Casino-like apps have drained people of millions | Hacker News Reader

Casino-like apps have drained people of millions

nbcnews.com

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"The company has said in previous court filings that only a fraction of the game's players actually spend money."

I was recruited by a sports gambling company and went as far as interviewing with them. I really enjoyed the interview (interesting tech, really smart people) and I've placed a few bets along with friends before in the past without ill effect, so I did some quick checking about how gambling businesses make money. As far as I could tell, across different gambling businesses, the focus is on "whales" -- chronic gamblers who spend as much as they can or more on gambling. The public image of these "whales" is the immensely rich person who visits a casino a few weekends per year and casually loses a hundred million that they won't miss, but a lot of the "whales" are people like the ones in the article, middle class people who lose hundreds of thousands of dollars while desperately trying, and ultimately failing, to stop their addiction from ruining their lives.

Online gambling makes it profitable to pursue smaller and smaller whales, because you aren't limited by the amount of space inside your casino, or the number of people who live near or can afford to visit your casino. Your targets are everybody where you can legally operate, and you're running A/B tests and other optimization technology to increase an addictive behavior. I.e., their business model is to stoke a ruinous addiction across every social and economic class in every jurisdiction they can legally operate in.

Standard disclaimers: I'm not an expert, not an insider, not in the industry at all. Also, none of the information I learned was directly about the company I interviewed with. I'm just talking about my understanding of how gambling businesses work from what I could glean online.

Anyway, I didn't take that job.

Reminds me of most social media

Social media doesn't cause $100,000+ in direct losses like gambling does.

It does cause serious lifelong mental illness, which often results on $100k+ in indirect losses.

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-social-m...

And they, including Mark, actively worked against doing something about it:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/sacramento/...

The article you linked certainly doesn't use the words "cause" or "lifelong".

Correct, I inferred those words.

It would be difficult to prove that social media causes lifelong anything, because there social media hasn't been around long enough.

It's like smoking. They used to say the same things. Smoking hasn't been proven to cause cancer, etc. Then over time the science got better, more data, and bam. It was proven.

I believe this is similar. You don't. That's OK. Time will tell.

This isn't gambling as you don't win anything of value. Every dollar you spend is guaranteed to never get you any money back.

Social media can certainly ruin your life, but it doesn't seem to do it quite as spectacularly and as thoroughly as a bad case of gambling addiction does.

And if it weren't for those bad cases, most of the gambling industry wouldn't exist. They aren't making their money from my friends flying down to Vegas and losing $50 each at the blackjack table.

This is the business model of many free-to-play games.

For instance: Overwatch relies on whales to purchase their excessively expensive and worthless in-game skins, and fund the business.

In my experience most free-to-plays just use a battlepass nowadays and don’t rely on whales (though obviously all games have them)

Gambling based games like cs:go and genshin absolutely apply to what you’re saying though

Battle Pass is just a subscription with more steps. It was cool when I could just pay $50 for an online game and play it for years in dedicated servers so long as there were other people who paid $50 out there.

I miss community-hosted servers in games.

Nowadays it's all servers that are only run by the developer, who could just flip a switch tomorrow and tell you "Remember that $80 you spent on Game 1 few years ago? You're gonna have to pay up again for Game 2. Also we're turning off the servers for Game 1."

Overwatch 2 was odd because it was only half that.

"Remember that $80 you spent on Game 1 a few years ago? Well, you get Game 2 for free. Also, were turning off the servers for Game 1"

It doesn't sound as wrong but the community still hated it.

> It doesn't sound as wrong but the community still hated it.

It only seems odd if all context is left out.

Blizzard's whole pitch for Overwatch 2 is that it would introduce single player and co-op PvE content. It didn't do that.

Overwatch 2 was much stingier with rewards for gameplay than Overwatch 1.

Overwatch 2 started locking new heroes behind a paywall, where they'd previously been entirely free in Overwatch 1.

Overwatch 2 charged much more for it's items, and limited specific items to bundles in an attempt to force players to spend much more than they would for the item itself.

Overwatch 2 made multiple changes to balance, that weren't always well received.

The sad thing is that people seemed fairly excited for PvE Overwatch. That excitement was strangled through a combination of hubris, corporate greed, and an inability to deliver.

There've been PvE missions for a few months now. I think part of the reason they were initially cut/delayed was because of all the shakeups at Blizzard after so many people left and/or got fired for misconduct.

Also, you mention unpopular balance patches, but "Blizzard sucks at balancing" has been a complaint since the early days of OW1 :P I remember when the first Mercy rework dropped... and the Bastion rework... and everything about Brigitte...

They are only a glimpse of what was promised. They're void of humans and filled with bots now. No replayability and just a learning down.

Do they have custom map support yet? Most of my time in TF2 was not spent on official maps. It seems like server browsers have been disappearing since the jump from MW1 to MW2, where the quality of the PC experience is dampened for the sake of making it more like the console experience.

Nope. Custom game modes and all that exist solely on existing maps or the testing plane/box maps.

The cloest Overwatch has ever gotten to a custom map was when a (offical) OW map designer was desinging a level with his viewers on Twitch one day. Blizzard than later suprised everyone by putting it in the game for a limited time.

> There've been PvE missions for a few months now. I think part of the reason they were initially cut/delayed was because of all the shakeups at Blizzard after so many people left and/or got fired for misconduct.

The missions they released have nothing in common with what was discussed. PvE was meant to have persistent hero levelling, skill trees, and a proper story. What they eventually released wasn't far off what would've been a seasonal event game mode in the past, in addition to being laughably expensive and horribly broken.

> Also, you mention unpopular balance patches, but "Blizzard sucks at balancing" has been a complaint since the early days of OW1 :P I remember when the first Mercy rework dropped... and the Bastion rework... and everything about Brigitte...

The OW2 changes went beyond a broken hero. They made fundamental changes to the way the game is played with the reduction in team size and changes to tanks.

All this.

I discovered OW1 a year before it was ended. I was addicted to this game like I haven't been since I was a teenager. I would sleep and dream of the music.. it was bad.

OW2 came out and it instantly changed things. Tanks were no longer fun to play. I haven't played a single game of OW2 in almost 10 months.

Many use both in order to capture multiple types of buyers.

Buying skins in a game is the same thing as buying fashionable/brand-name clothes. Gambling is different.

I'm not in that industry, but if I was, I bet you could do something shady. Perhaps people who buy expensive skins have an increased chance of "luck" within the game. Critical hits may be more likely, more high quality gear drops. It's possible there isn't a clear line between gambling and fashion. At least, that's if the industry is unscrupulous, and I generally assume that describes most companies.

Having played a lot of games, if that was the case, it would be vox populi. In all gaming communities there are very smart people and if the damage output is important, they'll have it traced, if loot if important, it'll be traced too.

In the Call of Duty games if you purchase a premium skin the matchmaking algorithm tries to match you into servers where fewer (or no) players have that same skin, to increase the feeling of exclusivity. This is not a secret, Activision even patented the idea.

I wonder if anybody specifically gets "elite" skins to increase their odds of being matched against easier opponents.

Unless the skin is in a lootbox

I was a Hearthstone whale on a small scale relative to wealthier people and a large scale relative to my family's annual income. I wanted certain gold cards (rarer) for aesthetic reasons in my decks, and shortly before I quit all Blizzard games (for the slot machines they are, to me) I bought fifty packs just to get enough dust to craft the golden legendary I wanted.

I did something similar with World of Warcraft, buying a level boost that I ended up not using, just to "round out my character list." It was a low point in my life and I will never go back to that behavior.

I recognize these games can be used and enjoyed responsibly, just not by me and that's okay.

This comment made me chuckle. Because I am a sober alcoholic. One of the things I remind myself all the time is: "It's wonderful that people can enjoy alcohol in moderation. I am not one of them."

It makes me sad that you can't play quite good games, just because predatory monetization has ruined them. It's not your fault, it's just the world we live in.

Hearthstone helped me get over my regret about selling all my Magic: the Gathering cards. I played Magic on the school bus in the 90s, had a lot of fun trading and making decks, and eventually sold it all because I didn't make the effort to find people to play with.

Hearthstone lowered that barrier significantly, and I still consider it an excellent game, aside from the predatory/monetary trappings. I might still play it if it could be done with real magic at my dinner table with friends, for a one-time flat fee or for the caloric cost to summon all the components, assuming some reasonable magic system.

As it is now, I like playing Cribbage with my wife, and am looking forward to teaching our daughter how to play Chess, Go, Backgammon, Arimaa, and any other game that isn't packaged in a predatory wrap.

If you ever want to get back into magic, definitely check out pauper. The decks have to use only card that were printed at common rarity. There are only like 20 cards in the cardpool that are over $2, and you can build pretty much any deck for less than $50.

> I recognize these games can be used and enjoyed responsibly, just not by me and that's okay.

Smoker before smoking is widely recognized as an addiction:

> I recognize these herbs can be use and enjoyed responsibly, just not by me and that's okay.

Ok, tbh, not all games and gaming are addictive. Though a big proportion is, with the rest being wasting one's life, as defined by a certain set of moral values. Though that is not yet a crime.

Yeah it's exactly like buying Gucci, except if it was dispensed in a slot machine and you had to spin it 100 times to get the clothes you want.

And the odds of the machine were rigged and personalized to you, which is illegal in real gambling

Overwatch and almost all modern games moved past the lootbox mechanic because that was getting too close to many countries gambling laws.

Now you just buy what you want.

Like you go into a store and buy a Gucci wallet. You go into the Overwatch store and buy the latest One Piece Collab.

No slot machine or anything.

Regarding RMT, I think Valve did the master play with their proto-NFT marketplace stuff, really ahead of the curve.

The Overwatch store is in your living room and available 24/7, before/during/after intense gameplay.

Do you know that Gucci has on-line store, also available 24/7 from your living room?

Gucci isn’t affordable by many, a $30 skin is. Plus the overwatch skin is digital, you can’t resell it nor does it mean anything in the real world. Not the same.

What do either od those have to do with anything?

Because affordability affects the success of the money grab?

