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I recently read about a story in my local newspaper (Colchester UK) about someone who stole £13,000 from his girlfriend's phone via her banking app so that he c
by paulbjensen 1y ago
I recently read about a story in my local newspaper (Colchester UK) about someone who stole £13,000 from his girlfriend's phone via her banking app so that he could fund his gambling addiction. He was found guilty of theft and sent to prison.
I wonder if there is any merit in building an app that helps gambling addicts by letting them play the same games that they would play on their phones, with a few caveats:
1 - It's all virtual money, just like a demo account on a stock trading service where you can test it out without real money being involved. You don't use real money, and the app is free to download and play. The goal isn't to make money from the app, it's to help treat gambling addiction.
2 - Where the games would tempt you to place another bet and say "better luck next time?" or "so close" and tempt the player to make another bet, this game would do something different:
- When a player loses on their go, it would say "if you'd staked real money, that would have cost you £2 etc".
- It would also remind you of the total balance, and say "if you'd played for real, then you would be down £200 tonight, but because you played this game instead, you've saved yourself £200."
- When a player wins on their go, it would say "congratulations on winning, that was your first win in the previous 6 go's".
The idea is to change the cognitive behaviour of the player so that a) they get to play a game that they enjoy playing and find addictive to play, but crucially b) they don't lose any money, and because they are shown the reality of what gambling is like from an accounting perspective, their cognitive association with gambling is changed.
It's better to play a fun game for free then to play a game that drains you of all your money.
How is that idea. Good, bad?
- pjc50 1y agoSuch things exist, but for the gambler the crucial thing is the possibility of winning real money. Also apps that don't make money don't pay for advertising themselves. (Compare vs gatcha, which doesn't allow you to cash out. Predictably there's also gatcha simulators if you just want to roll for things meaninglessly)
- PaulHoule 1y ago… when I got a real smartphone I wanted to try Fate/Grand Order because I was a fan of the fanart but when I saw the summon screen it used the same visual language as slot machines and I lost interest.
- plorkyeran 1y agoThe only thing worse than gacha slop is games which manage to be pretty good in spite of being gacha.
- sokoloff 1y agoFor a while, advertising for-money online poker was not legal in some jurisdictions. So “ParadisePoker.com” (a real money site) couldn’t advertise. Free-to-play/play money site paradisepoker.net however somehow found the money to advertise extensively. It was a real mystery…
- hakfoo 1y agoThere are plenty of Facebook/mobile "play casinos" which produce a fair amount of revenue by not refilling the customers' "free chips" fast enough to be fun so people will pay for more. There's also a bunch of fun dark patterns (side currencies, battle pass and leaderboard features, and account evolution you need to play X amount to unlock different games, and once you've played that much you can no longer scale down to very low wagers to make the free tokens last longer.) At least Genshin Impact has a fairly high quality game with some play value attached to the shitty casino.
- dole 1y agoVirtual money doesn't mean anything, gamblers will bet the max knowing they're not losing anything.
- parpfish 1y agoWhat if the app had you drop some amount of your own money into an escrow account, and the. You get it back when you demonstrate “healthy” behavior?
- HK-NC 1y agoSome people just want to piss their money away. I know people that spend hundreds, thousands even on opening magic boxes in games which have "rare" items in them, the games dont even have a marketplace to make the money back.
- paxys 1y agoPlenty of such apps exist. In fact before gambling was legal all apps had to use fake money. And no one used them. Unless you can replicate the rush that comes with winning real cash you aren't really providing an alternative.
- whoisyc 1y agoWhile I am generally against gambling and would like to see more social and legislative action against it, I would advise against forming opinions based on news pieces like the one you mentioned in the beginning of your post, because news has a bias towards reporting only the most extreme events without giving you the full picture of how prevalent (or not) they actually are. If anything news is like a mirror image of gambling. People vastly overestimate how likely they will hit a jackpot the same way they vastly overestimate how likely they will die in a plane crash.
- kelnos 1y agoThat assumes that the addiction is to the game itself, and not to the hope of winning real money. If you take the real money out of it, I expect many people with a gambling problem just won't be interested.