This is pretty screwed up, because it kind of trains your brain to be a gambling brain. To crave the instant gratification, the high of risk taking etc.

I think the time has come when android and ios should make a special versions of their online shops for children and teenagers and simply ban those types of games from those shops. This will at least prevent children from having their brains rewired. Of course this will remove the vast majority of games from the online shops, but so be it.

I remember my experience with these types of games. I wasted a lot of time and got a lot of needless frustration but I never once paid those bastards a single cent. There was a game called Candy Crush Saga. It was very popular in its day. Their in game super power currency was something called "lollipop hammers." They made one candy disappear. It seemed a pretty simple game, assuming the game boards (i.e., the candys) were randomly generated, but of course they weren't. They were carefully created so that they present problems that are very difficult to solve under the game's usual rules but were easy and downright delightful to solve using a lollipop hammer.

I would look at the gameboard for a long time and imagine all the great combos I would achieve, if I could only get rid of a single pesky candy, but alas, one had to use a lollipop hammer for that. I actually ended up having a lot of respect for the designers, it was not easy to design a board that would be incredibly difficult unless one candy was removed but if that candy was removed, it would all solve itself in an explosion of combos and extra points.

I was very proud that I solved so many of these boards without using a single lollipop hammer. But my reward would always be a board that is even harder and where the temptation to use the hammer was even greater. Eventually I decided that this is simply torture. I did not mind hard puzzles, I liked solving hard puzzles, but the temptation of the lollipop hammer being always there and me having to constantly use willpower to avoid clicking on those hammers made the whole experience miserable.

So quit and deleted the game, but I can proudly say that I never paid for a single lollipop hammer and I left 8 of the 10 hammers you get for free unused. I hope some random King employee looked at my cancelled account with so many puzzles solved and yet so few lollipop hammers used and felt a little pang of defeat. But I doubt it.