I'm not sure I follow, why is anyone playing these games at all? What's the benefit, or what's the social aspect? How do the clubs work to encourage more playing?
I found the article to be a bit sparse on these details. Maybe there's another source?
Addiction isn’t rational so the answer may be as unsatisfying as “people got addicted because they got addicted”. Many people addicted to real slot machines are addicted because you press a button and something happens, the fact that you can win real money is not much of a differentiator between these apps and real slot machines — because addicts in a casino aren’t walking away in profit either.
Most pleasure-seeking isn’t rational. I don’t understand why we single out this form of irrationally wasting money but not all of the other ones that are common.
We don't single out this form. Many other addictive forms of pleasure seeking are also negatively portrayed (e.g., smoking, alcohol, drugs, video games, TV, etc.)
Justifying their behaviour with 'addiction' makes them completely unresponsible for their actions. If that's the case you'd have to declare them incompetent for doing business and assign them an agent.
That's a fairly unempathetic view. I don't know what it's like to be a gambler, but I do know that anyone who thinks they are completely rational is only fooling themselves. We are emotional animals with a tiny rational voice that can only shunt our emotions in a better direction.
I think my number one pet peeve of this species is that people are so strongly inclined to assume that everyone’s experience is about the same as their experience. Empathy can be such an uphill battle.
Hacker News isn't really representative of humanity as a whole. It is a very thin slice of intelligent and creative but also cynical and pedantic people with low empathy and emotional intelligence. That is not a value judgement, that is just what it is. Virtually every top comment in every article is nitpicking or dismissal; positivity, especially blind positivity without any evidence, is not valued here.
Hello! I apologize for this being extremely out of context but five months ago on one of my comment threads you recommended Takayama Showa-Kan and I wanted to let you know that I visited it last month and loved it (and Takayama as a whole). Thanks again for the rec!
Is it a net benefit for society for folks to lose out on all their assets and money for the sake of gambling?
This is generational wealth that gets lost in gambling. It is the responsibility of a strong society to prevent scams, and to protect people from very damaging forms of manipulation.
Explain why that is a “responsibility of a strong society” rather than simply a fool and his money are soon parted. I like having the option to throw my money in a wishing well if I were so inclined.
Because when a fool is parted from his money he and those who depend on him starve to death, and that, dear friend, is the part a strong society should be concerned about.
Universal basic income might cleanly solve that problem. Might, because the addict might spend the weekly income on the addiction instead of food and shelter.
I got addicted to an MMO (DAoC) long ago. Luckily for me it didn't cost me much money other than the bot accounts I bought and maintained. But, it did cost me other things. I dropped out of grad school, stopped working out, stagnated at my job, and became completely obsessed with the game. I treated it as a second job. Looking back the why seems silly and embarrassing - I was part of a guild that needed my help. Eventually I had a long term relationship end over the game. The next day I gave all my accounts away and never played again. I still play single player games when I have time, but definitely no MMOs.
These are games where you earn points (in the form of tokens). Those points place you on a leaderboard within your club.
Just like if you were playing any their game which gives you a score and let's you compare your score with other people.
The catch here is that the games are all simulated Casino games - and one way to boost your score if you got "unlucky" is to spend real money on more fake tokens.
The games are "fun" because they emulate 100+ years of casino development in terms of figuring out what mechanisms people enjoy the most.
The result is the same, but the path differs. I doubt addiction appears out of nowhere. First some kind of reason for an activity is needed. Real casino - chance to win, big fish casino - social status within the club. In both cases the addiction seems to be self-reinforcing: A chance to win all the lost money back vs. not wanting to lose the status that was so expensive to reach.
Individuals are intelligent, but groups of people create peer pressure, and individuals become capable of the most stupid behavior imaginable. Just wasting money isn't even the most extreme form.
You are correct that the thing these people are addicted to is not the chance to win real money. So in that sense it's not the same as other casinos.
But the government regulates plenty of addictive things that are not "winning real money".
The thing in common is a for-profit company taking advantage of a weakness of human nature, which in some cases leaves a meaningful number of people financially destitute. I think there's at least an argument to be made that it's worth putting up some protective measures.