There is a distinction between lootboxes with tradable items and those without, if the items are tradable it is literally gambling. But yeah, sucky either way

It's not the trading, it's the paying money for lootboxes. Plenty of roguelikes/roguelites have loot boxes, but they randomly generated chests you open by defeating bosses, not by pulling out your credit card

>Yeah it's exactly like buying Gucci, except if it was dispensed in a slot machine and you had to spin it 100 times to get the clothes you want.

Not sure if you're into buying designer stuff, but that industry is going in a similar-ish direction.

People buy a bunch of undesirable crap just so they can be put on the VIP list and maaaaybe get the opportunity to purchase the actually desirable products at a far below market price.

Not sure if Gucci themselves do this, but I know Rolex and at least one of the big handbag brands (Hermes?) operate this way.

> Buying skins in a game is the same thing as buying fashionable/brand-name clothes. Gambling is different.

It’s not a good fit either: A game company can terminate your account and you lose it all.

Depending on the game, but in some you also cannot resell or transfer your skins. Therefore the only thing of value is the account, but terms of service also make this a non-starter.

What’s consistent here is that the business model revolves around feeding and addiction and relying in said addicts (aka, whales).

Buying skins from the skinner box

You can resell clothes. You can't resell skins in most games, including Overwatch.

People can be addicted to games as well, and spend thousands of [insert monetary units], tons of such cases on Eve and simple mobile "pay-to-play" freemium games. Probably not on the scale of addictive gambling it's definitely no insignificant.

> ... but a lot of the "whales" are people like the ones in the article, middle class people who lose hundreds of thousands of dollars while desperately trying, and ultimately failing, to stop their addiction from ruining their lives.

$4.4 m of net worth puts you in the top 1% by US standards. In the rest of the world (short of Monaco, Luxembourg and Switzerland and the likes), it's much less. For example top 1% in France means a net worth of $2m.

I find it hilarious the notion that the "middle class" would have "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of disposable income to splurge on gambling.

I'd go as far as saying that being in the top 1% in, say, France, puts you in the "rich" class, not the "middle class" and that with a net worth of $2m you do not have line of credits allowing you to bet hundreds of thousands of EUR/USD.

P.S: I was invited at some dude's place where he had this 3 meters high Jeff Koens sculpture (Ballerinas, kinda Jeff Koens' trademark), probably worth millions. He had four house employees serving coffee, cooking, etc. Reading HN I'd be tempted to believe he was actually a poor middle class chap and that only the Zuck and Gates are "rich".

I think dkarkl's point is that it's not disposable income. Using the house HELC or emptying the retirement account to fund your gambling habit is an easy and ruinous way to get your hands on hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're middle class.

> I find it hilarious the notion that the "middle class" would have "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of disposable income to splurge on gambling.

Don’t forget that there’s also an entire industry looking to loan money to middle class folks.

I'm confused, are you just mad about the label middle class, or do you believe that the only people spending large sums on gambling can afford it and therefore there are no ethical issues in this type of business?

Because you seem to be setting up a straw man bringing in a lot of talk about net worths in the millions, when the conversation was about losing "hundreds of thousands". The median net worth for a US family is $192k according to a recent Nerdwallet article, so it's absolutely in the realm of possibility that millions of Americans are vulnerable to losing hundreds of thousands to a gambling addiction. Certainly a lot of people would have their lives destroyed by losing $50k to a gambling addiction, and no doubt that happens plenty. Where we draw the line on what constitutes middle class doesn't really seem all that relevant to me.

The point of the article is that those hundreds of thousands of dollars are NOT disposable income -- they are life savings and home equity loans. What a callous comment.

> I find it hilarious the notion that the "middle class" would have "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of disposable income to splurge on gambling.

They get access to that money by borrowing it or embezzling it. Lots of middle class people have boring jobs with access to hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars.

If you read the article, one of the persons took out a HELOC to fund their addiction. Another one blew their entire inheritance. None of that is "disposable income".

A co-worker's spouse took a job at a company like that. I heard about it at a company dinner. I knew that they were quite religious so I had to ask how that squared, and the response was, "Oh, I would never use the product". It made me feel really uneasy, since I knew I'm fairly libertarian and I'd have a problem sleeping on it. The argument is always, if I don't take the money, someone else will. I guess I wouldn't like working in a liquor store or a bank either.

IME religious beliefs require suspension of disbelief and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

When I was religious I was uncomfortable with gambling and always voted to outlaw or heavily regulate it. Yet I can see folks I knew easily justifying taking such a job. The mentality was work for the heathen to win them to Jesus, and if you got really well paid then that's more you can tithe to the kingdom.

They are called VIPs, not whales, in sports-betting world

I worked with it for a while and if I was in a position to leave that industry I would have done it sooner. But I do have to say that at least the sports betting companies I worked on they did try their hardest to follow the law as much as possible.

One thing I have to say is that it is abhorrent that betting websites are allowed to advertise at all. It should be threated the same as smoking ads regulations.

Wait until you realize advertising should not be allowed.

I can’t see how this deserves to be downvoted. As far as I’m concerned, anything other than “just the facts, ma’am” advertising is about preying on human weakness. It’s legal, but is it right?

I don't think it is correct to say all advertising is preying on human weakness. Some people create good and beneficial products. advertising is how you get the word out about your product.

Just have a website/app/whatever that displays a database of products and information about each, comparisons, etc.

There is no excuse for invading people's lives with unasked for media of any kind.

People who want to know about new products can go to places where such information is available and seek it out.

> Some people create good and beneficial products.

and those would shine with a "just the facts ma'am" approach.

If you put a commercial on TV with "just the facts" it's still an ad.

if you make a useful product it will be found regardless

That doesn’t work outside of mass market products.

Not in the age of internet. It does work. People asking in reddit and internet forums (word-of-mouth) is what it is. If there is a need, humankind will get around to satisfy it. Even if it doesn't work enough to satisfy the need, someone will scrape the web to create a database of every product being sold and put an LLM with embedding search in front of it to make it work. Probably Google. Ah, but turns out there is money to be made with advertising.

As a counterpoint, %99 of the ads I see are companies I already know about. I'm seeing the ads of same services of the same set of companies every year since I got a smartphone. Ads are just manipulation through creating familiarity through repetition.

Sure it does, people ask others all the time about a solution to a very specific problem.

The real problem is where to draw the line, which is partly cultural.

There's a similar concept in legal contracts, with "unconscionable" terms.

If you really believed in that idea you wouldn't go on news.ycombinator.com to advertise it

> they did try their hardest to follow the law as much as possible

Well that absolves them now, doesn't it?

It does doesn't it? If someone chooses to gamble, it's at least better to do so with regulated companies that have to follow the law. The alternative is to gamble illegally, where you might not even get paid odds or payouts.

The world where the gambler stops gambling doesn't exist.

The article says that you win points but there is no way to win money back or get payouts. What is legal is not the same thing as what is moral (and vice versa).

No illegal alternative necessary, the players of this app get zero odds and payouts.

gherkinnn is saying that just because it is legal does not mean that the people behind the company are free of responsibility for the damage their app creates.

in the hood, so to speak, illegal gambling pays better than legal gambling.

> The world where the gambler stops gambling doesn't exist.

Casually ignoring that a large amount of gambling addicts have stopped gambling.

Also, just because people are addicted and it's not illegal doesn't make it morally right. You're still financially benefitting from their addiction.

These online casinos aren't simply complicit in their gambling addiction they are actively fueling it trying to optimize the addictiveness of their platform.

From experience the stats are roughly thus:

- 4% of users pay for something

- 1% of users fund the entire business

food should also be illegal because the one time month you buy some special flour for $10 it gives you some shit recipe on the back that also says to buy Xcorp's other $12 special grain then it also requires some meme ingredient of the month like gochujang sauce. when you go to buy the $12 special grain, there will also be a conveniently placed $20 bottle of """premium""" gochujang sauce beside it and you think, "wow i'm glad this happened to be here so i didn't have to go search for it".

now you will also buy a $5 package of some spice that will go bad by the time you use half the bag

finally, you can make the meal. and it turns out okay. then repeat next month with all new ingredients. and you throw out all these previous ones then as your cupboard is getting too full of things you will never use for anything else.

in fact cooking should be illegal for these reasons because they create too much unnecessary waste and co2 emissions.

then the next day you realize you still don't know how to cook even the most basic thing and buy KFC because you already spent like 5 hours on the previous venture. $40 for the family. then there's the medical visits due to eating deep fried food and 100ml of water 3 times a day.

> how you're telling me there's something wrong with my diet? everyone else eats like this! i'm getting a new doctor

all this could have been avoided by real education such as just buying a cook book published 100 years ago.

and don't even get me started with websites, they meme you into buying 10x more fake ingredients and meme recipes that will not teach you anything.

the average poor stressed out mom spends $20K a year on this, more than twice her retail salary! making her even more dependent on her abusive husband!

what else should be illegal? alcohol.

also the article mentions that an addiction counselor got addicted. reminds me of shit arguments alex jones people make up. like when "redpillers" thought covid was ebola they would state how a top medical authority got covid. then when they thought covid was fake the would state how a top medical authority got sick from the vaccine.

"Suzie Kelly of Dallas previously told Reveal News how she spent about $400,000 on the game. She took out a home equity loan and used the money she inherited when her mother died to fund her habit."

This is a symptom of problem gambling. The article makes it sound like this app is exploiting the same neurological reward pathways as regular gambling, and causing the same kinds of damage. The lack of monetary reward might prevent more people from trying this compared to other apps where winning money is a possibility, but exactly the same kind of people will get hooked on this version, and in the same way, and cause the same kind of damage as problem gambling for money.

Surely it's even worse, because it's available 24/7 wherever you are, instead of being somewhere you have to physically visit.

Plenty of online casinos exist as well.

Why the deflection? Both are a problem, no? One just slips past the “oh gambling is bad for you” mental defense

Problem for whom? We also have luxury stores selling expensive designer goods that people waste millions on.

Why do we care so much about this specific form of people wasting their money? What’s wrong with letting people go broke the way they choose?

I don't think you fully understand the issue if you compare this to people buying expensive designer goods.

If you know something others don't then please explain. Otherwise, why bother to comment?

The comparison to luxury goods is not really accurate here IMO. When you purchase a luxury watch you get something tangible in return. These apps purposely prey on psychological weaknesses to get people addicted - a better comparison would be something like phone call scams.

