Loot boxes linked to problem gambling in new research | Hacker News Reader

Loot boxes linked to problem gambling in new research

bbc.co.uk

160 pointsComodoHacker117 comments

Lootboxes were the beginning of the end for the gaming industry. All the visionaries have moved on from triple A games and now its just by the numbers cookie cutter formula games with different underhanded tactics to extract as much money as possible from victims.

Either you have a very narrow definition of triple A or you're somewhat overstating the problem.

I'm not saying the problem isn't bad but "all AAA games are cookie cutter money extractors" seems somewhat of an exaggeration.

The most convincing way to refute is a counterexample.

Maybe.

But I suspect it would probably descend into goal-post moving or quibbling about definitions.

It's doesn't feel worth the amount of legalistic laying down of rules that it would require to be a fruitful debate.

I'd argue this was only the end of the AAA industry, as they all shifted towards monetization, but has catalyzed the growth of indie games — which are more expressive and artistic than ever before.

Games like Outer Wilds removed any notion for what a game could look and feel and play like, for me

While loot boxes are pretty scummy what is this going to mean for CCGs like Pokemon and Magic that essentially sell loot boxes only in physical form? Or baseball cards? Trading cards in random packs have been a thing sold to children for 40+ years now.

Those are at least finite, limited by production and stock. Digital items can be nearly infinite.

"Finite" doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction here, if you're a kid at the limits of "production and stock" buying trading cards, you probably have a problem already?

Those can at least hold value over time as you're buying something tangible that can be traded or sold. And I don't get the feeling that going to the local newsagent and buying a pack with your pocket money sets you up for the same kind of addiction that microtransactions and loot boxes can.

I don't really think that they're equivalent. If you were to make a Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh game that encouraged you to buy digital versions of those packs to make any progress in the game, then I think there would be a better comparison. The fact that those are online-only means that the house can essentially rig the game on the fly and engage in many more unscrupulous practices to keep you hooked. Made all the more easy by having a payment method directly linked.

It doesn't mean that physical CCGs have no addictive properties, of course.

> Those can at least hold value over time as you're buying something tangible that can be traded or sold.

Ironically, that makes TCG even more like gambling, in contrast to loot boxes which do not provide a cash-value payout.

I’d argue that to the contrary, loot boxes have demonstrated that having a cash-value payout isn’t necessary to elicit gambling behavior in people.

Yeah, there's more friction to having to go to a store and buy cards but there is also friction in having to go to a casino or bar to find a blackjack table or VLT.

What is progress? To compete in the top 1% of Overwatch you don't need to buy loot boxes at all. To compete in the top 1% of paper Magic or Pokemon you absolutely need better cards that have to be acquired from random packs at some point either by you, an LGS or somebody that sold it to an LGS.

To my knowledge, pokemon card packs are not designed to be as addictive and easy to spend money on as possible in the same vein as loot boxes in video games. Additionally, the requirement to go to a physical store (or order online and wait upwards of a week for shipping) is likely a mitigating factor.

And still, I don't know anyone who ruined their life as a result of addiction to buying CCGs or baseball cards (and I do know that many of us learned a few things about economy thanks to them, when we were kids). I'm not saying it can't happen, maybe someone will dig out an example, but it would be an extremely rare edge case.

In games with loot boxes, on the other hand, many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life.

It's true that there is a continuous scale between baseball cards and the casino, with several factors influencing the level of addictiveness (immediacy, amount of maximum reward, etc.) and it's not obvious where one should set the limit. But there should be a limit, and IMO it should be one that heavily regulates loot boxes (and in particular, forbids minors from buying them) and doesn't touch CCGs or baseball cards. Claiming that we should not touch loot boxes because CCGs are similar would be a textbook example of the continuum fallacy.

I sounds to me that when you say that many people end up spending totally crazy amounts for their income and essentially ruin their life you are just referring to anecdotes (kid using mom phone with activated credit card and no protections), what makes you think this is a real and big problem?

