5 ms·

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that rea

by adrr 1y ago

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

beeflet 1y ago
they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
- episteme 1y ago
  With the second best way being gambling. Doesn't really change anything.
- vincnetas 1y ago
  Where do the items used in trading come from? I guess Gambling.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck. I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
  - sjw987 1y ago
    > It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community. More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors". I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like. On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
- gquere 1y ago
  Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling. Not if your dad is the one buying you the cards.
alberth 1y ago
Would you consider old school coin operated arcades as something that should be banned? Just curious.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- zharknado 1y ago
  Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism. Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine. If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward. I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
- vharuck 1y ago
  I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.
  - ad_hockey 1y ago
    They're an institution in the UK. They're in the arcades at every seaside town, and every kid plays them. Now that I have kids I actually think they're brilliant; for £2 each they taught mine everything they need to know about gambling. - You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything. - The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf. - It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead. They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop. I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.
TheRoque 1y ago
FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
- gruez 1y ago
  >and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one) That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
  - TheBicPen 1y ago
    And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee
    - Fade_Dance 1y ago
      I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with. It's "technically" just, after all.
      - teiferer 1y ago
        You mean "special prosecutor". Judges don't try to find things, they only decide which of the parties before them claiming different things is right.
        pdw 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)
mrheosuper 1y ago
But children can buy a cereal box that has some "rare" card.
- Retric 1y ago
  Being virtual or not doesn’t matter here, ban it all.
- smt88 1y ago
  Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their own boxes of cereal
  - jimmydorry 1y ago
    And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
    - smt88 1y ago
      They don't have to ask their parents first. The parents can link cards. One example, of many: https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-parents-money-mobile.html https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-...
      - lanfeust6 1y ago
        This just another way of saying their parents allowed it
        smt88 1y ago
        It's completely different in practice. A child can't buy $50,000 of cereal in an afternoon.
        lanfeust6 1y ago
dandanua 1y ago
Gambling mechanics is everywhere nowadays, especially in mobile games. It's almost like an industry standard. I think the only solution is to ban all in-game purchases completely.
atraac 1y ago
So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?
- mosselman 1y ago
  How about no gambling at all? That would work for me.
  - Xss3 1y ago
    This. It's predatory in every implementation.
    - throwaway290 1y ago
      but what about freedom
      - Xss3 1y ago
        It should only be criminalised as a business. Not between individuals participating in friendly wagers.
  - walkabout 1y ago
    Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought. I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.
    - pessimizer 1y ago
tonyhart7 1y ago
"Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned." its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money
SwtCyber 1y ago
And it's more dangerous because it's targeting kids who don't fully understand the value of money
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Even worse it creates adults that don't understand the value of money. Maybe that's why the laws against it are lax now that I think about it.
Der_Einzige 1y ago
Where’s all the pearl clutching over scam ticket “games” at Dave and busters and chuckle-cheese? The ticket conversion rate at these establishments is a worse scam than TF2 knife trading was until this update.
Waterluvian 1y ago
There's something funny about how some countries try to enforce this and how Valve "solved" it, which I think demonstrates how silly "there ought to be a law!" thinking can get. I believe for some regions, Valve just shows you what's in the "lootbox" (case, whatever), and you have to pay to acquire it before you're shown the next one. This isn't to say I don't fully agree that this kind of thing is probably predatory and probably unhealthy. But I find most discourse on the topic starts and ends at the shoreline with a version of "there ought to be a law..."
llama_boy 1y ago
As someone who moved to the UK I find it crazy that 2p machines exist. You put 2p in, and hope to get more out. It's literally child gambling. Where I come from we had arcades with tickets for stuff, but to me that's a whole different level to money in -> money out. I still enjoy them though, but I enjoy gambling responsibly!
- giobox 1y ago
  These machines exist a lot in the USA/other countries too, typically called a coin pusher: > https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers While it won't be true for all kids, personally I felt coin pushers taught me an important lesson about the drawbacks of gambling at a young age - it's obvious even to many children how rigged the penny pusher is. My own son had similar thoughts after a quick try of one too.