Wait, per $ spent luxury clothes are generally as practically useless as skins in a game. And, people who sell them do it by tapping into social status instincts. So whether tangible, or not, I don't see much difference

Gambling engages the brain's reward system, releasing neurotransmitters like dopamine, creating a pleasurable experience. This reinforcement mechanism, coupled with the unpredictable nature of wins, contributes to the development of addiction. The element of chance activates cognitive processes that can lead to irrational beliefs, such as the illusion of control or the gambler's fallacy. Factors like accessibility, environmental cues, and social reinforcement further shape addictive behavior. Unlike purchasing goods, where the exchange is tangible and predictable, gambling introduces a unique set of psychological stimuli, risk factors, and reinforcement mechanisms that can lead to addictive patterns and challenges in self-control.

Thanks, this explanation makes much more sense. However, it's still misses the fact that dopamine involved in our lives very widely, and addictions can be developed to practically anything. "Normal" games are a good example, as well as obsessive buying, or aesthetic procedures, caffeine, sugar. All this things (and many more) can become uncontrollable, and dangerous to the point of death. When people demand something to be prohibited because they got moved by a story of a poor soul destroyed by addiction they must realize logical implications. Like way more people affected by alcohol than by gambling, and yet at this times most people would point you that prohibition didn't work.

You've still created a tangible product, that someone gets utility value out of, and they could potebtially resell if needed.

The good itself is produced by employees, has material inputs from suppliers, contributes to the economy in other ways.

I can agree with reselling part (not sure if it works for every luxury item, but I guess in general it should). But economically it's still the same. Revenue makes salaries, taxes, it contributes to specific research areas (as other commenter noted bot detection got funded by this induatry) etc.

and NFT JPEGs. I agree, there's a lot of things people spend their money on, the collectibles industry for example is known for this. Luxury goods appeal to people projecting status because of brand names. Your question is valid, why do we only care about this specific form? In this instance I think it's because it's about designing apps to be addictive, although I don't really agree with that being the case here. There's online or even digital slot machines that are not designed to be addictive, they are just virtual slot machines. Then there's trading crypto, options and stocks, industries whose marketing and pump schemes are all about projecting an image and manipulating emotions to convince people to buy into what are often scams if not an inversion narrative (which is where you buy into a system rigged against you by some kind of monopoly that when you look at the mechanics functions exactly the way a Ponzi scheme does). I also don't think you are deflecting.

> Your question is valid, why do we only care about this specific form?

Why do you think people only care about this specific form? It's definitely one of the most discussed forms but I'd think that's mainly because it's a relatively novel medium.

I feel much the same way about betting shops, luxury brands, etc. as I do these "games". Luxury brands are often particularly detestable. It has become almost impossible to determine whether you're paying for a good quality product or just burning money. Even when of good quality, brands often go far beyond what could be considered moral. Hermes springs to mind in particular, convincing people to debase themselves in the hopes of being offered the chance to purchase an overpriced bag.

In this case, I believe the point is the lack of gatekeeping. For Luxury brands, you have to have that amount to start getting them. For physical casinos, you have to leave your dwelling to go there. However, for these sorts of games not only is it easy, but almost forced on people that play any other ad-based game. I know people don't have to click on the ad, but they do. In fact, realistically that's probably 90-95% of the games out there - start free, then have players pay to get "better" virtual items/outcomes. Futhermore, once you start those same factors are amplified. Instead of having to go somewhere else, you can game at any time, so there is even less reason to have second thoughts about it.

I really think you do not understand the seriousness of gambling addiction. This is not just some excessive discretionary spending. Gambling addicts have a compulsive behaviour that is virtually impossible for them to control. I feel terrible for people with this affliction. It is life-destroying.

Luxury stores don't engage in predatory dark patterns, like luring you in with "f2p" and so on.

I would say the problem isn't that it's a "waste", it's that the way it is sold is practically fraud. If the game was presented authentically as "pay $100 to click a button 100 times and watch some animations" then I don't really think it would be very addicting.

This comment is naive, from someone who doesn't understand the different dynamics.

The "play-for-fun" casinos successfully utilize the onboarding process to attract, and even create, the people most likely to be exploited by these games. Real-money, online casinos require a real-money deposit to get started, therefore, few people download the apps to begin with without being at least a somewhat-experienced brick-and-mortar casino gambler who is prepared to deposit real money.

Play-for-fun attracts casuals looking for the next Candy Crush or Bejeweled and might get a week of play (grooming, essentially) before even being asked for an in-game purchase. Further, specifically because play-for-fun is NOT gambling, they are unregulated and have no requirement to be fair or random. The developers can insert all kinds of manipulations and scripted outcomes that encourage more play and more importantly, more real-money purchases. They can amplify the payouts over time so initially, a few thousand coins is exciting, then tens of thousands, then millions. The coin purchases get more expensive as the player requires higher amounts to maintain their levels.

Lastly, it isn't like real online casinos aren't addicting or potentially problematic. Through 9 months of 2023, New Jersey online casinos have generated $1.41 billion, 65% of the brick-and-mortar casino revenue ($2.17 billion). And since online casinos and sports betting are growing much faster, they will likely surpass b-and-m a few years from now. Basically, New Jersey has created an army of addicts in a single decade, and many other states are following suit.

https://www.nj.gov/oag/ge/docs/Financials/PressRelease2023/S...

are you from the 80's?

It’s addicting but not gambling. Agree this should be regulated somehow

It is regulated at least in a number of countries.

In France for instance, only certified operators are legally allowed to run online money games (https://www.economie.gouv.fr/cedef/jeux-et-paris-ligne).

It is just as dangerous as « regular gambling ».

Money games are regulated in the US, too, but this is not a money game because there is no money to be won.

I really don't know why "only certified operators are allowed" is a positive thing.

For me it means the money bag is no longer on the table -- not because we removed it or invested it in something better, but because we gave it to the politicians' best buddies.

Edit:

I don't know French so I might miss some nuances. There are some kinds of regulation that I consider positive, for example to put a certain % of the casino's operating cash in a trust funding account (or buy insurance plans) so if they were found fraudulous, at least the victims would get compensated. But I don't know if France does this.

Presumably because you set certain conditions and regulations on the certified operators, with the threat of revoking certification if they fail to comply with these regulations.

I would suggest, for instance, that someone about to bet more than 99% of people must have a chat with an official who verifies that they know they're addicted and present options for rehab.

> someone about to bet more than 99% of people

How would you calculate this? By total bet volume alone? A very wealthy person can safely gamble more than a less wealthy one and might reasonably be gambling without being addicted despite having been flagged by this simple algorithm.

Oh no an edge case!

Then that very wealthy person talks to an official who verifies they can afford to bet that much.

Snark aside, there are other issues.

What if someone has been betting frequently, but they've been winning so far? They'll be deemed "addicted" by this algorithm. Should they be?

How much will it cost to administer this program?

How confident are you that it will improve outcomes?

Why should I be required to share details of my finances in order to play?

Legal gambling has issues but I would definitely vote against your proposal. Keep regulations simple, either allow the activity or don't.

It's not worthwhile to try to duct tape over side effects with mitigation programs of questionable impact that will inevitably be expensive to administer, all while arbitrarily invading peoples' privacy.

First of all it's not my proposal, but the proposal was simple enough and could improve outcomes.

None of these edge cases are actually issues if the system is "gambler A talks to official B before they're allowed to place more bets."

If this was an automated system sure these are issues to sort out. If it's just "talk to an official who confirms you know you're addicted to gambling and provides links to support info" before your next bet is allowed to be placed, none of these edge cases matter.

Those who have the wealth that or are not actually addicted can just ignore what the official says. No need to verify wealth, no need to check if they're winning or not. Just "hey you're placing bets at frequency X, are you sure you're not addicted? There is help available, here's some links to support materials."

It's simple really: we want free market when we want a given area optimised. Cheaper goods, better value, more efficient services. Do we want better gambling companies - more efficient at luring people in and getting them to spend money on gambling?

I think there aren't many sane people without vested interest who answer yes to the question.

The solution of only running state lotteries at least ensures there won't be much optimisation and the money goes to the public fund. What not to like?

You seriously overestimate "optimization" part. There's no secret knowledge to manipulate someone. All tricks are simple, the root of the trouble is that some people are more prone to this particular type of addiction.

And you propose to make gov't to get an interest in exploting addicts. Which is questionable

That's right, restrictions on entry into a market primarily benefit the existing participants. There is no significant benefit to consumers from this. Far better regulations would be about how they operate, not who does it.

Operates on the same mechanisms as gambling. Might not be considered gambling in the eyes of the law but it's gambling to the brains of the victims.

Gambling is also probably one of the worst addictions to get into. People tend to notice someone with a substance problem, but gambling often stays hidden until the person is completely overwhelmed.

Especially now that you can do it on your phone

Believe me when I say that sex addiction is worse because it has a much higher stigma attached to it, so it is generally much more hidden.

You could go to your wife and explain that you've spent the rent money on buying Smurfcoins to gamble on some lootbox lottery, but you can't go and tell her you've spent it on paying women to push squirrels up your bottom.

There is a book on this called Addiction by Design that covers a lot of this.

But yes, I think the assumption of rational people is that the reason these practices are addicting is the money involved...when it isn't the money but a carefully designed sensory experience that (somehow) taps into addiction. If you actually look at how the slots industry works though, they largely focus on the sensory experience not the gambling side. I have used slots and they do seem to dull your other senses/captivate you whilst using them.

Just imo, I gamble myself, have done so for all of my adult life, I know many people in the industry who are fine people, the spillovers for tech have been absolutely huge (for example, a lot of the bot detection tech we have today was invented in the gambling industry)...but slots/casino should 100% be banned. I am not a banning person naturally at all but they are just awful. Any kind of tech that seeks to replicate that process (these apps, FIFA, etc.) should also be banned because it isn't about the money, gambling is nothing to do with it. Casino products add nothing and the only people who find it appealing (in my experience) are gambling addicts. I used to work in equity research and covered the big UK gambling companies...at no point did I see any evidence that casino products had anyone but gambling addicts as customers either. You can have a laugh at the horse racing with your pals, lots of people put their accumulator on every weekend and that is it, maybe put 5 on a Prem match...but casino isn't like this, it is pure cancer.