I play a mobile game with loot boxes (although I don't buy them myself) and I am a frequent user of community forums where players talk about the game. Stories about people with modest income spending thousands a month, and sometimes losing their partner for this reason, are very common. Often a thread comes up on the matter and many people chime in with stories of that kind.

Of course, it's still anecdotes. It's impossible to have actual data, as obviously the developers aren't going to give us statistics on how many people are spending unhealthy amounts of money in the game. But my impression (and the impression of most players I know) is that it's quite widespread, and I'm not talking about kids, but adults that just don't know when to stop.

> what makes you think this is a real and big problem?

The average quality of mobile games have plummeted. Most companies have no inventive to make good games when they can legally trick children into gambling.

I think you make a good point and perhaps one day we will see those regulated as well. All we are missing is a news story of some kid who stole his parents money to buy a bunch of these cards and a parent claim it is gambling and we will see legal action.

Trading cards at least hold their value to a certain extent (you can resell them if you're no longer using them) and are a physical object that doesn't depend on a "cloud".

Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering cards are still just as good as they were when they first came out, where as a lot of games from ~10-15 years ago no longer have a functional multiplayer mode because the servers hosted by the publisher are down.

Buying a CCG pack is a rather detached process; you fork over you money and you get a foil wrapped packet. You unwrap it afterwards and that's fun but it's clear that an ordinary purchase is occurring. That's much less stimulating than the glitzy animation and audio one gets that is carefully designed to give kids the impression that something special and exciting is happening and to spark that bit of hope that they'll get something good. Add on top of that the additional animation/voice-over when they do get something good to reward them and it's therefore not surprising that children are strongly attracted to it.

That's the old way of doing it. Now you open it years later on a stream in front of thousands of people.

I don't really think is a strong argument.

You can present it wrapped in whatever glitz (or lack of) that you want, but the process is pretty much the same.

You're exchanging currency for a chance at getting something from a known subset of items.

There’s a huge difference.

You could write a terminal program in which people can buy and open loot boxes; I guarantee you it won’t be as “effective” as a fancy loot box ceremony in an AAA video game.

(I put effective in quotes because it depends on what axes you’re looking at.)

Pokémon cards are clearly different enough is enough ways that they don’t cause the same amount of harm to anywhere near as many people as other forms of gambling do (such a pokies machines in bars and loot boxes in video games).

Sure, the core process may be the same, but that’s not all that matters. It’s how it connects to everything else and what the overall resulting effect is.

I think a big part of the difference is that a kid is much more aware of the money involved when they hand physical cash to someone.

It's very different than having a number invisibly go down from your playstation gift card or a number invisibly go up on their parent's credit card.

There are countless adages like "Presentation matters" in business, "You eat with your eyes first" in cooking, "Dress for success" in interpersonal relations, etc. that all boil down to how appearances and the pomp and ceremony of an interaction can elevate it into something special. That's very well established.

Regarding currency, the real-world monetary cost is kept discreetly out of sight of the player, much like tokens are used in casinos, as part of the sleight of hand. They're not exchanging cold, hard cash; no, no, that would be crass. They're merely exchanging "gems", "crystals", "orbs", etc.

Fundamentally, I always wondered if the movement away from physical currency-- whether it's in-pp payments, general ecommerce or just the growth of credit/debit-- has a psychological impact on how we spend.

If you have to hand over some number of physical tokens, and actively see your stash of them diminish, it's going to hit differently than letting someone handle your card, and then a number that you have to log into the bank to even see goes down.

I see ads for programs where you give your kids their allowance on a prepaid debit card, so it could get to the point where you could reach maturity without ever touching a dime. Will those kids be as frugal as the ones who got notes?

Perhaps the biggest difference, to me, is that when you buy a CCG booster pack, you can resell the individual cards (the publisher cannot forbid or, realistically, attempt to prevent this).

When you buy a loot box, you get some bits set on your account with the loot-box-seller. You can only resell them if the publisher lets you, and only via publisher-approved methods.

The reason this is a meaningful point of difference is that you no longer have the "I want X, and the only way to get it is to keep buying loot-boxes and hope". If you want a specific M:TG card, someone is happy to sell it to you for the right price; you don't have to dig through booster packs.

