8 ms·

Gambling seems to have become absolutely rampant in the last 10 years. Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an in

Gambling seems to have become absolutely rampant in the last 10 years. Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an increasing number of unregulated gambling services as well it's crazy how widespread it is now. I don't know what to make of it. As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything. It is a form entertainment, but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies. It can also be extremely exploitative. The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive and there's a whole industry around innovating new ways to make gambling more appealing and profitable.

api 4y ago
The mobile revolution seems like a major factor in a lot of this. People have this little portable device that seems oddly addictive in and of itself and the perfect gateway to wider worlds of pointless addiction. It's like mobile devices are digital cigarettes.
p1necone 4y ago
The gaming industry seems to have been moving away from loot boxes recently. Overwatch and Call of Duty have both stopped using them (replaced with a battle pass subscription with fixed rewards). TBH I think it's kind of a shame because I never had a problem with this sort of thing for cosmetic only rewards. It's fun to crack them open and see what you get and it doesn't give you any sort of advantage over other players because it's all cosmetic. Mobile games where the lootboxes contain stuff you actually need to progress in the game (and often require you to spend hundreds or thousands to get to the upper tiers of power/content) are a whole different story but thankfully that doesn't seem to have corrupted the PC/Console gaming space yet. Are there any big AAA PC/Console games that still use these mechanics? Fifa/Madden I'm assuming but I'm also out of the loop and haven't played a Fifa game since like 2018.
- vogt 4y ago
  The gaming industry has moved away primarily because legislation has been getting passed in countries like Japan and China forbidding lootboxes in games. It's been a hot topic off and on in Congress and Parliaments around the world for a few years now and I assume game developers are (of course) skittish about it. To your point about cosmetic-only though, that still exists. Rocket League, which I play regularly, gives out boxes you open and get a random cosmetic with varying degrees of rarity. You can get a net larger amount of these cosmetic boxes by paying for the Rocket Pass premium (something like $10 a season). But the loot boxes only ever contain skins, wheels, etc.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    The Overwatch lootboxes were purely cosmetic too. The Call of Duty ones weren't. The new CoD battle pass isn't entirely cosmetic either, but the worst it does is give you faster access to weapons that you could have unlocked through regular gameplay for free.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    There's still no law for lootboxes in Japan (but have some regulation by industry) so many gacha games still being released. Discussion at congress is minor AFAIK. I suspect that China also haven't completely forbid lootboxes at least, since they also still operate such games. (But anyway China strictly manages releasing games)
    - b4je7d7wb 4y ago
      Netherlands is perhaps the furthest in the process. I think at least lost ark is not available in steam for dutch users.
      - l3uwin 4y ago
        You know you went too far when the dutch are looking at you thinking 'hmm that's too much gambling' from their boat casino And they're correct lmao
      - braymundo 4y ago
        Correct. Diablo Immortal was not even launched here because of this.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Why isn't it, and the atrocious conduct of pat to win games a bigger deal here? Chest china has more sense and integrity than our government
- vikingerik 4y ago
  Well, there's the online-CCG industry. Magic and Hearthstone and the others are all lootbox, with varying allowances of being able to grind it in the free tier.
  - kriro 4y ago
    I can only speak for MTG Arena. Been playing it 100% for free since a bit before DMU came out. I play pretty much the number of games that give me stuff, often 4 wins/day because I don't have time to play more. Mythic in Standard is possible (played cheap monoblue last season to diamond 1, mono black now almost mythic) and having some fun drafting. 0% need to invest any money. Obvioulsy I won't have all the stuff but that's fine. I'm ok with identifying one deck I like to play for standard and then just drafting until coins/gems run out (ideally never because the winrate is good enough). I also don't care at all about cosmetics and was happy to see there's even an option to turn them sort of off (hide alternate card styles). I still got quite a lot of free cosmetics as well. It is however interesting that they do have a pretty good value "first buy" option. I was always curious if it is priced so cheaply to get people from a "I'm a free player mindset" to...well payed once, might as well buy more now (+the friction of setting up payment is gone). I'm an avid board gamer and I can say very confidently that I would never get into any paper based CCG because the pricing/collection is just ridiculous to me. If it wasn't for the free to play online veryion, I wouldn't play magic (I did buy some of the stuff back in the college days but quickly realized what a money sink this would be). I do/did collected some LCGs and still rank Android Netrunner as one of the best gaming experiences in my life.
- prawn 4y ago