> they largely focus on the sensory experience not the gambling side

Every time I’ve sat at a slot machine, it’s not even clear if you’re winning or not, or what the rules are. It boils down to “push button, watch absurd animations and sounds.” I just find all that sensory overload irritating, so I don’t usually stay. I can see, however, that if you like that experience, it could be powerfully attractive.

Yes. Exactly this. No one understands and there isn’t a need to understand. You put money in and either you lose it all or you win some percentage back that you lost before.

I’m not a gambler, but out of all of the ways to lose your money in a casino the video slot machines make the least sense to me; they just don’t seem at all enjoyable win or especially lose.

I’ve never trusted video slot machines, probably because I know as a developer how easy it is to rig them. Always show a jackpot hand if you’d have increased your bet, payout a winning spin every so often to keep the mark sitting down, and have the big payouts only happen to some who punches in the right combo on the right machine during a specific window in time.

In the old days (1970s-1980s?) you could ask a casino employee for a card with the gaming odds for the various games / game bets the house was offering the gambler. About ten years back I was in a casino and had the same feeling of disconnect watching others play slots (IIR, it was in Palm Springs Ca.) So I see the casino manager walk by and ask him for a card on the odds for slot machines. He let out a long laugh and said "I haven't seen those in a long time but if I even had one to give you, I would get fired for showing you that kind of info."

Every modern slot machine I’ve used will show you exactly that information. It’s somewhere in a help menu.

It’s not at all comprehensible, imagine boilerplate TOS from a big company, with a third year statistics course mixed in. But it’s there.

Doesn't the state regulate the odds there? If so it would be public information anyway.

Yes, all the online casinos have this information too. An interesting question is whether providers of these fake money casinos actually alter odds to maximise yields? Presumably. I believe FIFA has fixed odds for their gambling stuff.

What are the chances somebody from law enforcement is going to decompile your cryptographically signed obfuscated binaries to hunt for exact numbers in equations that can span across whole codebase if you want... exactly.

You can just spin a new company every few years claiming completely new software, so law has tough time building case and catching up and probably couldn't care less unless somebody literally snitches on you.

The casino industry is as highly regulated as they come. Code is inspected, fines are huge and licenses to operate can be withdrawn in case of established fraud.

There are many ways casinos try to part their visitors from the money but fraud - these days, not the past - usually isn't the driver. But psychology, greed and environment are just as effective, if not more effective at accomplishing the same goals. The best way not to lose any money in a casino is by not going there in the first place. Most people believe they are immune to the envy of thinking other people around them are winning but they'd be wrong and the whole environment there is geared to make you move into FOMO mode until you're broke.

There was a recent post[0] where the author discovered that the company had deliberately tuned the loss rate so as to incentivize purchases. Which, I suppose is legally in their power. It is "just a game" where they can set the rules however they like.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37642538

video slot machines are especially insidious

its weird and I hate that the states are all in on it, I’m fine with states having casinos

but its one thing for “the house to always win” and there is a possibility of them implementing something wrong, its another thing for the state to come in and say “the house never loses” and the courts backing that up because you won at the time

This is my experience! My wife loves to play penny slots whenever we are in Vegas. She sets a budget, plays and I hang with her. I really have trouble parsing what’s going on. Happy to drink for free while my wife gets her $20 penny slot fix.

>It boils down to “push button, watch absurd animations and sounds.”

Because that's it. It's just a random number generator that decides whether you win or not. Then based on that it generates all of the bells and whistles to show you, but what's happening on the screen doesn't matter. You've already won or lost by the time you pressed the button.

It's just

if (Math.random() < 0.4) win()

else lose()

The problem is you can’t ban things because a minority of people don’t have self-control. If that were the case, we would ban beer, since it has destroyed far more lives than gambling.

But then, say you do that, the slippery slope gets more and more extreme. Like you have all these middle-eastern countries that ban alcohol, premarital sex, gambling- everything you can think of is illegal but people still need their vices. And then they lash out in dangerous and disturbing ways.

IMO the only free society is one in which people have the ability to act out vices in a controlled fashion. It’s an uncomfortable fact but real life is uncomfortable.

Regulation isn’t perfect but it can do a lot to prevent the worst outcomes.

> Like you have all these middle-eastern countries that ban alcohol, premarital sex, gambling- everything you can think of is illegal but people still need their vices. And then they lash out in dangerous and disturbing ways.

I'm with you most of the way, but there is a middle ground. Every system needs some friction so it doesn't become a runaway train.

Don't ban it, but don't make it so easy either.

Take porn. Before the internet, we (as kids) had to hunt for it. We had to network to find other kids whose dads had magazine stashes we could raid, or corner stores we could sneak peeks at the magazine rack of and rip pages out without getting caught. There was effort and risk involved. Obtaining it was an adventure and reward in itself. By the end of the day, you were tired-- and not always successful! It satiated some primal need for conquest, in addition to being sexually gratifying.

Now you can get to it in two clicks, and the extremity of the content stops just short of snuff. If they're being honest with themselves, nobody's really happy with the current state of porn, which leads to escalating behavior in similarly dangerous and disturbing ways. All roads lead to eventual interest in CSAM, and even that's not enough.

In a weird turn of events, porn is actually contributing to the emasculation of men. We're losing our ability to hunt because we expect everything to just be handed to us in two clicks. There's no thrill in that chase. Incest porn dominates trending pages. Wanting to fuck your mother or sister--a captive audience--is as lazy as it gets. (Cousins would be an improvement...at least you'd have to leave the house.)

Gambling is the same. It's easy to lose. The rewards are fleeting but potent. All it is is clicking a button and wasting away. You're reduced from being an apex predator to prey caught in a raccoon trap-- and held there by your own greed.

Even in a free society, nothing should be this easy. We're supposed to hunt lesser animals, not be predatory toward each other. Making vice so easy makes potential prey of us all.

> All roads lead to eventual interest in CSAM, and even that's not enough.

What??

> In a weird turn of events, porn is actually contributing to the emasculation of men. We're losing our ability to hunt because we expect everything to just be handed to us in two clicks.

Huh??

If that's how porn affects you then I think you needed therapy, with or without the pornography.

> you can’t ban things because a minority of people don’t have self-control. If that were the case, we would ban beer

We did ban beer. Parts of the country still have bans on beer. Almost every part of the country has bans on certain types of beer, or certain behavior by beer makers, distributors, and sellers.

The reason beer is broadly legal is not because it was illegal to ban it, but because the ban was unpopular and got reverted.

We could do the same for gambling or anything else for that matter. There is no fundamental right to make money as you see fit in the United States.

It would be better to make the point that banning beer didn't have the happy results proponents thought it would. Or take the "war on drugs" as a more recent example. Not only does it not prevent addicts from getting it, it leads to a huge increase in crime.

Yeah we did. It was called prohibition, and how'd that work out? People drank anyways but this time without strong regulatory bodies to ensure the safety and manufacture of said libations.

We can change the incentives of these game makers/designers, through the legal system. As an example, Paypal and credit card companies offer charge backs. What if you could charge back for all the money spent on a game, at the cost of getting your account/IP banned and being forced to uninstall the app? If the 400,000$ the whale spent got returned to them, they would be made whole. It's not like alcohol or tobacco where you've physically consumed resources. You are undoing access to digital resources and returning those to the company in exchange for all the money the player spent.

The problem is that a lot of activities in real life work in a similar way to gambling. Human relationships tend to have the right amount of random in it to build habits too.

Gambling as a mechanism can't really be banned. Everything slowly optimizes towards that same behavior. Simply following the metrics of "more use engagement" and "more money" will land you there when your start off with a bit of random chance. So if you ban gambling you'll have games that are totally-not-gambling-but-somehow-work-like-slots.

the lack of monetary reward is just a way to get around the legal definition of gambling, as you pointed out from an addiction perspective the result is the exact same as normal gambling.

Those big spenders are called whales and they get explicitly targeted and catered to. Those business models choose the predatory path.

It’s super gross that Apple and Google are taking a cut of these abusive business models.

Apple and Google are totally fine with gambling just as long as it's not regulated.

It’s a problem of stupidity and lack of education. If you take a 400,000 dollar loan on home equity to gamble your brain hasn’t developed correctly and you’re probably a risk to other people (drunk driving, bad driving, etc..). Anyways gambling shouldn’t be legal it’s too destructive to society. It needs to be much much more regulated (ie free cash flow has to be proved)

I wish it would be so linear. But many otherwise brilliant people have / had horrible vices and addictions in which they ended up on their own, and despite their own overall brilliance they were utterly powerless to them (or just surrendered with a big grin).

People are more complex than that, don't do the correlation vs causation mistake.

There are university professors addicted to gambling, so can't be at least about formal education. US average credit card debt is $6k, most probably spent on useless crap. Probably majority of people are in that "risky category" because making people doing bad decisions is a great business model, and most business use that.

From the headline, I thought these were regular gambling apps where you win/lose money.

But no -- this is something I'd never heard of. These are apps where you can't withdraw winnings.

People are spending $100,000's with zero potential reward.

I'm... baffled.

Although now I guess I'm forced to ask myself, how is this any different from other free-to-play games like virtual multiplayer golf or Mario Kart or whatever that some people have spent $10,000's for equipment/upgrades/cosmetics/etc., that similarly don't equate to anything in the real world.

I am reminded of this Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/04/25/an-artifact-of...

"It's so pure I think I'm going to cry."

it's different because the mechanics are carbon copy of other casino games with tighter reinforcement/addiction potential then other 'regular' games that have more space/process in game experience loop

Cosmetic is cosmetic, someone likes the way it looks, pays for it, receives the cosmetic - IMO no different from buying any vanity item in real world.

Paid upgrades/equipment/unlocks that give advantage to a player in a otherwise free to play game is a shitty spending-fest design that I avoid getting into, maybe unless the spending ceiling is very low. Still, I wouldn't see it as a gambling because there is no randomness involved.

The moment game devs add loot boxes though - well, IMO this shit should be banned. Especially when it's stupid obvious that there is no randomness behind the scenes.