by adrr 1y ago

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

beeflet 1y ago

they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.

episteme 1y ago
With the second best way being gambling. Doesn't really change anything.
vincnetas 1y ago
Where do the items used in trading come from? I guess Gambling.
voidUpdate 1y ago
I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck. I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
- sjw987 1y ago
  > It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community. More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors". I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like. On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
gquere 1y ago
Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
lurk2 1y ago
> You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling. Not if your dad is the one buying you the cards.

alberth 1y ago

Would you consider old school coin operated arcades as something that should be banned? Just curious.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zharknado 1y ago
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism. Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine. If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward. I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
vharuck 1y ago
I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.
- ad_hockey 1y ago
  They're an institution in the UK. They're in the arcades at every seaside town, and every kid plays them. Now that I have kids I actually think they're brilliant; for £2 each they taught mine everything they need to know about gambling. - You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything. - The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf. - It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead. They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop. I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.

TheRoque 1y ago

FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)

gruez 1y ago
>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one) That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
- TheBicPen 1y ago
  And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee
  - Fade_Dance 1y ago
    I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with. It's "technically" just, after all.
    - teiferer 1y ago
      You mean "special prosecutor". Judges don't try to find things, they only decide which of the parties before them claiming different things is right.
      - pdw 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)

mrheosuper 1y ago

But children can buy a cereal box that has some "rare" card.

Retric 1y ago
Being virtual or not doesn’t matter here, ban it all.
smt88 1y ago
Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their own boxes of cereal
- jimmydorry 1y ago
  And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
  - smt88 1y ago
    They don't have to ask their parents first. The parents can link cards. One example, of many: https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-parents-money-mobile.html https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-...
    - lanfeust6 1y ago
      This just another way of saying their parents allowed it
      - smt88 1y ago
        It's completely different in practice. A child can't buy $50,000 of cereal in an afternoon.
        lanfeust6 1y ago

dandanua 1y ago

Gambling mechanics is everywhere nowadays, especially in mobile games. It's almost like an industry standard. I think the only solution is to ban all in-game purchases completely.

atraac 1y ago

So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?

mosselman 1y ago
How about no gambling at all? That would work for me.
- Xss3 1y ago
  This. It's predatory in every implementation.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    but what about freedom
    - Xss3 1y ago
      It should only be criminalised as a business. Not between individuals participating in friendly wagers.
- walkabout 1y ago
  Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought. I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.
  - pessimizer 1y ago

tonyhart7 1y ago

"Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned." its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money

SwtCyber 1y ago

And it's more dangerous because it's targeting kids who don't fully understand the value of money

Mistletoe 1y ago
Even worse it creates adults that don't understand the value of money. Maybe that's why the laws against it are lax now that I think about it.

Der_Einzige 1y ago

Where’s all the pearl clutching over scam ticket “games” at Dave and busters and chuckle-cheese? The ticket conversion rate at these establishments is a worse scam than TF2 knife trading was until this update.

Waterluvian 1y ago

There's something funny about how some countries try to enforce this and how Valve "solved" it, which I think demonstrates how silly "there ought to be a law!" thinking can get. I believe for some regions, Valve just shows you what's in the "lootbox" (case, whatever), and you have to pay to acquire it before you're shown the next one. This isn't to say I don't fully agree that this kind of thing is probably predatory and probably unhealthy. But I find most discourse on the topic starts and ends at the shoreline with a version of "there ought to be a law..."

llama_boy 1y ago

As someone who moved to the UK I find it crazy that 2p machines exist. You put 2p in, and hope to get more out. It's literally child gambling. Where I come from we had arcades with tickets for stuff, but to me that's a whole different level to money in -> money out. I still enjoy them though, but I enjoy gambling responsibly!

giobox 1y ago
These machines exist a lot in the USA/other countries too, typically called a coin pusher: > https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers While it won't be true for all kids, personally I felt coin pushers taught me an important lesson about the drawbacks of gambling at a young age - it's obvious even to many children how rigged the penny pusher is. My own son had similar thoughts after a quick try of one too.