  I have a problem with the cosmetic stuff also as it's especially sticky for younger players. My son plays Fortnite and I think a lot about the variety of games I played while growing up, while a huge share of his gaming is the story-lite and constantly restyling Fortnite. I admire the strategy and the creativity that goes into reinventing it, but I also wonder if this will mean he misses both the diversity and also story-heavy classics from my childhood and onwards. All while chasing gold guns and dance moves.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    The addiction to things like Fortnite is stronger than any addiction I've ever seen - and I mean this as a casino owner who watched and often banned people struggling with gambling addiction. It's of a different quality and on another level. Your blackjack addict is essentially a fully grown human who has transmuted his sense of rejection into a wish to lose on cards and thus gain a sense of release, or absolution, having been rejected one more time by the gods of fate. A Fortnite addict is on the make and believes in some ephemeral salvation that might be experienced by temporary success. The former knows when to quit, or at least is encouraged to do so. The latter has hope. The nastiest thing about gambling marketing is selling hope... it should be banned. Yet somehow when you can't win anything at all, it's fine to sell it.
    - prawn 4y ago
      One thing that doesn't help is that Fortnite is 'juiced' beyond almost anything ever before it. So if you try to pitch your kids trying a different game (say, with a clever mechanic or thought-provoking story), it is harder for that game to compete.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - p1necone 4y ago
        Eh, I don't think arguing that really good animation/sound/art design being a bad thing somehow is a line of reasoning that results in sensible outcomes. Be wary of predatory monetization techniques yes, but a bunch of people playing Fortnite because it's a fun, well designed game is not a bad thing. (I deleted a comment where I worded the same thing much less eloquently. I'll keep the incredulous hostility to the one comment in this thread)
- leetcrew 4y ago
  doesn't fit the AAA definition, but counterstrike is very popular and has a f2p + cosmetic-only items for purchase. I can see how the mechanics around lootboxes specifically can be problematic, but overall, f2p + paid skins seems like a pretty good business model for a game. no one is priced out of the base game, which is a) just nice in general, and b) leads to a healthy playerbase size. the people that care the most end up funding the ongoing support, and the developer is incentivized to make the base game enjoyable enough to be worth purchasing skins for.
  - girvo 4y ago
    CS:GO is a bad example with the Valve-ignored gambling that exists for it, due to the skins having real world monetary tradable value.
thatguy0900 4y ago
Gambling has always been extremely widespread https://www.casino.org/blog/medieval-gambling/ https://www.casino.org/blog/medieval-gambling/ https://historycollection.com/the-intriguing-past-times-of-peasants-in-the-middle-ages/16/ https://historycollection.com/the-intriguing-past-times-of-p... that's why so many laws have been made around it. The lottery and scratch off scene in the US has always been insane
paulgb 4y ago
One thing about gambling on real-world events (as opposed to dice rolls) is that it puts a price on overconfidence. I was into political betting for a while and found that the more avid amateur bettors usually have a better grasp of the near future than professional pundits do. I'm not sure if the same is true in sports betting, but it wouldn't surprise me.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  Bettors have the financial incentive to consider all possibilities as objectively as possible. Pundits have the financial incentive to become memorable caricatures.
trifurcate 4y ago
From a 30,000 foot view, one begins to see interconnectedness when you look at the shift in other dopamine mediated processes in modern society (social media, attention spans, sexual behavior, drug use, etc.) I view modern forms of gambling through the same lens.
sokoloff 4y ago
> The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive Some of the worst odds are offered by state-run lotteries and it's got nothing to do with information imbalance. People literally line up to play MegaMillions/Powerball and all the information is readily available.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  The decline of meritocracy makes the lottery a rational last-ditch source of hope for the impoverished working class. Without hope, they die. See: deaths of despair. The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it.
  - ur-whale 4y ago
    >The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it. Holier-than-thou much?
- usrusr 4y ago
  You write as if you'd consider that a bug, but it's a feature: those lotteries exist to give citizens an outlet for their gambling desires that openly admits that participating is a bad idea. Gambling is a problem not because of the (usually tiny) cut of the house, it's a problem because it distracts addicts from seeking more productive solutions and because of the diminishing returns of money in terms of happiness. State run (or endorsed) lotteries are a damage mitigation strategy that has bad odds by design and they used to serve us pretty well, before sports betting somehow snuck in and took over (same thing happened in multiple European countries)
- PubliusMI 4y ago
- frumper 4y ago
  The odd's are stupidly long, but they aren't lining up to play when the prize is $50m. They're lining up to play when it's $1B+. $2 for a ticket and a chance to become a billionaire.
kingTug 4y ago
For the half of working Americans who earn < $35k/yr, gambling and lotteries and such appear to be the only way to have a shot at a dignified retirement. Like so many problems, I think it can mostly be explained by stagnant wages and gargantuan, historic levels of wealth inequality.
- keithalewis 4y ago
