account and then still try to log into it later? This isn't a regulatory issue, it's a willpower issue. Might as well regulate how much/what food you can buy so people don't get fat.
The government hates competition. They want to be the only ones that can swindle money out of whales via state lotteries.
They were also designed to replace numbers -- a similar game run by mobsters that took money from the poor. The rates of return of lotteries are much better than the old numbers games.
Of course some states have gotten greedy and have changed the rules to encourage more impulse spending.
When viewed in that light, perhaps even existing gambling regulations don’t go far enough because there are plenty of people who suffer from gambling addiction and even ruin their lives in the process.
As for the people who oppose all of this regulation on the basis of individual freedom (and perhaps don’t care about gambling addicts), here is the issue: externalities. People with severe gambling addiction can do tremendous damage to society as well as enable and enrich organized crime groups. It’s well documented that people with gambling addiction can and do commit thefts and even murders to fuel their addiction.
Now you might also argue that regulation does not prevent gambling addiction but that is only evidence against the current set of regulations, not proof that all regulation is ineffective. Trying to determine the right regulations to minimize the harms of gambling addiction while balancing personal freedoms is the hard part of policy debates.
No, lawmakers are choosing to keep their eyes shut.
Here's your odds for opening a pack of baseball cards: https://www.topps.com/media/pdf/odds/2023ToppsSeries2Odds.pd...
Looks like the rarest insert is 2022 SILVER SLUGGER AWARD WINNERS CARDS PLATINUM at 1 in 1,036,176 packs.
Try to remember this in the future if you ever think, "Why is this thing illegal? That's silly. People should be free to make their own choices!"
Because this kind of reasoning is exactly how that other thing and all its derivatives got banned. Eg drugs and the war on drugs.
Also, those analogies are not half-baked. They're spot on.
The push for legalization isn't about people making their own choices, it's because it's not possible for the government to have this power and not abuse it and harm reduction via regulated production (taking away choices, clearly) and medical supervision.
This argument doesn't apply to video game gambling. Nobody is getting their hit of digital lootboxes from their dealer and the government isn't arresting players for Fortnite possession. You can have all the thrill of random drops without it being tied to your credit card, there are still recovering WoW addicts.
If people en masse suddenly started spending ruinous amounts of money on Yu-Gi-Oh that's a pretty strong case against them. Regulation follows the harm not the principles.
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Dead Comment
For example, your nanny state comment could easily be modified to describe chemical waste dumping.
"What's insane is that some want to replace the irresponsible CEO's and C-suite execs of those workers with a nanny state."
Well fucking hell yes I do, I want the government to have to power to ruin companies if they negligently damaged or destroyed the environment we all share, for profit, stupidity or laziness.
Government regulations are the only reason we the workers have it as good as we do today. 5 day work week, EPA restrictions, etc.
The worst part I see is "water rush" or whatever that is called on farmville. The water is basically the premium currency you only slowly gain if you are playing free. But on that rush time you gain a lot more and it is 6 hours or so. My mom pretty much plays that game for 6 straight hours when that rush is available
I tried hooking her to other hobbies but it doesn't really work. Farmville's claws are hooked too deep on her
Slowly remove the dopamine hits or mistime them to be less effective. Push the player to play and check in less to gain more ("Kittens" has this mechanic - you gain resources faster by being offline).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
That is just so actively evil, it should be criminal.
It’s already beyond fucked up but imagine how infuriating it is for anyone with a clue that does this. If u show the slightest indication that u possess >= 1 functioning brain cell ur done. Eg my max bet at Pointsbet was limited to a couple bucks fairly quickly (my account was literally negative too lol! Altho there were some pretty obvious tells: brand new American account immediately starts exclusively betting obscure stuff like Bulgarian basketball) and similarly at draftkings (tho they were more lenient).
It’s pretty trivial to churn out a 7-12% ROI as side income until it isn’t! I get it but that obviously doesn’t make it any better. It’s so predatory and coupled with how conservative they r about anyone that might win it’s just disgusting
"Hi, we noticed your bank account hasn't been completely drained yet. How can we help you resolve this? And have you considered intermittent fasting?"
The slots players were never satified. They were excited to spend $100 and win $10. Or win many small wins and play it all away since it wasn't real money to them. It was staggering at times to see people in one evening spend $100K casually and could no problems. Others not so much but the majority just dabbled.
I gave up computer gaming before the loot box trend. But I could see its popularity. I went back to school and many 18 - 25 year old guys talked about it constantly. It was very obvious in its popularity.
With slots just like US military training is stimulus response reward. I've been caught up in simple games from their hold a past time a dopamine rush. It's that 3% of people who can't turn it off that get hit the worst.
Which is okay in poker because you win your money from other players.
You don’t have to be “good”. You just have to be better than the next person at the table (and sufficiently better to outrun the house take).
If you're really good at poker, it can be a source of income. You have to be really, really good though.
I recall we had a few good looking people regulars who were in movies or TV or models not sure. One woman had on jeans that cost more than I made in a year. Actual diamonds for the decoration on them. They spent piles of money and on drinks.
