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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

The strangest part in this story for me, is that this is nothing like a casino, you can't even win any money back! It's purely spending money for spinning wheels, without the suction that you might win in the future...

> As in a real casino, players exchange money for coins to bet. Unlike in a real casino, there is no way to win money back or earn a payout on coins. But that has not stopped Shellz and her husband from spending about $150,000 in the game in just two years.

This is unreal! How can you spend $200 A DAY on a game that you cannot win anything back from? I'm having a really hard time understanding how or why these people keep playing the games.

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Welcome to the sad reality where people are so imperfect that they can't even imagine ways in which people are actually imperfect.

By the way, have you heard of the Cookie Clicker?

I've played plenty of Cookie Clicker and other video games, probably too much, and also been to my fair share of casinos, but never spent $200 per day on things that there is no chance of getting money back somehow.

Well, I've never been to a casino, but I did spent quite some time on videogames, including WoW. For me, the trick to actually give something like this up was to say to myself, "I can stop at any moment. In fact, I will stop right now" and... stop. The next few moments/hours/days (depending on how long you've spent and how emotionally attached you've grown) feel kinda surreal: "Have I really just spent all this time to... basically doing nothing", but it helps to switch your attention to something else and forget about that accident. I suspect, however, that this trick only works for someone pretty lazy i.e. someone who can easily refrain from doing something even when feeling like doing that something (imagine "Mood: Ich Hab' Keine Lust by Rammstein").

It’s really hard for me to get in the headspace to understand this. Maybe one way to think about it is if you were ever playing a Civ game where you were in that “just one more turn” mode. You know you have just lost 8 hours of your life to something with no real world payoff. You know you lost a day of productivity at work/school/life with real quantifiable impact and need to get back to real life. But ... “one more turn”

The article actually has a pretty good explanation for this- part of it is the social aspects of the games. Spending big allows one into higher-tier VIP clubs. So there can be friendships that have developed where, in order to maintain status and stay in the same league as your friends, one needs to maintain spending habits.

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