  You are on to something. Dignified retirement used to mean a pension for years of hard work. We now live in a world of charlatans, and people who allow themselves to be taken advantage of. Paging P. T. Barnum. P. T. Barnum to the sucker born every minute phone.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    We also live in a world devoid of conventional wisdom. My grandparents learned that gambling was at best entertainment, they also learned to scrimp and save. My peers don’t learn this, they depend on regulation to protect them against everything, and when there isn’t regulation, they racked up six figures of student loan debt (financing a party lifestyle) and they gamble as a financial strategy. The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
    - michaelscott 4y ago
      Well our grandparents lived in a world (if they were in a first world country) where working a normal job with a stay-at-home mom was enough for a comfortable retirement. This made gambling, at best, the entertainment it was viewed as. In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope
noduerme 4y ago
>> As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything This is true. And as you say, it can be exploitive. But the same could be said ten times over for casual "click" games that take money for useless tokens, or AAA games that take money to buy mods, or even socal media sites that use deep/dark pattern UX methods developed originally by casinos to monetize every second of user interaction - none of which even have the possibility of returning some of the money or money-for-time spent by the user. With that - 100% theft - as the modern paradigm, a game of chance or skill with a 95% ROI, and provable stats of winning or losing, regardless of how manipulative its marketing may be, is somehow more noble than selling someone useless tokens or virtual goods, in my opinion. As long as they're adults and know what they're signing on for, let's stop treating people like children. But people who buy virtual goods shouldn't be allowed to play blackjack, IMHO. They're not capable of making financial decisions with their own money. Call me old school but I grew up in Vegas and never believed in offering a wheel of fortune where no one could win, or a game where someone didn't fully understand their risks and chances.
- kriro 4y ago
  I don't fully agree. I do think it's a pretty bad and predatory industry but there's a tiny bit of value. It does provide good estimators of probabilities of real world events. Like if someone would ask me how likely it is that team X will win the world cup I'd look up the betting odds. In general, if there's a betting market for something I'd always use the odds as placeholder until I can come up with a better estimate (which quite frankly seems unlikely). If I were to build an ML model that tries to predict something with a betting market that would be the baseline I'd measure against for example.
wnoise 4y ago
Good list, but you forgot the stock market (and derivatives!).
dfxm12 4y ago
It can also be extremely exploitative. This, along with the ubiquity, is the big problem. It's bad enough if you have to go to a physical sports book in a certain state. It's downright exploitative when you're watching a game & you see an ad egging you on to bet, oh and by the way, here's also how to bet with just a few pokes on your phone. Sometimes you can even gamble on credit!
glangenderfer 4y ago
poker, a game of chance, gave me a reason to learn about probability and eventually coding. Gambling and games of chance are an incredible outlet to learn these valuable skills.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
It produces the ilusion of escape from hopeless circumstances. Stuck in a dead end job. Gamble. Alimoney and no way out. Gamble. Stuck in a dictatorship which can crush your life for arbitrary reasons every day. Gamble Its a valve for deeply dysfunctional societies. A faked flame of hope for hopeless situations.
- frankzander 4y ago
  Well said, Well said!
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  And funny how the rise of online gambling - at least in NJ and PA, came just in time for Covid lockdowns.
  - vageli 4y ago
    NJ legalized online gambling a decade ago and Nevada's monopoly on sports betting was dissolved in 2018.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      But there was a massive advert push once PA did. The PHL sports radio talks more betting than sports. With, of course, the occasional "need help?" disclaimer.
- SteveDR 4y ago
  I don’t think gambling is any more escapist than movies, TV, podcasts, games, books, or literally any other form of entertainment. Entertainment is escapism.
  - deminature 4y ago
    Those other forms of entertainment don't have nearly the destructive potential on a person's life and finances that gambling can have. A movie is a $5 one-time purchase, gambling is an endless recurring purchase that may not stop until the person is bankrupt, if they have addictive tendencies.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an increasing number of unregulated gambling services as wel Except online gambling pretty much all of these "technologies" are just "gambling with plausible deniability so that the people who like to look down their nose at the old lady playing slots can engage in it without feeling like a hypocrite. It's kind like the gambling equivalent of how people who look down their nose at cheap school cafeteria type chicken patties that have plant based filler will happily buy a partially soy chicken patty that costs 5x as much if you market it correctly.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
It's a very lucrative one for government (i.e., tax revenue), and at least for me, any company serving ads. Take away the gambling ads and the pharma ads and there wouldn't be much left. There's next to no incentive for traditional safe guards to safe guard. I'm not suggesting it go bqck to being illegal, only that the ad impressions be limited.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
> but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies Doesn't have to be. I gamble on the NFL weekly and in the last 5 years have never lost more than $20 a year, less than the cost of a movie near me somehow.

