He was very much pro-legalizing online gambling. He had worked for sportsbooks, had done lots of sports betting himself, stuff like that. But has concluded that legalizing online gambling has been a disaster.
> When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.
> It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.
The article makes a compelling argument that online gambling is a lot worse than other forms of gambling.
I have a take on this too. You know how scammers cast a really wide net, hoping to get lucky and find suckers? Well, that's really only part of the story, what actually happens is they get lucky and happen to find people when they are vulnerable. That's how smart people get scammed somewhat randomly.
When online gambling is in your pocket, it is guaranteed to be available when you're vulnerable.
You may be shocked and horrified to learn that two things can be bad at the same time, even if we only talk about one.
GP's comments trend digital because we're talking about digital games. GP is on-topic, you are trying to derail and delegetimize the conversation.
Alcoholic drinks? History of bans like that suggests that it's not a good idea. However that doesn't mean that nothing can be done. Addictions to alcohol, drugs, smoking, gambling damage both the person suffering from them and the friends/loved ones around that person. It is most likely impossible to drive the harm down to 0, but it can be reduced by denormalizing casual alcohol intake and sitations where people are peer pressured into consuming alcohol to fit in (especially in young adults), etc. People addicted to those substances/behaviors need a safe environment, a society that won't prompt them to relapse over and over because everyone around them is a casual user. Those are my thoughts, but I'm no expert.
This said the gambling bullshit is going way too far and has it's own set of consequences in society. Remember, every time you act like an asshole to maximize the amount of money you can rip off of others, you invite an authoritarian takeover when the average person in society gets tired of your bullshit.
For example, you can get married at 16 in the UK, but can't drive until 17 (it's not a priority as we didn't build so many car-dependent hellscapes), and you can buy alcohol at 18 or be given it with a meal by your parents at younger ages, because we didn't have puritans making motorway funding contingent on passing strict drinking laws like the USA did.
Anyway, what I remember from the UK's Gambling Commission giving committee evidence to MPs on this topic is to ask the question: what is gambling? What activities need strict regulation, audit trails, compliance inspectors, etc? Village fête tombolas? Fundraising prize draws? Radio station cash giveaways? Top trumps? Panini sticker albums?
Lootboxes are not slot machines or FOB terminals. If they can't be "cashed out", they are more like collectible card games... which are also IMHO a plague on humanity, but not the same level of destructive activity as gambling for cash. They do need regulation, given how prevalent they are in games popular with teenagers, but need different regulation from casinos.
Games like Fortnite deserve regulation too, weaponised FOMO to keep money rolling in is sketchy.
16 if you're buying wine or beer with a meal, at least in Scotland. This means that when you go to your mate's mum's pub for a pub lunch on a Friday you need to watch out for your teachers also going for a lunchtime pint.
Man, the 80s were wild.
Even if they can't be cashed out officially, there are often other unofficial ways. Like selling the accounts in question.
In this case, if the focus is on the psychological mechanisms that underly gambling (varying rewards) in connection where they are used to compel people to spend vast amounts of money for nothing, I don't see how the question whether or not there could be a monetary payoff is relevant. The psychological mechanism and potential damage is the same.
Anyway, in my estimation the threat of gambling addiction is far higher for teenagers than young children, since teenagers may often have sources of revenue other than their parents, so they can feed a budding gambling addiction longer without supervision, increasing the risk of addiction. 16 year olds don't belong in casinos, nor should they be engaging with loot box gambling.
... are you sure?
16-yo kids might do some amount of part time work, and should at least have enough of a concept of money to understand why pressing the "more loot boxes" button is a Bad Idea. They're also old enough that they might potentially have their own bank account and their own card, which then caps the damages to their allowance.
I strongly believe that this is mostly performative, honestly
By all means game developers deserve to make a living... However, if they're going to operate a casino, they should be treated and licensed as such.
I also think the odds should also be not only disclosed, but made prominent
Typically spelled "gacha", although I have to admit that "gotcha" seems apt.