I think there is a stronger and more general argument to be made that the government should not be in the business of telling people how or if they can spend their money on things they want to spend it on.
Spending significant fractions of one’s income servicing one’s chosen addictions (alcohol and tobacco and reckless spending of money principally among them) is a long and great tradition enjoyed by an huge portion of society and it seems utterly contrary to the idea of basic liberty to get involved in impeding that. Most addicts love their addictions; most of the ones that don’t eventually stop.
It's one thing to enjoy a vice, it's another to intentionally manipulate someone else into falling deeper and deeper into that vice to your benefit. Prohibiting that kind of behaviour isn't the same as prohibiting the vice itself.
The sociopaths that gleefully exploit human psychology for their own financial gain should be stamped out.
> Most addicts love their addictions; most of the ones that don’t eventually stop.
Source? This doesn't match up with any addict I've interacted with or seen in media. The majority seem to fall between being unaware, in denial, or deeply unhappy about it but are unable to break their dependency.
Addicts don’t gamble in order to make money, that’s just what gets you in the door.
Once you’re in that addiction cycle, you crave the dopamine rush and play just for the feeling of maybe winning back a big loss even when in reality a big win probably won’t even make you break even.
It’s why people just sit in front of slot machines for hours on end.
Actually the dopamine rush isn’t in winning. Slot machines are all flashing lights, overwhelming colors, patterns, and matching patterns designed to provide dopamine rushes purely through stimulation. The point isn’t even in the potential of winning anymore, it’s getting lost in matching patterns and pretty lights where the world disappears for as long as possible. Slot machines are designed to maximize engagement and winning actually interrupts it with rewards (slot machine addicts have actually reported being upset when the slot machine pays out, because it ruins their trance like state!)
Actually thats making a ton of assumptions about the experience of gambling on slots. The world is more complicated than some Atlantic articles on casino design, unfortunately. Go play some slots with a group of friends and realize it.
The literal casino designers have explicitly laid out all their tricks about it. The fact you can see the other symbols not involved in the lines gives a feeling of a near miss. There are several machines which incorporate eyes to invoke parasocial relationships with the players. Multiple lines beyond the three, with obscure multiplier rules, also give a sense of mastery and understanding of mechanics as if it’s not a random number thing. And the fact is that pattern matching is inherent satisfying to people, so presenting endless pattern matching game is… well.. yeah…
None of what you said refutes my point: The human experience of gambling (including slots) is much more broad than the designers influence upon it and more value can be had than from the winnings and the losings of money. It's more than just shiny lights, and us gamblers aren't zombie lemmings shoving every paycheck into the void. Go gamble with a group of people, watch the diversity of their experiences and I bet you'll see gambling is more than your reductions. There is nuance to this that you are missing.
You don’t earn real money in a physical casino, you earn chips.
You’re correct that those chips are exchangeable for real money but the chips still serve a very real purpose: to dissuade you from picking up the cash and walking out. The vast majority of people who win chips plug them straight back into the casino games and end up leaving with nothing. It’s all about the addiction to gambling itself, winning money is merely a potential bonus. So the end result is not a whole lot different than these apps.
Purpose of casino chips is more practical and less nefarious than you imagine. Try playing a poker game with banknotes and coins and you'll see what I mean.
I think it has little to do with earning money. That's just the hook. It's a human condition/disease. Just like the hoarders. You need to experience addiction first hand to understand it, be it video games, smoking, collecting useless stuff, or just any kind of addiction.
In a pretty significant way, you also can't "earn" money in a physical casino, negative EVs and everything.
There is a very limited set of circumstances in which playing a game with negative EV can be rational (e.g. if your utility function for money isn't linear); everything else seems like a more or less thinly disguised attempt to exploit certain properties of the human mind's/brain's reward system. (It's a philosophical question on whether consent can even theoretically be given to that exploitation.)
I'd argue that the magnitude of the expected loss per game (i.e. everything or only a fraction of it – but in iterated games it's always everything as well) is much less relevant than that.