api 4y ago

The mobile revolution seems like a major factor in a lot of this. People have this little portable device that seems oddly addictive in and of itself and the perfect gateway to wider worlds of pointless addiction. It's like mobile devices are digital cigarettes.

p1necone 4y ago

The gaming industry seems to have been moving away from loot boxes recently. Overwatch and Call of Duty have both stopped using them (replaced with a battle pass subscription with fixed rewards). TBH I think it's kind of a shame because I never had a problem with this sort of thing for cosmetic only rewards. It's fun to crack them open and see what you get and it doesn't give you any sort of advantage over other players because it's all cosmetic. Mobile games where the lootboxes contain stuff you actually need to progress in the game (and often require you to spend hundreds or thousands to get to the upper tiers of power/content) are a whole different story but thankfully that doesn't seem to have corrupted the PC/Console gaming space yet. Are there any big AAA PC/Console games that still use these mechanics? Fifa/Madden I'm assuming but I'm also out of the loop and haven't played a Fifa game since like 2018.

vogt 4y ago
The gaming industry has moved away primarily because legislation has been getting passed in countries like Japan and China forbidding lootboxes in games. It's been a hot topic off and on in Congress and Parliaments around the world for a few years now and I assume game developers are (of course) skittish about it. To your point about cosmetic-only though, that still exists. Rocket League, which I play regularly, gives out boxes you open and get a random cosmetic with varying degrees of rarity. You can get a net larger amount of these cosmetic boxes by paying for the Rocket Pass premium (something like $10 a season). But the loot boxes only ever contain skins, wheels, etc.
- p1necone 4y ago
  The Overwatch lootboxes were purely cosmetic too. The Call of Duty ones weren't. The new CoD battle pass isn't entirely cosmetic either, but the worst it does is give you faster access to weapons that you could have unlocked through regular gameplay for free.
- fomine3 4y ago
  There's still no law for lootboxes in Japan (but have some regulation by industry) so many gacha games still being released. Discussion at congress is minor AFAIK. I suspect that China also haven't completely forbid lootboxes at least, since they also still operate such games. (But anyway China strictly manages releasing games)
  - b4je7d7wb 4y ago
    Netherlands is perhaps the furthest in the process. I think at least lost ark is not available in steam for dutch users.
    - l3uwin 4y ago
      You know you went too far when the dutch are looking at you thinking 'hmm that's too much gambling' from their boat casino And they're correct lmao
    - braymundo 4y ago
      Correct. Diablo Immortal was not even launched here because of this.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Why isn't it, and the atrocious conduct of pat to win games a bigger deal here? Chest china has more sense and integrity than our government
vikingerik 4y ago
Well, there's the online-CCG industry. Magic and Hearthstone and the others are all lootbox, with varying allowances of being able to grind it in the free tier.
- kriro 4y ago