There is absolutely glitz in card opening. No there's no sparkling lights and sound effects emitted from packs but look at hyper rares or secret rares in Pokemon for example. It's glitz. Special card frames, new holo designs. Always hoping you're going to get that Rainbow Charizard and not crap. Putting the rare at the end of the pack to increase anticipation. Magic has recently extended what is possible to get in packs the same way too.

I think I agree with you, but then what about something like Hearthstone? How much glitz would they have to add before a digital version of the same phenomenon be considered gambling, if presentation were the metric?

They are bad as well. I remember stealing as a child to fuel my purchases of Magic cards...

1. Lootboxes available 24/7 anywhere

2. Lootboxes can be purchased easily with credit cards and can be hidden easily from relatives

3. Login bonus and free pulls

4. CCG is arguably pay 2 play

5. Progression & achievements

6. Nation-wide or international-wide reach

7. Gameplay session and purchasing session most of the time are different

Those are a substantially different economies. For one thing, you end up actually owning something (you often don't even own the software you use the item in for lootboxes). That comes with a bunch of changes, but the most significant is that you can buy things from other players. I can build Magic decks without opening a single pack; I just buy the exact cards I want from other players. That's huge because you never get to a spot where you're spending $1,500 on packs to get that one card you really need. It amortizes the randomness of the packs across a huge group of people, so it can always be had at a specific price relative to it's rarity. Excluding cards no longer in print, which you can't buy packs for anyways.

You can gamble for cards in Pokemon or Magic, if you choose to. If you'd rather, you can hand me a list of cards and I can give you an exact to-the-cent price for you to get those. Loot boxes generally don't have that option. The price is anywhere from the price to get a box up to infinity, period.

You can also simply buy knock-offs. They aren't tournament legal, but nobody cares if you're using a Chinese knock off that you bought for $5 because you didn't want to pay $500 for a legit version.

If lootboxes gave players the option to buy and sell the items contained within, I think things would be different. Of course, that would also kill the profitability. If a casual player gets a really rare item right now, they have no choice but to keep it, and the whales have to keep buying boxes to get that item. If they could sell items, that casual player might decide they'd rather cash out that item for $300. Whale pays $300, consumer gets $300, game producer gets nothing. They could charge a transaction fee, but they probably could have gotten the whale to buy $500 worth of lootboxes trying to get that item.

The fact that duplicates are basically worthless doesn't help either. At least with Magic or Pokemon, you'd be hard pressed to buy a $5 pack that you couldn't resell for at least $1. Your worst case is bounded at a 20% return. It is entirely possible, and not at all rare, to get a lootbox full of duplicates and end up with nothing.

The number of players you contact also makes it easy for them to create items that are common to see, but not easy to get. If an item has a 1/20,000 drop rate, and the average player has opened 50 lootboxes, each player has roughly a 1 in 400 chance of having that item. If a Magic or Pokemon card is that rare, you'll maybe see one of them. It'd take a while to play Magic against 400 people. Meanwhile, in a 25 vs 25 game (or just 50 player for stuff like Fortnite), you'll see it in 1 out of every 8 games on average. That makes it seem like it's not too hard to get, right? You see it all the time.

And lastly, lootboxes are generally cosmetic, while trading cards are usually functional (maybe except baseball cards? I don't know if there's a game that goes with those or not). The rarity of cards can have a substantial impact on how the game plays, to the point where you can absolutely ruin the game by making some cards too rare. Nobody wants to play a card game where the winner is determined by who blew more money on their deck. Again, knock offs help with this.

Phones & tablets have the additional advantage of being able to get your attention regularly and reliably. They can train you like an animal: open this chest in 40 minutes and that one after 2 hours. This is very useful when you're trying to create & enforce a habit (and once you're well locked into the habit spending real money for that stuff starts to seem more reasonable).

We need at least 2 lens flares and a firework in order for it to be addictive. Maybe if the "new card smell" contained some nicotine?

> A spokesman for Ukie, the national games industry body, said that game companies had "already taken action" on the issue.

Ah, well I’m sure it’s all just fine then.