Having said that, though, when I also combine this news with the attempt to force operating systems into sniffing for my age at all times, I am still totally against this. This kind of over-eager bureaucracy is not good. It reminds me of attempts to prohibit alcohol. Yes, it is not the same, a loot box does not cause physical symptoms really, compared to alcohol or, say, harder drugs - but states seem too eager to want to restrict people. Or monitor them, such as in the case of "age verification". So now this legislation is another basis to support mandatory age sniffing of everyone. So I am completely against it now.
This 'gambling' in games should have been headstompped under the law decades ago, but has instead grown into a huge ravening monster buying every politician it can. Every time you say we can't do anything about said monster you ensure that whatever happens will be extreme.
The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago.
I am right with my late grandfather, a Baptist preacher, on the subject of gambling after watching people back home constantly checking their phones during the college bowl games and periodically sighing and cussing over the performance of teams they had never cared about before.
Between the 24/7 gambling and the easy answers machine being in their pockets (“well, ChatGPT says…”), the resulting brain rot hurts my soul.
I grew up in Italy when sport betting was illegal and you had to do it through illegal channels, and I did it now and then like everyone else, and thought we should totally make it legal.
At some point all betting, slot machines etc.. became legal and it's been a disaster and I'm also totally radicalized against it.
Aggrieved parties can partly get restoration. That way there never is enough political momentum to legiferate them. Try to resell your Fortnite account and they close it.
Pokemon cards have utility within the game of pokemon. They additionally have value in secondary market places which is not strictly tied to the rarity of the item. These markets are not required to exist for the game to function.
Lootboxes, especially for competitive games, do not have any utility within the game and are often cosmetic. Their value is strictly tied to the rarity of the item which the vendor fully artificially controls. Absent the secondary markets the cases would not be purchased and the items ignored.
So you have a choice. You can make pay to win items and publish the probabilities of actually winning them. Or you can have items that can't be traded. Otherwise you're trending very close to widely known regulated activity like gambling.
Whereas gacha games and lootboxes are notorious for unpublished, ridiculously bad odds for "desirable" things with no way to outright purchase them.
Just ripping packs hurts my soul. What a waste.
I think they're right, really.
Obviously you need to require enough friction that the experiences are comparable (e.g. no letting someone impulse buy 100 times in half a second without having to re-type their "I am an adult" payment info or something analogous, possibly just a hard ceiling for everyone), but I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge, and you can't mandate that parents teach their kids how to handle it.
So I think the best you can do is put hard limits on people's ability to hurt themselves without at least an "are you really sure" check, and maybe something like not allowing cash in the exchange without adult verification so the kids might, at worst, gamble their FunBux they earned playing a game and get burned on having lost a lot of FunBux, rather than their or their parents' cash. (This doesn't stop parents from giving their kids their credit card, but that's not really a problem you can solve...)
meanwhile, one of the game that would have been affected by it, Counter-Strike 2, is already rated M by ESRB [1]. it is undergoing a major case in NY as we speak, and there are many professional players, also recognized by the devs, that openly stated they played the game since their early teens. [2]
it does mean that a lot of more suitable games for younger audience, such as the sports title released every year. but a lot of them already have free titles with pay-to-win mechanics. i wonder if the enforcement would really differ any more than it currently is.
I don't think I have ever paid attention to a single age rating in my entire life. Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways?
Very spiritually European move.
What regulators should do is focus on easily applicable percentage-based fines. Make sure it's not just another line item.
You mean when you've selected games for yourself to play? That's... fine.
If you mean when you've selected (or allowed) games for your kids to play, that's... pretty irresponsible.
It's my understanding that lots of parents use these numbers as guidance. I will make my own decisions about what my child can play, but the ratings and all the labels makes it much much easier to make an informed decision.
For the parents that are not into gaming, being able to just go by these numbers is much better than having no such guidance.
> Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways?
Yes. In fact I believe they help breaking down the fundamentalism by making it so clear that gaming is not inherently bad or good for your child. It all depends on the content.
This law in worst case doesn't cause any problems and in best case solve problems. So win-win.