I think this touches on an idea that isn't necessarily intuitive. People may not always gamble for the monetary winnings; that's just their excuse. It may be that people do so for the sensory input, and corresponding chemicals their brains release. It would make an interesting (albeit unethical) study: design a casino game where it's impossible to win. Would people still get addicted? I suspect they would.

People still get addicted definitely for example the gatcha slot game: Watchers of Samsara in Dota 2.

I am not sure why slots work but gatchas are fun in moderation. I personally try to avoid them though and only consume them very rarely.

The play money casinos are now vastly more profitable than the real money ones. It's all just entertainment. Always has been

Some time ago I watched a documentary about gambling addicts. They claimed they were playing because the game puts you in a kind of stupor which is like being high. Winning money did not matter to them as long as the high held on. It is a bit counter intuitive but winning money is not the point of gambling. If an addict wins money he will imedialty spend that money to gamble more.

This app skips the winning and some degree spending, money part altogether. Which is smart if you want to exploit gambling addincts and avoid regulations.

Every time I've played slots, I just lose repeatedly. I struggle to understand how this can give a high.

It is totaly weird indeed.

Some People seem to get in the zone and get completely lost. Sometimes that happens to me while coding. But i can't do it for long and unlike gambling it pays.

It is hard to get up from the machine and some even shit themselves. The big casinos often have emergency teams for the people who get heart attacks and die on their chairs in front of the slot machine.

It is truly bizzare I never understood the appeal but some people are drawn to this and get absolutely zombiefied.

Gambling addiction truly is one of the worst things that can happen to someone.

I've only ever gambled once and don't see the appeal, but for some people they can enter a state of "flow". This is very satisfying.

Same. Surely they should not let you lose 3 times in a row, that just takes a person out of it. But there are people, mostly the elderly, who get completely taken in by the sights and sounds of a slot machine

It’s flow state. It’s the same feeling we get when programming.

Quote from: https://www.bigfishgames.com/play/bigfishcasino/signup

> "You must be 18+ to access Big Fish Casino/Jackpot Magic Slots. This game does not offer gambling or an opportunity to win real money or prizes. Practice or success at social gaming does not imply future success at gambling."

So, you're able to pour them money and no way to get it back. What exactly is the money for then? Why this does not qualify as a scam? Just because of the disclaimer?

It's no different then any other online game like clash of clans or pokemon go or even FIFA. You spend money to be allowed to spin the wheel more, the more you spin the better your chance at winning some in game shiny trophy to show off to others competing for the same shiny trophy. The addiction comes purely from the fact that thousands or millions of other people can see your progress and are competing against you to earn better.

I see, but they shouldn't be allowed to use the word "casino" then. As far as I know, a casino (virtual or real) is a place where you gamble and have a chance (small but real) to get your money back. So basically people playing through this app are believing that effectively can win money when is not true.

I really don't think the core issue is being allowed to use the word casino or not. Whales pour their life savings into other things not labeled casino - the core gambling addiction remains the same.

The first definition of "casino" is a place for social amusement, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/casino, and there are non gambling casinos still out there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalina_Casino

I don't think many people playing these games are fooled into somehow thinking they'll win their money back. Certainly the 21 big spenders in the article knew they wouldn't.

But then why would you choose to go to this fake casino? If you also have the choice to gamble for real and at least a tiny chance to get something back or if you have high hopes "win", there seems to be absolutely no reason to put money in this game or fake bet app. Am I missing something?

What is the reason for playing any computer game? To get a dopamine fix by reaching some virtual goal. People pay small (at least at first) amounts of money for access to the game or in case of free-to-play games for a better chance of getting to the next goal. If someone gets a bit of excitement every time they win a virtual jackpot, they might think a $1 is an acceptable price to pay for it. And then it just spirals out of control.

I think the answer is in the question. They're not playing to win money. They're playing because whatever rewards that have been engineered into the game suck them in. Social aspects, FOMO, "winning" at a game, etc.

Different people crave different rewards. Some people may care more about the financial reward, but they're out playing some other gambling game that caters to them.

My parents use these games and I started as a way to commiserate with them, because I have always played games but they only started using computers after I was already well and truly addicted to computers writ-large.

The Double U Casino used to have a team check-in, where you could send your team bonuses and they saw that you checked in with them. I know it sounds stupid, but this was a real way that I was connecting with my parents, and then they shut it down.

Incidentally the name of our team was Roman Catholicism, because most of the teams were full and this was one that was not full. Whoever started Roman Catholicism left the group, and eventually we became the admins of Roman Catholicism. It was a sad day for me as a part of my family when Roman Catholicism closed its doors.

I should call my folks! I think they still use the casino app, even without any money or social investment, they still enjoy it and I made sure they had nice tablets to use the app on. This is still working, even without the social aspect. It's still valuable to us, we game as a family, even if we're not always together.

Anyway, would you ban Roman Catholicism because they're believing in what is not really true? I think someone baited me into this position, I wouldn't even make this ridiculous argument except that all of this literally happened and I am not making any of it up. Casino app keeps family together, son calls his parents more often after they get disconnected by the oppressive dev team that shut it down. I'll be here all week, try the Clams Casino at the bar.

When someone wants to setup a casino that awards players with real money for winning, it's heavily regulated. Sure, they're allowed to set extremely favorable odds for the house, so it's still a scam. But they actually have to publish those odds and abide by them. And lucky players do actually come out ahead. Slot machines do occasionally pay out jackpots. The most important regulation, IMHO, is we do not allow minors to participate in this activity. This regulation doesn't seem very controversial.

But what if someone sets up a casino where there is no chance of a cash payout? No matter what, the player loses 100% of the money they put in. For some reason we do not regulate this kind of casino at all! It's totally wild. This kind of casino should be the MOST regulated, or banned entirely. Worst of all, we let children participate!

Slot machines that use worthless virtual currency, award only virtual currency, but let you buy virtual currency with real currency? Playing one of those is worse than playing a real slot machine, or even playing a rigged real slot machine! At least both of those have some non-zero chance of paying out real money.

Lootboxes in video games? That's gambling with a 0% payout. All you get are worthless JPGs. And we let children participate!

Crane games at the arcade? Those are just vending machines with programmed odds. They are gambling! We let children play them.

Baseball, Pokemon, or Magic cards? Other collectibles that come in blind boxes or sealed packs? These are gambling! Sure, some will argue that these are different because no matter what you are getting some minimum prize. A pack of Pokemon cards will always contain 10 cards no matter what. Well, what if I make a $5 slot machine that at minimum always pays out 50 cents no matter what you spin? How is that different from a $4.50 slot machine that has the potential to pay out $0? Changing the odds and payouts doesn't make it not gambling.

IMHO, all of these activities should be completely banned for children. No games of chance whatsoever if they cost real money per-play.

As for adults, consenting and informed adults can throw away their money if they want. But all of these activities should be heavily regulated. And the casinos that don't pay out a cent should be MORE heavily regulated than the normal ones.

A lot of entertainment falls into this category though. A $15 movie ticket has a 100% to consume ~2 hours of your life and pay you nothing. A $5 order of fries will pay you about $0.50 worth of potatoes. Go to a ballgame and it’s just as bad as the movies; they’ll charge you for expensive food and drink inside and your favorite team might not even win.

Trying to draw a bright, defining line between watching a movie and buying a video game and playing an arcade game or Skeeball seems practically impossible. We don’t want to force everyone to be stuck at home playing “blow the ball of yarn to the opponent’s side of the table”.

Those analogies aren't good because the outcome is not randomized. That's what makes things addictive and dangerous (especially for children).

I think it's very easy to draw a line. When you pay money, the result has to be specifically given up front. It cannot be based on random chance. If you wan to buy a Pokemon card you have to buy a specific card (or a set with fixed cards included). If you want to buy virtual clothes for your avatar then you have to buy specific objects. If you want to buy a doll then you buy a specific model, not a random box.

Most of the reasons real money gambling is regulated is to do with stopping money laundering, not protecting gamblers.

The incentives for the govt to regulate virtual gambling sims(that don't pay out) arent as strong, especially when these companies pay tax on that VIP revenue.

Exactly. If governments were truly concerned with protecting players, they would have provisions preventing casinos from kicking out winning players

If you think non-payout video game gambling isn't used for money laundering, wait until you hear about Counter-Strike skins.

I was wondering where I had heard the name "Big Fish Games". I just realised that they created Virtual Villagers which was a huge part of my childhood, I loved that game.

I also enjoyed Fish Tycoon and Diner Dash by them.

Seems like they got sold to a casino operator? Unfortunate that this is what makes money.

They also published some Nancy Drew games, I believe, one of which im currently reverse engineering!

Pardon my tone, but what could possibly be of value to RCE in a mass-market mobile-gaming app?

Maybe some personal enjoyment?

I'm not OP, but, reverse engineer all things. You can learn how they are made, you can learn reverse engineering in general, you can make mods, hacks, cheats, spinoffs.

They’re not mobile games. https://www.bigfishgames.com/us/en/games/1207/nancydrewdange...

Theyre not mobile games, they are pretty old point and click adventure games, with lovely art and humor.

The reverse engineering is interesting because they rolled their own engine and most of the game is written in Lua 5.1.

I also personally find it interesting as the binaries and code in general is tiny, so its a good way to learn.

Diner Dash was made by PlayFirst, BFG and many other game download portals were selling it (Windows PC version)

It's disapointing to see zero criticism applied to Apple and Google.

All of Apple's credability about needing to maintain control over iOS apps and App Store goes out the window once it's evident they make a fuck tonne of money selling casino games to children (and adults).

I don't even know how Big Fish Games can be criticized here?

These people are literally, knowingly giving their money, with no expectation of getting any back.

Companies like Big Fish expend huge amounts of effort researching how to make their games more addictive.

They are criticised because they have created something expressly designed to develop compulsion in as many people as possible. They aggressively tune their products to increase that compulsion and to prevent their victims from breaking it.

To play the devil's advocate, how is it any different from a tv studio designing addictive tv shows?

At the end of the day, there needs to be some level of personal responsibility.

The main difference is that a TV studio isn't trying to get you to spend an unbounded amount of money. As a result it limits the total harm that can be inflicted, hence why TV addiction isn't considered as bad a problem as other forms.