I’ve seen relatively low income people drop hundreds of dollars a day on loot boxes in games like CS:GO. Until I saw it myself I couldn’t understand how these companies were making money. I’ve also seen accounts with thousands of dollars worth of digital items. I don’t want to police behavior too much, but I wish there was some transparency for those people to see how much money they’ve put in to get to that point. I assume they must have put in roughly 5x what they own.

Its not your place to police their behavior because they are adults, not children.

Here's what I don't understand: where do children get their money from to compulsively spend on lootboxes?

Unsuspecting parents that are not technically inclined enough to block it in advance, happened to my sister.

Actually, since it creates destructive externalities, it is my place.

and its my place to make sure people like you know their place.

pick:

Stop regulating externalities, including environmental regulations, civil rights regulations, etc

Regulate externalities, including socially corrosive behavior like gambling, alcohol, excessive drug use, pornography, etc.

It’s incoherent to regulate the ones you dislike and pretend the ones you like have no externalities.

Well, you're doing a pretty rubbish job at it. If anything you've just given some one more eloquent the chance to convince an audience of their position, while refusing to yourself offer up any coherent argument. Your strategy just seems counter productive is what I'm getting at.

Wait until you see the stats on cigarettes, alcohol, weed, prostitutes, and junk food.

Video games are in a market with lots of healthy competition for dollars.

All those are heavily regulated (and usually taxed) in most developed countries.

Like I lean a bit libertarian, but I'm not sure society could handle alcohol being sold for its cost of production at every corner store -- less than $1 a litre of 94% ABV.

Better that people be impoverished and drunk rather than just drunk?

Scotland introduced minimum pricing for alcohol. I imagine it's done some good.

https://www.gov.scot/policies/alcohol-and-drugs/minimum-unit...

Not really. Alcohol related hospital admissions rose slightly and per 100k rate declined slightly.

https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/03/fantasy-mod...

> Among the authors' recommendations were that any regulation has extremely precise definitions to avoid any possible workarounds

I find this surprising - shouldn't it go the other way? The more strictly defined your law is, the more space it creates for "tweak just this bit to technically comply". More vague definitions are closer to "you know what we meant" position.

In context, they mean the law should target any gambling mechanic as opposed to banning “loot boxes”. Otherwise the gambling mechanic will come back with another mechanism, say a lucky companion that increases your chances of finding a pot of gold at the end of each rainbow.

This is already present in Pokémon Go with egg incubators, shiny Pokémon, and raids. You’re not directly buying rare Pokémon, but the tools to increase your chances of getting them.

As I understand it the law in Anglo Saxon countries is closer to the "precise definitions" system, while European Napoleonic Code law is closer to "you know what we mean". In the US you must follow the letter of the law. In France you must follow the spirit of the law. (I'm no expert. So please tell me if this isn't correct.)

It depends on the area of the law and the field of application. E.g. criminal law and stuff that is meant to cut into civil liberties is very precise and letter-of-the-law style. Any criminal act needs to be defined in the law, you-know-what-we-mean isn't acceptable there. On the other hand consumer-protection, environmental regulations and stuff like that is interpreted more in a you-know-what-we-mean-style. Of course there are areas where both styles overlap.

Exactly, it should be a clear cut age limit, (say 18/21), to participate like gambling.

There's one mobile game I play semi-regularly. It's a Moba style game riddled with gacha style events and gambling and such for heroes and skins.

They regularly have these roulette style events which usually have the brand new shiny skin of the moment as a prize among a bunch of other random prizes. Typically, they'll give you a couple free spins, usually after completing some in game tasks, you'll inevitably win the worst of the prizes, leaving a bunch more crap, and the one good prize, only now, the cost has jumped to like a real dollar(in digital diamonds of course) a spin and increases in cost with each spin.

The games are rigged so that the good prize is always the last one you'll win, pretty much every time.

I remember one time, when there was a particularly fancy shiny new skin, I used up the free spins, checked out the rules to see how much it would have cost me to keep going until I got the shiny skin for sure...

