> If, as in casino games, there is hope for you to get your money back, and more, there is temptation to play just to cover your losses, which will eventually result in a downwards spiral. That is, you already can't pay the bills, so you take a loan to play more. After all, it was a bad losing streak, you will win the next one, that's for sure...
Plenty of retirees flock to casinos as soon as their Social Security check clears, then spend it all and go home without selling their grandchildren into sex trafficking. There is a difference between poor people and gambling addicts. A subset of all gamblers (addicts) struggle with rationality and will reach for someone else's wallet when theirs is empty-- and eventually find themselves encased in concrete at the bottom of what's left of Lake Mead. They would do this to obtain more heroin or meth just the same.
You're describing a worst-case scenario. Most gamblers are just poor people, who are poor because they make poor choices with money (like spending it at casinos). The type who trade in functional cars and finance a new truck every time they get a raise, or buy new appliances that cost exactly as much as their tax refund check. Money burns a hole in their pocket, but they don't become the neighborhood firebug. Ironically winning the lottery usually ruins the lives of them and everyone connected to them, since their spending scales linearly with available resources. They're just cows that consume until nothing is left, then they switch from pleasure-seeking to subsistence. They're not intelligent, but they are rational.
Kids don't have vaults full of money, and they have no equity worth loan-sharking for. Their rationality is up for debate, but there's no money to be made in kneecapping or drowning child debtors. What they do have is a surplus of attention. So you keep them engaged through all means available and milk them for quarters as long as you can. Dopamine derived from playing the game is the payout children get. Casino "games" are fucking lame beyond all comprehension, so casinos have to give adults some incentive to play the push-this-button-and-leave-nothing-to-your-children game.
To me, I don't see the situation being any different than traditional arcade machines (some games had owner-adjustable difficulty settings, and I swear some games outright cheated), and yet the current state of things feels more exploitative. Maybe it's the RNG-dependence and not skill...at least you could earn extended time and rewards if you were good at the game. Everything is gacha-crap these days.
I've always been amused that the Spice channel and the like were 100% scrambled by default. Seems like they could have done way better showing the non-explicit parts of movies/shows as a "free sample," then only scrambling the signal with a quick-activation hotline overlay the second the sexy parts start.