I am not interested in playing hours of videogames to be able to decide. Not in googling through ai-slop and idiotic gamer videos to find out what is in.
edit: I'm pointing out the UK has apparently decided lootboxes are not gambling, because if they did classify it as gambling it'd be covered by existing gambling laws that restrict it to 18+.
Not that I personally hold that opinion, though I can see how I could have phrased my original message better.
It's a stupid decision by the government, they should be 18+ and recognised for being gambling.
Wow, considering how the UK has been going full Taliban on everything why stop at lootboxes? Guess the politicians are getting some money/bribes from the lootbox companies.
How much access to money parents want to give their kids is up to the parents.
What people do with their own money, including kids, is up to the people.
WHY are countries not enacting laws that punish companies for once? Say something like:
• "After 3-5 purchases of the same item with random contents the buyer should get the content they specifically want."
• "No item with random contents should cost more than N $\€"
• "Buyers should have N-M hours to get a refund for an item with random contents"
That way you could keep the "fun" and spirit of gambling without its destructive spiral and stuff
I have kids and as a parent I use these ratings as a very loose guide combined with my own experience and understanding of the game in question. Other parents ignore them completely.
I agree more could be done to directly affect the companies, and there have been a lot of legal cases surrounding loot boxes aimed at children.
But this is a good complement to that. It makes it easier for parents to get aware of the issue.
For instance, by being used in further legislation to mandate age verification on all operating systems. Lo and behold, that is already happening - see California.
One can not view a single law and assume it is isolated, when in reality this is a move by lobbyists to further restrict people and sniff after them (see MidnightBSD giving in and adding a daemon that sniffs for user data; I am 100% certain systemd on Linux will follow suit, via a new systemd-sniffy daemon). Some companies pay good money for such legislation. So the answer to your question is very simple, actually. You just should not view it as an isolated way while ignoring everything else - lobbyists are sneaky. It reminds me of Google claiming it has no problem with ad-blockers, then they went on to destroy ublock origin (https://ublockorigin.com/).
They've already enacted mandatory age-verification-via-ID to use apps/features.
It seems they're gonna put as many "gates/fences" at every N age years to make sure they can surveil as many people in distinct age brackets as possible.
Up next: Be of at least N years to watch cartoons with animated violence?
I agree with some of your other points, though: we should have legally mandated return periods for this sort of thing. Not sure how you'd enshrine price limits into law, though; that seems impractical.
Thinking in childrens' terms:
• Any microtransaction <$1 is fine, up to 10 per week or 20 per month or whatever
• Anything between $1-$10 should be more limited
• Anything $10 or above should be limited to 1 per week
• No microtransaction should cost more than 50% of the game's own full price, if the game isn't free
"Traditional" gambling is already not allowed below 18yo
Age ratings are an aid but still require passing good habits and developing your child’s ability to think and solve this for themselves. So not letting your kids get addicted to in-app purchases sounds like good parenting. Keeping your kids away from tablets and smartphones until they’re 16 is even better parenting.
And if a parent is blindly skipping an age verification screen for their kid without figuring out why that age verification is there in the first place, then they're a bad parent. You can't really fix that, unfortunately, outside of extreme cases.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_waOkwIpWxg [video][18m]
And "learning" about gambling doesn't need to happen at 8 years old. What a fucking delusional view
That's not how I use the term. I think of a loot box as a treasure chest or similar that you discover while exploring which, when opened, gives you some loot!
On the other hand if you're talking about a package with a random assortment of stuff in it that you buy without knowing what's inside, I call that a "grab bag" or "mystery bundle".
Am I too old? What games were primarily responsible for changing the vocabulary?
The model is very strongly associated with the rise of "live service" gaming, with Overwatch and Battlefield being some of the more notorious offenders.
They usually have a very involved opening animation with music and sounds specifically designed to maximize the feeling of anticipation. Once you see it it feels completely different from what you are describing, because it’s so obviously trying to maximize the gambling aspect of it. It’s like confusing genuine love with prostitution.