It was going to be over $50...for an item that literally does nothing but change your appearance.

The thing is, I ended up seeing not a small amount of people already playing with the skin on the first day of the event...as in they just pumped a bunch of money into the game immediately without really thinking about it.

It's constant though. Last time I played it they had 3 similar roulette events going on at once that would have cost over $100 to win them all.

Then there's the amount of people on there who seem like they're kids who've obviously been playing the gacha shit and spending a bunch of money on these things.

Hell, that game even teaches kids about leasing. They sometimes have an 'event' where you can pay a small amount of diamonds(real money) every day for a month or so for the new shiny skin and as long as you play using it every day for the lease period, you get to keep it...again it works out to cost almost twice as much as just going to the in game shop and just buying a skin...but people seem to do it.

I probably went off on a bit of a ramble about this, but that game's my only real experience with these modern day lootbox gambling style things and I still find it unbelievable that it's so blatantly scammy. It doesn't lie about it either. Every event explains in the rules, you're probably going to lose a bunch of money and you're going to have to basically win everything.

But these events must be popular, they happen constantly and I always see other players who've clearly taken part.

When they are going to tackle dopamine addiction from sites like Instagram or Facebook and how much productivity the country loses to that? Not to mention other health risks and problems. All that compounded by paltry taxes paid by these platforms further sucking energy out of everyone.

Back I the day I played “ultima 3” . In the game as you explore and defeat foes and monsters you find chests with random stuff (free!). But about 10% or so had traps which would injure or poison a member or your party.

Perhaps I learned a valuable lesson..

Doesn't Fallout have booby traps on some locked chests or computer terminals?

Since loot boxes are not allowed in Belgium. I sold a couple of them and got >50€ ( in relativity out how much I earned with a online game, that's 100%)

That's quite a lot of money for something useless. Even the steam market has some stock characteristics.

https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/AWP%20%7C%20A...

This reminds me of the time the Warframe developers inadvertently created a gambling mechanism and removed it once they noticed it. Sadly this is the exception rather than the rule.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/03/warframe-removed-a-microtr...

IMHO all these free to play MOBA games designed like a crack and feel like TNG episode[0].

Think about what these companies hypothetically could do with data they have on players, combined with access to voice from voice chat they can generate psychological profiles, and easily manipulate people mood by generating different loot or putting certain kinds of people in team together, you could run entire social experiments with 15min iteration time. (typical match length, while thousands matches happen in the parallel)

I am not saying they do that.

But from personal experience in these games I feel that matchmaking is somewhat resembles Conditioning[1] in the way that they put you in teams, 5x losing, 1x winning, reinforcing your addiction to game.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Operant_conditio...

As someone who has worked on a game with loot boxes and analytics and all that, you are definitely underestimating the cost of doing that. Only the mega companies in the world could do that, and they aren't in gaming. The reality is is that the whales are basically subsidizing the 99% free players. It's sad, but free to play and wealth inequality has created this system. The game developers are trying to enable rich people to part with the cash that they are comfortable spending on leisure. It has a nasty side effect of baiting people who can't afford it to spend too much.

The game developers are trying to enable people to part with the cash. That's it. Baiting people in to spending too much (which means people can't afford it, that's why it's too much) is the intended effect.

It's a couple centuries to late to be pretending that it's just some tragic oopsie

It's like this because if you put a price on the box then no one buys it, and on Android it gets heavily pirated (100:1 pirates to purchasers).

I have been trying my whole career to maintain artistic dignity in mobile gaming, but you gotta realise why and how this has happened.

Apple arcade is trying to help.

I don't like loot boxes. But I'm not egotistical enough to say that just because I don't like something, it should be banned.

This is the same moral panic that would have made arcades and baseball cards illegal. Those both follow the model of "put money in, maybe you'll get a reward." Loot boxes are the 21st century innovation of that mechanic, and if you're going to make an argument about "flashing lights and rigged games enticing young minds" then you better be prepared to argue that Dave & Busters should be shut down too, because that has all of the fanfare and phycological reward structure of loot boxes, plus physical sensations and sensory overload, plus cash value payouts, and yet the kids are alright.