  I can only speak for MTG Arena. Been playing it 100% for free since a bit before DMU came out. I play pretty much the number of games that give me stuff, often 4 wins/day because I don't have time to play more. Mythic in Standard is possible (played cheap monoblue last season to diamond 1, mono black now almost mythic) and having some fun drafting. 0% need to invest any money. Obvioulsy I won't have all the stuff but that's fine. I'm ok with identifying one deck I like to play for standard and then just drafting until coins/gems run out (ideally never because the winrate is good enough). I also don't care at all about cosmetics and was happy to see there's even an option to turn them sort of off (hide alternate card styles). I still got quite a lot of free cosmetics as well. It is however interesting that they do have a pretty good value "first buy" option. I was always curious if it is priced so cheaply to get people from a "I'm a free player mindset" to...well payed once, might as well buy more now (+the friction of setting up payment is gone). I'm an avid board gamer and I can say very confidently that I would never get into any paper based CCG because the pricing/collection is just ridiculous to me. If it wasn't for the free to play online veryion, I wouldn't play magic (I did buy some of the stuff back in the college days but quickly realized what a money sink this would be). I do/did collected some LCGs and still rank Android Netrunner as one of the best gaming experiences in my life.
prawn 4y ago
I have a problem with the cosmetic stuff also as it's especially sticky for younger players. My son plays Fortnite and I think a lot about the variety of games I played while growing up, while a huge share of his gaming is the story-lite and constantly restyling Fortnite. I admire the strategy and the creativity that goes into reinventing it, but I also wonder if this will mean he misses both the diversity and also story-heavy classics from my childhood and onwards. All while chasing gold guns and dance moves.
- noduerme 4y ago
  The addiction to things like Fortnite is stronger than any addiction I've ever seen - and I mean this as a casino owner who watched and often banned people struggling with gambling addiction. It's of a different quality and on another level. Your blackjack addict is essentially a fully grown human who has transmuted his sense of rejection into a wish to lose on cards and thus gain a sense of release, or absolution, having been rejected one more time by the gods of fate. A Fortnite addict is on the make and believes in some ephemeral salvation that might be experienced by temporary success. The former knows when to quit, or at least is encouraged to do so. The latter has hope. The nastiest thing about gambling marketing is selling hope... it should be banned. Yet somehow when you can't win anything at all, it's fine to sell it.
  - prawn 4y ago
    One thing that doesn't help is that Fortnite is 'juiced' beyond almost anything ever before it. So if you try to pitch your kids trying a different game (say, with a clever mechanic or thought-provoking story), it is harder for that game to compete.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - p1necone 4y ago
      Eh, I don't think arguing that really good animation/sound/art design being a bad thing somehow is a line of reasoning that results in sensible outcomes. Be wary of predatory monetization techniques yes, but a bunch of people playing Fortnite because it's a fun, well designed game is not a bad thing. (I deleted a comment where I worded the same thing much less eloquently. I'll keep the incredulous hostility to the one comment in this thread)
leetcrew 4y ago
doesn't fit the AAA definition, but counterstrike is very popular and has a f2p + cosmetic-only items for purchase. I can see how the mechanics around lootboxes specifically can be problematic, but overall, f2p + paid skins seems like a pretty good business model for a game. no one is priced out of the base game, which is a) just nice in general, and b) leads to a healthy playerbase size. the people that care the most end up funding the ongoing support, and the developer is incentivized to make the base game enjoyable enough to be worth purchasing skins for.
- girvo 4y ago
  CS:GO is a bad example with the Valve-ignored gambling that exists for it, due to the skins having real world monetary tradable value.