It was amazing to see especially in small town Canada with a population of no more than 70,000.
And yes our comps sucked mainly due to laws on free booze or encouraging gambling. The odds/payback are industry standard it's all highly regulated here as other casinos. PAR sheets only allow so much adjustment.
it is also gambling, but it's certainly very achievable to be a profitable poker player with a bit of study & practice
Hold’em (assuming the bets are money, obviously friendly games are possible) is 100% gambling.
> It is definitely a skill/game.
While some regulatory regimes either treat gambling different or not-gambling where a particular criterion for skill involvement is met, that’s not really material outside of consideration of the application of those regulatory regimes.
> It has an element of randomness just like most board games for example, but it's not gambling
Betting money on board games (whether or not you are also playing and betting on yourself), even those with no random element in the game itself (or nothing beyond side/turn-order selection), is gambling, too.
Where there is randomness, even if the game is largely skill-based on its face, playing for real stakes and the selection process it creates will result in games tending to be more dominated by chance than the game structure itself would suggest unless participation is mandatory and matching is random. (Even when there is not randomness in the game on ita face, as random and out-of-game events that effect player performance can’t be eliminated.)
On the one hand this lead me down a quite enjoyable route of (re)discovering single player indie games and retro tutles but on the other hand it also made me avoid most modern, AAA-level games.
My current recommandation would be, if anyone is also looking for tutles like this, Cloudpunk, an athmospheric, indie, simple driving game in a cyberpunk-ish dystopia. The game runs great on Linux w/ Steam.
I liked the game and was looking for exactly that as something to replace post-endgame Death Stranding (I just want to get high, drive around and deliver packages), but did not find Cloudpunk simple-- while it was fun, it was confusing, depressing and unrewarding.
This sounds negative but I can't articulate the "feel" of it any other way-- it's a beautiful-yet-sterile corporate dystopia so soulless (Harry Canyon's cyberpunk future, with none of the edginess and grit), in-game suicide would have been a reward worth grinding for...not because "this game sucks," but because "this character's life sucks." Like living inside Reddit rendered in VRML. As much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't bring myself to care to progress her in that world anymore. Not even Dark Souls made me feel this much despair.
Atmospheric indeed. The descriptions of it being a desktop wallpaper engine are on point.
Spiderman, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War, Horizon are all recent-ish ones that I really liked.
Anything From Software puts out is great too - Elden Ring being the most recent example.
Just avoid anything published by Activision, Ubisoft and EA. (Although you'd be missing out on some titles that are still pretty good amongst the microtransactiony stuff)
Looking at it in light of this discussion, it would have been way too easy to include microtransacations. Make it a little harder, make the elements you invest into building your character a little more scarce, sell the weapon aspects... It's an absolute blessing really that it didn't happen that way.
We all know how ghastly it is when an adult loses their mind with gambling, but when I realized my nephew (12) is already being strung out by these same mechanics through 'games' on his phone, I felt a sort of despair and psychological darkness descend over me and it's like the world is a little bit less bright, permanently.
Instead of thinking about his bright future now it just seems like a matter of time till he can get dragged down further. And I wonder what percent of kids are getting sucked into it too. Is half a percent too pessimistic? A gambling addiction is inculcated in one out of 200 kids before they're even old enough to work?
And as I'm sure you all can imagine, the desperate pleas and arguments of a kid who needs more 'coins' or whatever have a negative impact on the whole family dynamic. All a parent can do is block the kid from installing new apps on their phone and try to weather the storm of withdrawal, knowing that once they can't protect their child anymore, the kid will also be old enough to do real & permanent damage to their own life.
1. College admissions: There are not enough seats for everyone who wants to go to school at a top college, so colleges filter via things like merit and race, but also random chance lotteries.
2. Applying for jobs is a form of lottery. You typically apply for many jobs and hope one or two get back to you.
3. Savings: The only place normal people have access to get decent returns is the Stock Market Roulette wheel
4. Business Success: Often boils down to right place, right time, and massively overindexes on luck.
5. Housing: Leverage up and buy a house for perpetual asset growth. But watch out for the once-a-decade collapse that will put you underwater and in foreclosure!
It's like we've permanently decided that rewarding risk is the only way for a society to function.
Most Western, democratic countries select jurors for a trial by one’s peers by lottery and I consider this to be an important aspect of having a more “just” justice system – particularly compared to what preceded this system: trial by one’s betters (a magistrate).
In Ireland, we’ve also also recently started using Citizens’ Assemblies who are randomly selected to make recommendations on matters of public policy to the houses of parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Assembly_(Ireland)
1. Which family you were born in
2. Literally the fucking weather
So I don't think modern society is that luck-based, relatively speaking.
6. Shopping: Sales, promotions, and coupons are all designed to induce more frequent and varied consumption. Pricing for the same item can be wildly different depending on the store or the day of the week. Attempting to secure the best price is a gamble even after carefully researching your options and making price comparisons.
As for housing, a collapse in residential real estate values doesn't equate to foreclosure. Lenders can't call in mortgage loans and borrowers have the option to continue paying even if they are underwater.