Considering policies that prevent someone from enriching themselves from the ruin of others isn’t just based on “not liking it.” It’s a fundamental decision about the ethics of the society that we want.

Basically everyone agrees with that which is why the question is over how much enrichment should we allow from how much ruin.

The fact that "the ruin of others" is entirely consensual means that it is indeed based just on "not liking it".

No victim, no crime.

Go spend some time with people who have had "consensual" addiction ruin their lives and tell me there is no victim again.

Thus doesn't mean you have to make addictive things illegal, but it does mean that you should investigate mitigation strategies and regulate the industry to prevent deliberate exploitation of these vulnerable people.

I've spent a lot of time with addicts who have chosen to stop, and a lot of time with addicts who have chosen to continue. To insinuate that the addict has no control or isn't actively making a choice is to dismiss the large percentage of addicts who decide the other way and stop.

There is no victim when someone chooses to harm themselves, any more than there is a victim when someone chooses to better themselves.

loot boxes are designed / deconstructed gambling devices... but also, we see "loot box" design in loads of regular companies too, like when you buy plane tickets or in services where you literally open up a box e.g. Blue Apron

Those are very different things. The whole point behind loot boxes is that you never know what you're going to get, and it might be quite rare/valuable. With both Blue Apron like boxes and airplane tickets you know and select exactly what you're going to get.

I think with airplane tickets the costs can be quite variable, but you're right it doesn't make you want to buy more boxes.

With Blue Apron, the quality of ingredients always ends up shifting... some weeks were terrible, and it was always like "oh, maybe next week's box will be better?" In the end, it always ended up not being worth the price of subscription. I think sometimes they'd skimp on the cost/quality of a box, and then lead you to think that staying subscribed for the next week would be worth it.

Not completely analogous to loot boxes, but I think in both cases the design is still influenced by variable rewards systems, just not as obvious as loot boxes.

> it always ended up not being worth the price of subscription.

I mean, this is a given, right? They can't make money unless the price of the contents + shipping is less than what they charge you.

Although, this isn't obvious at sign up.

There was a very serious situation involving children and gambling and popular streamers on counter-strike global offensive. It was a scandal, but it could have been way bigger.

The book “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” is a scholarly work covering related topics.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad...

In other news, water is also wet!

But in all seriousness, what these companies have done is take gambling to a newer, worst level. It’s just packaged different, but I’m not really opposed to it unless with minors.

A more interesting story is the shifting market. Casino-gaming and sports betting is basically stagnant on innovation and growth because of regulation — trapped to bubble cities or locations — while tech companies are allowed to slap a cute UI on basically the same thing and run wild unregulated anywhere in the world via the Internet.

Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech? Would be fun to walk into a casino and have it be a real world game experience.

Maybe it can't really be improved. Do their clientele really want improved roulette or slots? Or even something completely different/complicated like a RPG? I doubt that.

There are people who really, really love the video slots that were designed in the 80s for CRTs. They've been upgraded and ported to new platforms and now run on LCDs, but they don't dare change the game or graphics because there are total diehards that are into the specifics just the way they are.

> Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech?

A while back I was in Vegas. I don't gamble but some friends did, so I spent hours wandering the casino floors. With my product hat on, I could see so much to improve in the computer-driven games like slot machines. So many ideas for making things more fun.

What stopped me was watching faces. Most people on casino floors are not having fun. They looked miserable, desperate, compelled. I wasn't looking at play, but addiction. That's not something I wanted to make more of.

I’ve seen that at the slots. People just staring.

what got me was I saw someone win, the sounds and light where amazing, but I think I was more excited than the winner.

If you play a lot maybe you get immune to the sensory overload that is a casino.

If you gamble the game I like to play is craps. It’s more social and a more fun way to loose your money.

A craps table that has recently produced several wins for players (colloquially a “hot table”) is an amazing social experience.

I prefer poker for a combination of mental exertion, social banter, and entertainment. You don’t have to be great at it for it to be a very slow bleed of chips and at a lot of low-limit tables, the other players are so fundamentally unsound that you can have a break-even or positive expected-value from fairly basic play that you could learn in a few hours.

