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> 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

• jchw 3y ago
  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.
  • ianferrel 3y ago
    >there are plenty of under the table ways to sell virtual assets for real money. But are there any games where you can plausibly put real money in and generate excess gains in virtual assets in a short time? You can double your money in a casino in seconds, but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming. I agree with your take on NFTs. They would have been used that way if the NFT games hadn't basically all been Ponzi schemes. Like the pachinko gambling loophole.
    • AussieWog93 3y ago
      >But are there any games where you can plausibly put real money in and generate excess gains in virtual assets in a short time? CS:GO
      • ironick09 3y ago
        Last I checked, you cannot withdraw money from a steam account like you can a checking account. Has this changed?
        • fragmede 3y ago
          Not from steam directly, but there are a number of websites to sell your CSGO skins for real money on.
    • serf 3y ago
      > ...but the only way I know to extract money from video games (even play-to-win video games that milk whales for a lot) is arduous and slow gold-farming. I don't know what to call it, but there were examples like Anshe Chung; those might re-emerge with the upcoming vr-scape/metaverse/whatever-itll-be-called. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung
      • duskwuff 3y ago
        Second Life is hardly a typical video game, though. It's barely a game at all.
    • jamilton 3y ago
      I don't know that this has actually been done for these kind of games, but selling an account in it's entirety would be one way of making an asset somewhat transferable.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Not in the scale for a first world country. You talk about 2nd/3rd world countries and you can argue that account selling is the modern gold rush.
  • jmccaf 3y ago
    The pachinko parlor "special prize" token, with a separate business next door to buy the token for cash, is the analog example of this conversion.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Yeah, pretty much. I don't even think it was that big a secret. any studio running a Games as a Service would love to be a middleman taking in money from their biggest players. Crypto not being bound by any one country's monetary laws helps a lot as well. It's not necessarily so they can get around gambling laws, but that could be one other side effect. Hell, for an NFT game like this you don't even need lootboxes to financnce the game. Just your 90's MMO style grinding and maybe some community functions.
  • ehnto 3y ago
    That's not cynical at all, there is basically no other reason to do it. There were probably some devs who were naive and did it because they thought people wanted it, but it was always about monetizing digital assets.
  • keerthiko 3y ago
    > wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers As a gamedev actively relatively socially involved with other gamedevs, those with any hopes from NFTs were a pretty small minority, and most of the shillers were non-gamedev members of the greater NFT grifting community.
    • account42 3y ago
      https://decrypt.co/99214/square-enix-sells-off-tomb-raider-fund-nft-blockchain-games https://decrypt.co/99214/square-enix-sells-off-tomb-raider-f... > Square Enix Sells Off Tomb Raider and Three Studios to Fund NFT Games Not everyone jumped onto the train but enough did and more would have followed if it was more successful or didn't receive as much pushback.
• jstarfish 3y ago
  > 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.
• skeaker 3y ago
  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).
• everforward 3y ago
  > 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.
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Which is why gambling has traditionally been heavily regulated. Where gaming gets too close to gambling and causes similar harms, it's worth seriously considering limiting that harm through regulation.
• munk-a 3y ago
  > 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.
• c048 3y ago
  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. - The 'want' is not interesting to anyone.
  • robotresearcher 3y ago
    That definition covers collecting model trains or old bottle caps, if the expense is harmful to the collector. And few people would call that gambling.
    • worrycue 3y ago
      There is still a payout in those games - it’s just not money. Sunk cost fallacy still plays a role. Frankly, the addictive part is in the randomness of the payout. What the payout is isn’t particularly important. The fact that games don’t payout money could be seen as worse - you have zero chance of recovering your expenditure.
      • robotresearcher 3y ago
        Yeah, I get it. But buying stuff you want but can't afford is not what anyone else means by 'gambling'. Compulsively spending your mortgage payment on model trains, heroin, or hookers is harmful addictive behavior. But it's not gambling.
    • c048 3y ago
      It's not gambling because there is no randomness directly between an input and output (and subsequential outputs). Unless you want to argue that the lack of clear resolution of an item as chance (be it either due to lack of knowledge or testability). For all intents and purposes it will be considered a direct purchase, and is also why microtransactions are an entirely different 'problem' from online gambling.
• ecdavis 3y ago
  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.
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    If you reject the necessity of a monetary payout then near to all modern tech becomes gambling. Maximizing "engagement" has always been little more than a euphemism for addiction after all. And social media "engagement" is certainly destroying far more lives than gambling, not only in raw numbers but also as a percent of its users. So many people claim to be unhappy or at least dissatisfied with social media, yet continue to spend hours per day on it, chasing those highly exploitative little dopamine rushes that drive addiction to it. And of course it regularly gets much darker than just wasting vast amounts of time. Even in a casino the overwhelming majority of people will at least tell you they're having fun. And in video games the overwhelming majority of people will not only be having fun with what they're playing, but also spending next to nothing on it.
• tialaramex 3y ago
  > 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.
  • yayitswei 3y ago
    Such people now become entrepreneurs, with the same types of rewards and addictions.
    • red-iron-pine 3y ago
      nah the startup entrepreneur type prefer coke to fleeting moments of success
• ehnto 3y ago
  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.
• DragonStrength 3y ago
  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!
• lobocinza 3y ago
  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.