The other reply to this from zeroonetwothree hits the nail on the head. The major difference is in the capacity for serious harm. That's not to say that there shouldn't be more oversight of manipulation in other industries.

> At the end of the day, there needs to be some level of personal responsibility.

Why is it that the concept of personal responsibility is never applied to those employing the psychological manipulation tactics? My belief is that it's their personal responsibility to refrain from such behaviour.

The devil does not need an advocate.

Yes, It will not be a popular opinion around here, but I think it's worth mentioning that it's very difficulty for our Governments to help these abused people. A government need to draft legislation, debate it, and get it passed. All the wile assaulted by a powerful lobby group.

Apple and Google simply need to draft a policy and decide to do it.

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?

Surely you could ask all the same questions of physical casinos? The answer to most of the question is “addiction”.

How is that the same? You can earn real money in a physical casino, here you cannot

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.

Sounds like these apps are more honest.

Addiction is not related to the potential benefits of the habit. You can get addicted about anything depending on your personal dispositions.

Simply said lot of "games" are disguised Skinner boxes, people with addictive personalities are very vulnerable to those.

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.

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.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jQIHqkudgNY

His point is that the average person that walks into a casino loses money by definition, as the casino designs its offers in that way.

If the average person would win money, the casino would cease to exist.

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.

What a strange, nonsensical comment.

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).

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.

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.

The problem with that logic is that when someone bottoms out on their addiction they become a burden society has to pay for.

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.

> Most addicts love their addictions; most of the ones that don’t eventually stop.

This does not match my understanding or experience at all. Please share a source if you have one.

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!

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.

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.

Uh, what?

By this logic, 99% of bartenders should be alcoholics.

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.

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.

Not every explanation is justification.

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.

To add to your point, these are companies with the ability to spend millions to get research done on the most efficient way to manipulate people.

This isn’t just gambler vs some other person.

This is one person against a resource pool worth millions of dollars. No individual in aggregate has a chance against that.

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.

Well, if we’re not here to nitpick then what are we here for? Should the comment to upvote ratio decrease?

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!

No problem! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I agree! Looks like a variant of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

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.

For real?

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.

If only people were so simple.

What exactly do you think an addiction is?

What exactly do you think happens when someone kicks an addiction?

They aren't "completely" non-responsible, but they are somewhat because they are being taken advantage of in a predatory and almost fraudulent way.

Just like if you fall victim to a phone scam, sure it's somewhat your fault, but clearly it's mainly the fault of the scammer.

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.)

Playing apart, it’s surprising they spend 1000s of dollars.

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.

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).

I can't give a short answer, but IMO the best long answer is the book Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll.

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

Occasional, unpredictable, variable rewards, with corresponding colourful splashes and satisfying noises, providing a temporary escape from uncomfortable feelings.

I can guess.

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.

Yup, it's like Euro Truck Simulator, but you simulate being a gambling addict. Oops...

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.

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.

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.

I’m sorry for how this impacted your life, but congratulations for doing what you needed to do.

Thank you. Everything worked out fine :)

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.

my lifelong friend who developed schizophrenia as an adult (tick bite while jogging -> lymes disease -> schizophrenia, yes that's a thing) is going through bankruptcy due to these apps. IIUC what happened is after years of use she hit a jackpot (which they allow or cause to happen every now and then), cashed out a big win which generated an IRS Form W-2G, deposited somewhere else across the fiscal year boundary, immediately lost it but now owes a pile of tax. Her net worth is now less than 0; she is currently living in a state funded halfway house after her latest stint in rehab -- having otherwise now reached the point of homelessness for the first time. Historically she has had the apps block her (over a decade of this addiction) but there are always new apps and they obviously target her with advertising. If I have it wrong it's because it's impossible to extract coherent information from a schizophrenic. The only reason to believe this is even real is, how does a schizophrenic know what is a Form W-2G?

The apps discussed in the article do not allow cashing out. Sorry to hear about your friend’s difficulties.

This is very sad to hear— I am sorry. I also wonder why only older people are getting hooked on these games. Perhaps it is due to changes in the brain? These companies seem to target the weakest.

> (tick bite while jogging -> lymes disease -> schizophrenia, yes that's a thing)

women with schizophrenia actually tend to develop symptoms in their 20s, much later than men; lymes disease is real but also often a fixation for the mentally ill and hypochondriacs since the symptoms are so vague and varied, so it is likely that the bite is irrelevant and she fixated on it as her symptoms were developing for genetic (or whatever) reasons

thanks – I didn't know that. She is 39 and was bit in her late 20s, showed early schizophrenia (wrongfully diagnosed as psychosis) in early 30s. So could be.

Clearly the App Store isn't protecting users. They've long been allowing gambling-like mechanics to hook kids ("loot crates", etc).

I simply don't understand why Apple can't choose the moral high ground here and say no gambling on the stores.

Doesn't Apple take around 30% of all in app transactions? No one gets promoted for cutting out a revenue stream for morals, much less before enough loud voices are angry about it.

Apple makes $10+ billion/year from this practice. So that's one reason.

(2020)

But more to the point, these "social casino games" (as they're known in literature) should probably be outlawed.

One thing that I never understood is the idea that "gambling is fun". In the culture that I'm from gambling is considered something left for the "lower class". It's a bit similar to acting up while heavily drunk, not exactly something to be proud of.

The first few times that I heard something to the tune of "Vegas, baby!" I honestly thought the person was being funny by ridiculing themselves slightly.

People find uncertainty and sudden twists engaging. That’s broadly true in humor, books, movies, and gambling.

I find gambling on games where the house has a large edge generally uninteresting, but I’ll play craps with friends in Vegas. Games where player skill has an element and games like poker against other players are quite a bit more interesting.

Honest question: have you ever tried it? Ever played blackjack at a casino?

I've only done it a handful of times, but it's a gigantic exciting roller coaster ride of emotions as you win and lose real amounts of money, whether they're in tens or hundreds of dollars or whatever scale you're at.

It's way more exciting than the thrills from a superhero movie in the cinema because it's real life, real money. It's more exciting than sports because it's your win, your money. When you're winning, you can't believe how much fun it is. All your life you were told an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, and now you feel like you've found a magic shortcut!

And if you lose, well... next time. You're sure you'll make up for it and then some.

It can honestly be hard to imagine until you've tried it. I was similarly confused until I experienced it. But it really taps into something deep in the primate brain, about hopes and dreams fulfilled, about getting lucky and rich, about being special.

There's a good reason I've only ever gone a handful of times, and limited myself to a small amount of money. Because it's also scarily easy to see how you could get addicted to that feeling.

You don’t even have to go to a casino. I personally wouldn’t look at a poker night with friends as being much different than getting together to play a board game.

It's different though. Poker with friends, you can only ever win as much as your friends put in, which usually isn't going to be that much. You're right -- it feels closer to a board game.

But at a casino, there's no similar limit to how much you can win. It feels like your dreams could literally come true in Las Vegas, that you could come back home and buy a new house. Poker with buddies doesn't include that possibility.

Poker with buddies is still gambling though and it’s a lot of fun. Maybe more fun than casino gambling (depending on your friend group). I wonder if the GP thinks people who have a Thursday night game with friends are low class as well?

Oh for sure -- I'll take poker with buddies over a casino any night of the week.

It's funny, for whatever reason I don't mentally put "poker with friends" in the category of "gambling". I mean obviously it technically is -- no argument there -- but when I think of "gambling" I think of "potentially dangerous/addictive", and (hopefully) poker with friends isn't.

I'm also curious what GP thinks about whether poker with buddies is "lower class", or if it's only a casino thing. (Or gambling dens? Backroom tables?)

I find games for money really unfun, even if it's for small stakes. It just makes it too much about winning rather than having a good time.

I have and had the opposite experience. All I see is games with uninteresting choices, pointless rule systems due to those choices being uninteresting, and an endless parade of negative EVs trying to pretend they aren’t somehow. People who enjoy it clearly have a very different relationship with math and probability I guess.

> People who enjoy it clearly have a very different relationship with math and probability I guess.

That sounds like you're implying that only mathematically less-literate people gamble.

I think that's wrong, though. I've got as strong of a background in stats and probability as they come, and that hasn't changed my enjoyment of it at all. Maybe it's even added to it, since there's the added challenge of finding the least-bad bet.

You're paying for the excitement of the ups and downs.

You sound like someone who says they don't like the movies because all they see are uninteresting plot predicaments, pointless obstacles, and an endless parade of non-optimal choices by characters all trying to pretend the ending isn't going to be predictable.

All I can say is, to each their own, but it definitely sounds like you haven't grasped the essential emotional quality of the entire experience -- that perhaps you don't have, but many other people certainly do. And that aspect doesn't have anything to do with mathematical literacy.

> endless parade of negative EV

Wait until you find out some Blackjack is exploitable to be positive EV and requires interesting levels of multitasking the first few hundred hours. Poker can also be profitable due to marks, even with a negative EV rake.

But yes, many games, especially Roulette, Slots, and Craps, are blatantly negative EV. However, Craps is very fun due to the team table dynamics.

> All I see is games with uninteresting choices, pointless rule systems due to those choices being uninteresting, and an endless parade of negative EVs

If this was true, clearly you should be playing at the poker tables and raking in the cash.

Being able to identify a game as -EV doesn't mean you are going to be great at poker? Or else why isn't every statistician in the world a professional poker player?

I have played the slot machine, and it was hilarious how fast it used up the money I had put into it - I had a genuine laugh. I heard that the machines outside of main casinos in Vegas have much higher payout rates, so that you can take more time to lose your money. Makes sense, someone has to pay for the Eiffel Tower model.

My question/comment was about the overall cultural perception of gambling. I just found it strange in America - a small instance of a "culture shock".

I went to the old Monte Carlo casino, just for the experience, won 400 euro, but didn't feel much excitement ... it paid for the helicopter ride though.

Well, that's precisely how classes work, no? There are guys who spend all day in a bar drinking. That's very lower class, and I wouldn't do it. But they themselves are lower class, so that behaviour comes naturally to them.