I'm mediocre at poker but generally turn a profit in casino poker rooms. The trick is to never go up against the sharks unless you've got the nuts (for those not familiar, "the nuts" is a poker term that means the best possible hand on the table)

I guess you also have to have developed the ability to identify who the sharks are at a poker table.

I was just reading about this phenomenon. It seems these machines have been designed to create flow in the gambler's mind. If the win disrupts this flow it is actually annoying to the player.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/5976927/slot-machines-casinos-a...

The saddest thing I ever saw with my own two eyes was at a blackjack table in a smaller, rural casino. I was at a table with my sister and we were playing $5 and $10 rounds.

A man walked in with a duffel bag on his shoulder. It was a chilly day outside but he was in just jeans and a T-shirt. He walked up to the table, pulled a $100 bill out of an envelope, and put it on the table for a cash play.

Busted. -$100.

He pulled out another bill and played another round.

17, dealer had 20. -$100.

Third and final bill.

20. Dealer blackjack.

He didn't say a word, or show dismay, or really have any expression at all. Just slung his bag back over his shoulder and walked out.

That actually sounds like a much more healthy way to gamble than spending hours at the table/machine chasing dopamine hits. You can plan how much you are willing to lose in advance and more easily stick to it (rather than after hours of the game and casino feeding you chemicals).

He probably was a gambling addict. They develop weird routines like this to deal with it. I knew a guy that would just walk in and play one round of roulette with everything he had planned to spend there, then walk out win or lose.

To his credit, if you're compelled to play roulette, that's the optimal way to play. Every spin is stacked against the player (that is, the payout * the odds of hitting a particular bet are all less than 100%), so minimizing the number of spins minimizes the stacking of the odds against winning.

Yep, that was basically what was going on in his head. He was compelled to go there and gamble but had some control over how. The whole thing reminded me of a methadone clinic.

No, it’s more like he sold his coat for $300 and left with the last of his belongings in the duffel bag

Sure, I guess. The pall it put everybody under killed the table, though. Even the dealer was sad for him, and I assume a dealer at a rural U.S. casino has seen things.

Joylessly losing as much as possible as efficiently as possible, and then leaving? What’s the healthy part? Or do you mean more that it’s less acutely harmful than enjoying the games while you lose?

The benefit that the tech industry has is that each person carrier their addiction in their pocket and are mostly alone when they look miserable, desperate, and compelled.

There's a lot of truth to this. When I looked at the revenue from mobile gaming "whales" I was shocked. I remember some Zynga people explaining things at a conference and I couldn't tell if they were oblivious to the harm they were causing or just indifferent. Either way, it repulsed me.

With my product hat on, I could see so much to improve in the computer-driven games like slot machines.

Everything about these machines has been painstakingly A/B tested to maximise their intended purpose - there was nothing that you saw that would be considered an improvement by those machines owners.

Exactly right. This is like all the people here who thought they could unstick the Ever Given.

A lot of machines in a casino may be quite ancient and we learn new things about manipulating each other every day.

If your point is that the intended owners don't care about player experience except to the extent it maximizes revenue, I agree. But I disagree that there's no possible improvement in those terms.

A/B testing is great for incremental improvement. It's bad for major innovation. Which is why a lot of the pioneering work in engineered addiction is not being done in Vegas but in "game" companies. I note that "gaming" use to mean gambling [1], but now the very term is being taken over. This is classic Innovator's Dilemma territory, where an existing micro-optimized industry segment ignores major changes for way too long.

[1] E.g., https://gaming.nv.gov/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

I used to go to casinos with the idea of spending some money to have a good time interacting with pretty machines, lights, other people -- breaking even would be a win because of the fun times. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize what I actually wanted was to go play at an Arcade. There aren't any in my city anymore though, and that always makes me sad.

>In other news, water is also wet!

I dislike this mentality that I often see. Common sense can be misleading and humans like to deceive themselves. Studies on things that are obvious often yield surprising results.

Agree, just playful commentary here.