Certainly see your point, but there is still a difference. In a real casino, you _may_ come out ahead on isolated events, even though over an infinite time horizon you won't. With these apps, that's not even a minuscule probability!
If you could earn real money in a physical casino, casinos would cease to exist.
Edit for clarification: excluding the staff, who obviously earn wages there, if the average person made any money gambling in an average casino, casinos would quickly go bankrupt.
You can earn real money in casinos, that's why they do exist. They pay out just often enough for people to believe that they are one pull away from hitting a jackpot.
If they never paid out, people would never go and the casinos would not exist
I recently saw a good video[1] covering the history and appeal of gambling machines. My takeaway is that the primary reason people play these is not because they think they're going to win money. This especially true of pachinko where "cashing out" is a convoluted process of trading balls for prizes for cash.
> If they never paid out, people would never go and the casinos would not exist
This is self evidently false based on the linked article. Random chance games that have no possibility of ever having a net payout attract tons of players and make a lot of money.
I think the problem is analyzing this with the economic "rational consumer" model of human behavior. Gambling is not rational but extremely popular because people are not rational. The whole industry is a trap that feeds users dopamine rewards in exchange for money. Once you're in, the payouts have little to do with it.
This whole article is about apps that are up-front about never paying out cash. Money turns into points, points can be lost or turn into more points. But points never ever turn back into cash. And yet people play.
Poorly phrased. You mean casinos wouldn't exist if the expected winnings were positive (or more precisely, not negative enough to offset their fixed costs of rental, maintenance, and salaries).
For most people, you can't earn anything at a casino. Almost no one comes out ahead, because no one leaves when ahead. They just keep playing, until all their money is gone.
Using the word addiction is troublesome, since over 99% of the industry employees that work in that environment 40hrs a week are not “addicted” to gambling. If gambling addiction existed, then a large number of employees would also be “addicted”, but they are not. Its another effect fir people that cannot control their spending.
Occasional, unpredictable, variable rewards, with corresponding colourful splashes and satisfying noises, providing a temporary escape from uncomfortable feelings.
One of my friends showed me an "casino" app on his phone where they don't give you real money but you can earn (or buy) "premium currency" that can be redeemed for various rewards like a free dinner in Vegas or 20-50% off a room, which I would assume Big Fish Casino is doing something similar. It could be that or it could be the big A word that casino's hate (addiction).
Why do people play Tetris or any other game? For most it is just a fun way to pass some time. However for others, it's an obsession that is prioritized over real-life -- jobs, finances, etc.
The clubs appear to be like guilds or teams in online games, players collaborate for high scores and to maintain a ranking on a leaderboard. The problem is that once someone joins a team, they feel pressure to generate points to contribute to the team's success, which often requires in-app payments to obtain more coins to wager.
It’s the exact same reason why Destiny The Game subreddit consistently argued in favour of KRPG drop rates till it got to the point that not even the basement dwellers could get anything they wanted:
They are addicted to “exclusivity”.
This same type of thing impacts all video games with gambling aspects or drop rates.
I’ve played Diablo 2 for decades and have never once dropped a rune higher ist, and the sub vehemently defends those drop rates.
Many defended the Diablo 4 Uber rare rates.
What’s the point in playing just for some strange exclusivity? Who knows. Gotta ask the people that defend the ever increasing annoying rarity of shit on the premise that they believe they alone play enough to end up in some sort of exclusive club of owners.
People who play a lot want to feel that their "time investment" was "worth it". If things are too common that anyone playing 1 hour/day can get the same stuff as someone playing 16 hours/day then the latter group feel like they are "wasting their time".
I would say, just play a different game that doesn't have this toxic reward system.
Operates on the same mechanism as gambling, variable ratio reinforcement schedule - i.e. the player is rewarded after a random number of "responses"; similar to a slot machine.
From my experience playing a popular blackjack social casino game, they seem free to make you hit a blackjack at just the right time to keep the dopamine (and real money) flowing.
I found the article to be a bit sparse on these details. Maybe there's another source?