It's essentially a way of hacking your brain to care about something that you otherwise wouldn't. I wouldn't suggest anyone gamble casino-style, because a relative minority has a real pathology there. Still, I've been known to make non-monetary bets on the outcome of sporting events (e.g. "loser cleans up"). It gets you invested in the outcome, which does make it more enjoyable.

Gambling is fun...if you aren't an addict.

Go down to the races, there is real excitement, real energy, it is fun. Saying it is "lower class" is poor (I would say that is ultimate "low class" mentality). Lots of people have other stuff going on in their lives, so they watch sport and having a small bet on makes it more exciting.

The gambling culture that exists in the US is completely bizarre because it is designed towards the most extractive, most pointless forms of gambling because of political pressure (the gambling industry are usually the biggest donors to both parties every presidential). Gambling is not something that should ever be fun by itself but something that can enhance an existing interest.

And most people can have a bet on their sports team, and that is it. They put on a accumulator, they bet on the home team, it is fun and ends there. Gambling addiction is something quite distinct from this (and something that only impacts a huge minority of people, usually under 1%...the reason why it is so pervasive in some countries, US and HK being the two most notorious is due to government intervention that maximises harm).

Poker is fun because it is social, blackjack is okay but verging into degen, there is a spectrum here.

Yeah the lower classes gamble on the races, the upper classes gamble on companies and financial derivatives. The even more ridiculous thing is one bet has a positive expected value and one doesn't.

In the UK we have these things called "fruit machines"[0] which are common in certain types of bar and pub. They have lots of buttons and colourful lights and in theory there's some kind of "game" you can play to win money from here, but I've never been able to figure it out; on the rare occasions that I've put cash into a fruit machine, all it did was flash some lights and tell me it was keeping the money.

But what's interesting to me about these machines is that, since they're just big computers, their expected rate of return is entirely determined by their software. And it's a legal requirement for them to have a little infobox printed on the front that tells you exactly what that rate of return is. I don't remember what that rate typically, but it's definitely less than one pound returned for every pound gambled.

In other words, these machines literally say right there on the front of the machine, next to the part where you insert your coins, that by playing their "game" you are mathematically guaranteed to lose money. And yet people - lots of them, I assume, based on how prevalent these machines are - still gladly pour their spare change into these black holes.

Whoever invented the fruit machine must be laughing all the way to the bank.

[0] Here's what they look like https://azteccoin.co.uk/product/hot-box-100-jackpot-pub-frui...

A friend of a flatmate made a lot of money selling some bingo halls. He knew exactly how bad the returns on fruit machines are, because a handful in the atrium were half his profit when he was running them. He still liked to play on fruit machine whenever he saw one...

dopamine

Not long ago I've read a very interesting and sad article where it was exposed that teenagers who haven't yet finished high school in Argentina are becoming addicted gamblers on illegal websites. We are talking about kids between 13 and 17 years old (in some cases younger ones) gambling on roulette, sports, anything. Apparently this was intensified during the pandemic. In one case a 14 old asked his grandmother a huge amount of money to keep gambling. What is worse is that on these platforms kids can get loans to keep playing, and one way or another they will get their money back.

Here's the link to the article (in spanish): https://www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/jugamos-una-fichita-en-...

So what is the takeaway from this? It isn't even the expectation of winning money that keeps people in casinos, just the dopamine hit from a slot machine itself? They would've played with or without reward the whole time?

I think it's more that the reward doesn't need to be valuable to the legal system in order to be valuable to the player. It's relatively easy to convince a minority of people to care about a reward that the legal system doesn't consider valuable. This feels very much like gambling for the player, while simultaneously skirting gambling laws and improving the house edge to 100%.

Most people say they don't care about that number at the top right on HN, but somehow there is still an awful lot of complaining about voting patterns. HN is almost entirely unlike a casino, but karma does demonstrate the phenomenon (of getting people to care about a legally meaningless reward).

We knew this about casinos. That's why they were relegated to a little hellish desert town.

What happened that we decided apps somehow solved the problems related to gambling?

Out of sight, out of mind.

The odd difference here is people supposedly do this knowing they can’t win their money back (which is shocking to me). I assume the argument is they’re paying for entertainment.

You never got momoney back from pacman yet people spent a lot of money on video games.

I can only imagine the boardroom meeting where this idea was first proposed.

"So you're saying it's like a slot machine, except they can't win anything and just give us free money? Are you insane? What kind of idiot would sign up to that?"

Two weeks and a beta test later:

"I'm so sorry I doubted you."

For me, I want to have a little here and there. It's fun, I like putting $20 in with my friends and we get a little pool going.

I don't understand why I can't gamble because someone else has no self control. My same argument applies to alcohol, marijuana, fast food, etc.

How do you feel about gun control?

Should we prevent people from owning guns because _some people_ like harming themselves and/or others?

You can’t really kill someone else with casino chips, unless you tried really hard. Not everything is black and white, need to consider the context as well.

Yes, famously, gambling has caused zero suicides.

Suicide from gambling and homicide/suicide from gun use are not comparable.

Right, it’s not black and white.

You can cause harm to yourself and others with gambling as well as with guns.

Drawing the line at “you can’t directly kill people with casino chips” is reducing a complicated issue to a black and white stance

For me, yeah, I might have the self control, but I also live in a society. What other people do affects me. For example, I don't want the people with an alcohol problem to have unlimited access to alcohol. I drive on the same roads as them.

Not really a great analogy because someone else’s gambling problem is not going to get you killed on the way home from work.

I would support some kind of rule where you can’t generate more than $1,000 / yr or something off the same user. Does that change the entire economics of the social game industry? Yes, that’s the point.

Laws, rules are enacted regarding those things all the time. A soda tax to stop kids from getting fat, driving under the influence is a crime.....

As with everything else on this planet, it's all about moderation and the ones that can't help themselves, fuck it up for everyone else.

Addiction isn’t a function of moderation. It is not rational and it is not based in willpower.

>We knew this about casinos. That's why they were relegated to a little hellish desert town.

There are only two states with legal casino style gambling statewide, but most states offer many other ways to gamble legally: lotteries, tribal casinos, racetrack betting, and sports betting are widespread and nearly every state has at least one form of legal gambling. In fact there are only two states where all forms of gambling are outlawed: Hawaii and Utah.

These patterns are everywhere. I play COD mobile - in order to get the legendary skins for weapons you use a roulette wheel type interface.

The cost of the rolls is decoupled from the actual cost through using coins, and the chances of getting the legendary skin vs other less valuable things is weighted so that you effectively always need the full 10 spins. The spin cost increases each time.

The end result is that the skin you want costs upwards of £100.

Was there a legal change recently that has allowed these predatory life/society destroying apps to suddenly explode everywhere all at once? Maybe state by state in the US? In Kentucky, I have very suddenly noticed these sports gambling and online fake casino apps are now EVERWHERE. Tv ads, physical billboards all over town, in-app ads on my phone, etc etc ...

> But unlike the gambling market, apps like Jackpot Magic and Big Fish Casino are under little oversight to determine whether they are fair or whether their business practices are predatory.

The apps are upfront that there is no possibility for a payout, right?

It seems stupid to spend money other than for entertainment on these apps, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that the app is unfair.

It's a skinners box. People will put money in for the dopamine rush it gives. Think candy crush or vampire stories. They're paying for an experience. In a sense the people spending money are victims of predatory gaming mechanics.

If you've payed for anything in any video game to enhance your experience like getting an upgraded weapon it's the same exact thing. Turns out there's an audience that's willing to pay this money. Or it's a money laundering scheme but who really knows.

The issue is that there are some people who physically can’t help but pour all their money into these skinner boxes.

The insidious and unfair bit comes in when you realize that these companies specifically engineer their apps to take advantage of people with that kind of addictive personality disorder.

Check out the talk “Let’s go whaling” to really see what I mean. He opens the talk with “let’s set ethics aside for an hour”

The article mentions that Big Fish Games was at one point owned by Churchill Downs and now belongs to Aristocrat Leisure. The former operates racetracks and an online oddsmaker while the latter literally manufactures gambling machines.

> These games are not gambling because, among other reasons, they offer no opportunity for players to win money or anything of value. Our games are offered for free purely for entertainment, with an opportunity for customers to spend money within the game to enhance their gameplay experience.[1]

Right, no connection to gambling whatsoever.

[1]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6896112-BF.html

Oh wow, just from the title I assumed it was talking about gachas (FGO/Genshin/etc), but no, the "apps" the article is talking about seem to be several orders of magnitudes worse ($100k+) than even gachas (where even fully whaling out on a banner costs you ~$2.5k).

Gachas are, I think, basically identical. They appeal to a different demo using different processes but a lot of the people who work on games with monetization are using stuff that was learned in the gambling industry (i.e. how to maximize yields, how to treat whales, etc.).

Gachas are as problematic as casinos imo.

> Gachas are, I think, basically identical

Which is why I thought the title was about gachas.

What I'm trying to point out here is that are extra digits in the amount of money people are losing. This is utterly insane and I'm having a hard time even understanding that number.

Roblox is similar and in some sense even worse cause the kids are younger. There needs to be some curation or something done.

Also apple needs to develop better parental controls and we need MDM services that can restrict these apps for people with addictions.

Ethics in programming right here.

Check top games on Google's play store. Almost all have spinning wheels left right and centre. It needs to be stopped. One thing is random in games and totally different turning children games into Casino's

Definition of Gambling according to Gamblers Anonymous:

"GAMBLING, for the compulsive gambler is defined as follows: Any betting or wagering, for self or others, whether for money or not, no matter how slight or insignificant, where the outcome is uncertain or depends upon chance or 'skill' constitutes gambling."

http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/ga/content/questions-answer...

The article is from 2020 but there is a headline out today in the WSJ about the owner of Big Fish Games: "Aristocrat Leisure Raises Dividend After FY Profit Jumps 53%"[1]

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/aristocrat-leisure-rai...

There’s a reasonable regulation for these things — limit $/hour extracted per player

All digital entertainment period outside of live events

Whatever it costs to go to a cinema and see a 2hr movie. That’s the limit.

They'll open up a chain of premium cinemas as a benchmark.

The cynic in me suspects in-app-purchase was a mistake from the get-go. Outlaw all in-app purchase?