A news article insinuating morals about an industry of ridiculously paid engineers creating the most addictive possible behavior, through extremely optimized gambling mechanisms, being posted to a forum of other ridiculously high paid engineers.

It deserves a little jest...

Edit: To be clear, I don’t think being paid well is bad — it’s obviously good thing. I don’t think working for big tech is bad — it’s also a good thing. Just when stuff like this gets posted, the info really deserves “all the cards on the table”. This in particular is extremely greed driven dark corner of tech from the bottom workers to the top workers and honestly I don’t blame any of them.

>being posted to a forum where those very engineers congregate

ftfy

The point of the comments were to bring serious discussion to tech’s presence in the industry of feasting on humanities worst behaviors — not to poke fun of article or research.

> Studies on things that are obvious often yield surprising results.

No, they don't. Empirically false.

Empirically false that they "often" yield surprising results - i think the adjective "occasionally" would be more correct.

'Occasionally' invalidates his entire premise.

> Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech?

Cryptocurrency exchanges are the new casinos, and to some extent apps like robin-hood.

yeah, and there are literally crypto gambling games out there too. I'd really advise not to play any of them, though

>Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech?

Not quite what you asked but prediction markets are perhaps the only gambling space that's both useful and innovating but sadly some jurisdictions like the US are especially harsh on it.

Crypto prediction markets like poly.market or augur (finally picking up steam) come to mind.

Paid loot boxes in video games come from Japan, a territory where gambling is illegal (except for pachinko parlors, where gambling with added steps takes place) and they're known as gacha.

They got very good at improving the system to make it increasingly addictive, eventually creating "kompu gacha", a system so addictive that it left thousands of families with telephone bills in the thousands of dollars. That's when regulators intervened and now kompu gacha is illegal.

Loot boxes are meant to be addictive and make you lose track of your spending.

They also target children. And they don't just target them. These people have read every book there is about emotional and social manipulation tactics in order to hook people.

I know a lot of gaming (as in Vegas) developers that were way into Facebook games and slots back in the mid 2010s, on the hopes that FB would eventually allow you to cash out FarmVille-type points into USD.

It's pretty apparent that this wasn't going to happen under governmental watch, since it's a literal opening of the barn doors to federally-endorsed gambling. So the developers lost interest and went elsewhere.

AFAIK none of the CuteUI mobile games can covert back to cash, and luckily the idea of a rare skin or weapon has taken the place of cash.

I think even doing this to adults is reprehensible. And what makes a 17 year old not able to manage it but an 18 or 19 yr old is free reign? As I get older, the more I realize we're all just kids but a little bigger. But that shift from being a teenager to an adult didn't make me substantially more able to cope with addiction.

I met a guy in a Starbucks in Palm Springs... He was working at a casino gaming company that was like making a Diablo clone or something. Like you'd pay to play and could play with your friends and get a pay out somehow. Sounded cool actually.

"limited time offers and special deals", like literally any company selling something out there.

"The report said that many games use a "psychological nudge" to encourage people to buy loot boxes - such as the fear of missing out on limited-time items or special deals"

I am Duke's complete lack of surprise.

I think behavioural research like this has value. But, once we're speaking in terms of nudges & clustering... I feel the terms are ambiguous for scientific language.

That is... This probably is useful to the gambling regulator, addiction counselors and such, especially if similar results are found in similar studies. OTOH, they may not hold true in a different country, or 7 years from now, etc.

Conversely... I wouldn't be surprised to find many gambling ads surrounding loot box videos on youtube.

The orthodox scientific approach is to seek generalities. Any clustering of loot box consumption & problem gambling exists on the plane of generalities that the UKGC or addiction charity operate in. It's an awkward place for science though.

Academic pathologies notwithstanding, replication means something different in behavioural sciences... Either that or behavioural science has to be confined to a fairly small realm. Ultimately, what facebook do with their optimization algorithms (or any startup a/b testing) is similar to what gambleaware do. Companies have less need for formal publishing than NGOs, GOs and such. They need a way of informing decisions that convinces the boss, not the world.

Not sure where I'm going with this.

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