thatguy0900 4y ago

Gambling has always been extremely widespread https://www.casino.org/blog/medieval-gambling/ https://www.casino.org/blog/medieval-gambling/ https://historycollection.com/the-intriguing-past-times-of-peasants-in-the-middle-ages/16/ https://historycollection.com/the-intriguing-past-times-of-p... that's why so many laws have been made around it. The lottery and scratch off scene in the US has always been insane

paulgb 4y ago

One thing about gambling on real-world events (as opposed to dice rolls) is that it puts a price on overconfidence. I was into political betting for a while and found that the more avid amateur bettors usually have a better grasp of the near future than professional pundits do. I'm not sure if the same is true in sports betting, but it wouldn't surprise me.

BobbyJo 4y ago
Bettors have the financial incentive to consider all possibilities as objectively as possible. Pundits have the financial incentive to become memorable caricatures.

trifurcate 4y ago

From a 30,000 foot view, one begins to see interconnectedness when you look at the shift in other dopamine mediated processes in modern society (social media, attention spans, sexual behavior, drug use, etc.) I view modern forms of gambling through the same lens.

sokoloff 4y ago

> The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive Some of the worst odds are offered by state-run lotteries and it's got nothing to do with information imbalance. People literally line up to play MegaMillions/Powerball and all the information is readily available.

nopenopenopeno 4y ago
The decline of meritocracy makes the lottery a rational last-ditch source of hope for the impoverished working class. Without hope, they die. See: deaths of despair. The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it.
- ur-whale 4y ago
  >The apologists for this sort of thing are every bit as disgusting as those presiding over it. Holier-than-thou much?
usrusr 4y ago
You write as if you'd consider that a bug, but it's a feature: those lotteries exist to give citizens an outlet for their gambling desires that openly admits that participating is a bad idea. Gambling is a problem not because of the (usually tiny) cut of the house, it's a problem because it distracts addicts from seeking more productive solutions and because of the diminishing returns of money in terms of happiness. State run (or endorsed) lotteries are a damage mitigation strategy that has bad odds by design and they used to serve us pretty well, before sports betting somehow snuck in and took over (same thing happened in multiple European countries)
PubliusMI 4y ago
frumper 4y ago
The odd's are stupidly long, but they aren't lining up to play when the prize is $50m. They're lining up to play when it's $1B+. $2 for a ticket and a chance to become a billionaire.

kingTug 4y ago

For the half of working Americans who earn < $35k/yr, gambling and lotteries and such appear to be the only way to have a shot at a dignified retirement. Like so many problems, I think it can mostly be explained by stagnant wages and gargantuan, historic levels of wealth inequality.

keithalewis 4y ago
You are on to something. Dignified retirement used to mean a pension for years of hard work. We now live in a world of charlatans, and people who allow themselves to be taken advantage of. Paging P. T. Barnum. P. T. Barnum to the sucker born every minute phone.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  We also live in a world devoid of conventional wisdom. My grandparents learned that gambling was at best entertainment, they also learned to scrimp and save. My peers don’t learn this, they depend on regulation to protect them against everything, and when there isn’t regulation, they racked up six figures of student loan debt (financing a party lifestyle) and they gamble as a financial strategy. The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
  - michaelscott 4y ago
    Well our grandparents lived in a world (if they were in a first world country) where working a normal job with a stay-at-home mom was enough for a comfortable retirement. This made gambling, at best, the entertainment it was viewed as. In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope

noduerme 4y ago

>> As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything This is true. And as you say, it can be exploitive. But the same could be said ten times over for casual "click" games that take money for useless tokens, or AAA games that take money to buy mods, or even socal media sites that use deep/dark pattern UX methods developed originally by casinos to monetize every second of user interaction - none of which even have the possibility of returning some of the money or money-for-time spent by the user. With that - 100% theft - as the modern paradigm, a game of chance or skill with a 95% ROI, and provable stats of winning or losing, regardless of how manipulative its marketing may be, is somehow more noble than selling someone useless tokens or virtual goods, in my opinion. As long as they're adults and know what they're signing on for, let's stop treating people like children. But people who buy virtual goods shouldn't be allowed to play blackjack, IMHO. They're not capable of making financial decisions with their own money. Call me old school but I grew up in Vegas and never believed in offering a wheel of fortune where no one could win, or a game where someone didn't fully understand their risks and chances.

kriro 4y ago
I don't fully agree. I do think it's a pretty bad and predatory industry but there's a tiny bit of value. It does provide good estimators of probabilities of real world events. Like if someone would ask me how likely it is that team X will win the world cup I'd look up the betting odds. In general, if there's a betting market for something I'd always use the odds as placeholder until I can come up with a better estimate (which quite frankly seems unlikely). If I were to build an ML model that tries to predict something with a betting market that would be the baseline I'd measure against for example.

wnoise 4y ago

Good list, but you forgot the stock market (and derivatives!).

dfxm12 4y ago

It can also be extremely exploitative. This, along with the ubiquity, is the big problem. It's bad enough if you have to go to a physical sports book in a certain state. It's downright exploitative when you're watching a game & you see an ad egging you on to bet, oh and by the way, here's also how to bet with just a few pokes on your phone. Sometimes you can even gamble on credit!

glangenderfer 4y ago

poker, a game of chance, gave me a reason to learn about probability and eventually coding. Gambling and games of chance are an incredible outlet to learn these valuable skills.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

It produces the ilusion of escape from hopeless circumstances. Stuck in a dead end job. Gamble. Alimoney and no way out. Gamble. Stuck in a dictatorship which can crush your life for arbitrary reasons every day. Gamble Its a valve for deeply dysfunctional societies. A faked flame of hope for hopeless situations.

frankzander 4y ago
Well said, Well said!
chiefalchemist 4y ago
And funny how the rise of online gambling - at least in NJ and PA, came just in time for Covid lockdowns.
- vageli 4y ago
  NJ legalized online gambling a decade ago and Nevada's monopoly on sports betting was dissolved in 2018.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    But there was a massive advert push once PA did. The PHL sports radio talks more betting than sports. With, of course, the occasional "need help?" disclaimer.
SteveDR 4y ago
I don’t think gambling is any more escapist than movies, TV, podcasts, games, books, or literally any other form of entertainment. Entertainment is escapism.
- deminature 4y ago
  Those other forms of entertainment don't have nearly the destructive potential on a person's life and finances that gambling can have. A movie is a $5 one-time purchase, gambling is an endless recurring purchase that may not stop until the person is bankrupt, if they have addictive tendencies.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an increasing number of unregulated gambling services as wel Except online gambling pretty much all of these "technologies" are just "gambling with plausible deniability so that the people who like to look down their nose at the old lady playing slots can engage in it without feeling like a hypocrite. It's kind like the gambling equivalent of how people who look down their nose at cheap school cafeteria type chicken patties that have plant based filler will happily buy a partially soy chicken patty that costs 5x as much if you market it correctly.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

It's a very lucrative one for government (i.e., tax revenue), and at least for me, any company serving ads. Take away the gambling ads and the pharma ads and there wouldn't be much left. There's next to no incentive for traditional safe guards to safe guard. I'm not suggesting it go bqck to being illegal, only that the ad impressions be limited.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

> but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies Doesn't have to be. I gamble on the NFL weekly and in the last 5 years have never lost more than $20 a year, less than the cost of a movie near me somehow.