It's social media, but instead of advertisers paying them, it's the users paying them. Same addictive tactics, same pointless entertainment.

It's funny because in the mid 90s when online gambling was illegal (U.S.), I joined and played a service located in the Caribbean so I could place sports bets. I won a couple of times and they mailed me an actual check.

I lost way more than I won of money I didn't really have, but now that online gambling is legal and I have more disposable cash, there's zero interest in these

How is this any different that starting a legal weed shop that also happens to sell to people that are addicted to it? I knew plenty of people when I was younger that would spend so much in weed every month that they couldn't make rent.

If we are going to support legalizing drugs (which means the choice to destroy your life), we also need to support legalized gambling.

if you actually skip past the pathos and think about it, this is actually just bullshit. you can't make software illegal, that's like making authoring a book illegal. you're just wasting tax money of actual hard working, non-losers, who are a rapidly diminishing group. they will literally go do some other loser shit not even one second after the app is banned, ad infinitum. this is also an example of where regulation is not needed because you can (afaik) provably securely implement gambling on cryptocurrencies (*ducks*). eventually, people will only be using provably fair gambling software (although it's a bit slow to get there because crypto is still in the webshit phase and for instance they will sacrifice actual decentralization to use the web browser). a completely pointless result of cryptocurrencies but

What if the millions of hours drained on internet were spent in nature or doing stuff in your city ?

Nature and cities would be filled with people

Cue the times during covid when the national parks were overcrowded.

What’s interesting is they offer no chance to make money. Instead once you start paying they give you access to special clubs where you compete against each other, have conversations, etc. but of course if you stop paying you lose access to all of these.

So if you win, you can't cash out?

These games provide no cash reward. This is clearly stated in the article.

That's key because it shows how money isn't the only reward that can encourage unhealthy gambling behavior. It sounds like the victims express feeling of a sunk cost, knowing that if they don't maintain their status with additional purchases, all the previous money spent will have been wasted. If it took them $10k to get there, why throw it all away (and disappoint their "club") if you can keep it rolling for another $100?

Is this really any different to other “free to play” games? Sure, it looks more like a casino style game, but it’s still micro transactions and some addicted “whales” spending insane amounts of money.

Most successful businesses will have drained people of millions. A business making money by people paying them is a fundemental part at how a business works.

Why even bother with these when you could go to many casino web pages and just play in demo mode. With minimal if no deposit at all...

Smartphones and candy crush will be our generation's cigarettes. FAANG = Big Tobacco.

Slightly unrelated to the OP but: I think that in a more prefect world, the legality of parasocial internet use (which smartphones do a great job of enabling and encouraging) should be tied to the legality of cannabis use.

Too young? Shouldn't be able to use it. In a public place? It's rude and inconsiderate to those around to start using your phone / smoking; there should be designated areas where it is allowed.

FAANG isn't making candy crush, or any of these addicting mobile games for that matter

What a silly comment. McDonalds doesn't make poisonous coca-cola, they just distribute it.

You think cola is poison?

You don't?

In the same way that a slice of cake is poison, sure.

Tobacco kills 50% of its users. Smartphones and apps do not.

Tobacco doesn't kill users, cancer kills users.

I can apply the same silly pedantry ad infinitum if you like.

I know it’s just the inevitability of capitalism but I’m just old enough to remember the early days of the internet (via a 9.6kbps modem if I recall!) and it was such a wonderful, positive force. Every now and then I’ll look back and reflect on how distant that memory feels these days. Locked down proprietary app stores with apps designed to do nothing other than part addicts from their money. Sigh.

Do you remember the anarchist community that loaded up BBSs with bomb making and animal torture material?

Definitely. And all of their 25 users. It was literally a non-issue even back then but titles like The Terrorist’s Handbook and The Anarchist’s Cookbook had a lot of shock value.

Animal torture is such a fringe and infinitely small area that even if it’s deplorable it’s not, and never has been, prevalent in any meaningful way.

Funny enough the first fallout we had among admins when we started The Pirate Bay was about a cat torture video that forced us to take a stance on freedom/anti-censorship vs decency and compassion. (The latter won, but not without losses in the team because they found it hypocritical that we “censored” uploads.)

Animal torture is highly prevalent in the world. It's even part of our mainstream supply chain from food, cosmetics, or medicine. Torture for the sole purpose of torture is what you are describing and not what I was referring to.

I remember some high school kids dying during that period after trying to follow pipe bomb tphile recipes.

There was bad press, but for 99% of people, using a computer to do this was so abstract that it didn't create any lasting moral panic.

Hindsight is rose-tinted.

Tho I think those kinds of things weren’t as easy to discover or as widely talked about as the internet was largely a hobbyist thing at the time

I don't think that's the case here. The early internet and social media's original function and intent was basically to share information, learn things that would otherwise be nearly impossible to know, like what's going on across the globe and to keep in touch with friends/family.

Today's internet is a far cry from those ideals. It's about a handful of enormous companies sharing private data, shaping the way people think by promoting fake news and suppressing differing opinions. It's about making a buck of advertising which makes it impossible to surf the web without add blockers. Social media has devolved into a cesspool of hate and a fake sense of self worth.

Yup

I'm starting to think that the entire internet is a net-negative, especially when compared with desktop computing and occasional ability to connect to other specific endpoints which we chose — doing the computing we wanted to do with the tools and people we wanted.

Today, the entire world of computing and internet seems like being hooked into a giant scam-land, where it is just a giant effort to avoid everything from constant flashing adverts (that screw up any dark-screen setting) to outright hacks and scams, despite having multiple layers of filters in place, and the FFoxes, TBirds, & DDGs of the world, who try to preserve some hint of independence struggle to merely survive.

And this doesn't even account for Star Citizen or hearthstone

Robinhood isn't much difference. I'm shocked that an investment app gamifies trading so much it obviously becomes gambling. Financial industry is otherwise so heavily regulated I'm surprised they get away with it.

How does it gamify trading?

Headline reminds me of the recent crypto booms...

This, along with sports betting is the new smoking tax for dumb people.

There will always be a substantial part of the population who can't think critically, save money, etc.

I don’t ascribe becoming addicted to thinking critically. Anyone can fall into addiction.

I also don’t ascribe the inability to save money to be by stupidity. A substantial minority of the population in general is disabled, and society really isn’t good at supporting disabled people with complex medical needs— work is rarely adaptable to regular medical treatments for example.

Addiction isn’t rational and it isn’t related to financial planning or critical thinking.

Hope you never need opiates for an injury and have a family history of substance abuse, it's more common than you might think

> After a long legal battle, 2 million players, including Shellz and her husband, will be eligible to get a small part of their losses back — about 20 percent for those who lost $10,000 to $100,000.

This is ridiculous - are people incapable of free will anymore? I'm sick of "journalists" painting people as victims for gleefully engaging in reckless behavior. Remember the idiots who lost millions on Robinhood and tried to claim it was "too easy" to lose money via day trading? Or children "addicted" to loot boxes in video games? I know this is HN and the inevitable comment regarding pHd pSyChOlOgIsTs designing dark patterns into these apps so people have no agency over themselves.

My guess is there's some ambulance chasing law firm sourcing these poor fools, they use the PR circus to generate buzz about how they're poor victims, then they broker back door deals with the companies to get some settlement vs the negative press. Idk who the negative press works on - there are actual victims in this world, and these people are NOT victims.

It is definitely surprising the amount of time/money wasted on people like this that could help people who are in distress through no fault of their own. I said something about the gene pool in an earlier comment. We can't help everyone, and we should maybe stop trying to make it so that incredibly dumb people can reproduce even after putting themselves in situations where they couldn't normally.

I wouldn't doubt if there was a gullibility gene

Why do you have no curiosity when presented with a phenomenon that doesn’t make sense to you?

what's the phenomenon? how dumb and gullible the average person is?

> We lie in bed next to each other, we have two tablets, two phones and a computer and all these apps spinning Reel Rivals at the same time

am i supposed to feel bad?

How can you not feel bad reading that?

Mostly because its pathetic and in a way, its poetic justice. Smart enough to save six figures, most definitely didn't cry victimhood when they "won big", but dumb enough to think that setting up multiple devices could improve their odds. Seems like they're sore losers, not victims.

How can they be sore losers when there never was the possibility of winning anything?

Justice? Who did they harm?

Well you clearly said in your above post you’re just guessing. So you clearly understand you don’t understand something, but instead of expressing curiosity you assume a truth and derive conclusions from that. It strikes me as irrational, that’s why I’m asking you why you’re acting like this, because I have curiosity.

I don't think its worth deeper introspection ... Gambling has winners and losers, the winners don't whine and the losers do, except now the media thinks its a cause worthy to parade around. Its a free country, you can spend your money how you want. Don't expect people to care if it works out or doesn't.

> the media thinks

“The media” doesn’t think anything.

How does an industry (media) think? Also what evidence are you using to glean the intentions of people who are voluntarily reported upon with their gambling financial troubles?

People don’t become addicted because they’re “dumb.” Addiction is a completely different beast

okay show me the rocket scientists and astronauts pumping six figures into casino mobile apps ... its not a kind thing to say, but at some point we just need to admit that certain behavior is prevalent in less intelligent individuals. using "addiction" as cover is just a means to avoid that unsavory debate.

> what's the phenomenon? how dumb and gullible the average person is?

> am i supposed to feel bad?

I see no reason for anyone to load up on the grief of others. We are all carrying enough of our own grief. But, it seems like you bear actual animosity towards people who are emotionally devastated. The least you could do is to maintain a neutral, non-judgemental point of view.

If you believe people have 100% control of their actions all the time you know very little about human behavior.

Humans are barely rational bundles of emotions, urges, and instincts. Sometimes the rational part of your brain wins, sometimes the lizard brain that wants to see pretty colors and numbers go up wins.

where do you draw the line? you can use the lizard vs rational brain argument to make sense of any behavior. violent crime? blinded by rage. drug abuse? coping tool for trauma. rape? overcome with lust.

The money is obviously of better use in the hands of others. No harm done here.

I’m guessing you’re joking, but some people who can’t help but become addicted to skinner boxes have dependants. Children, families, tenants even.

Those people are harmed.

scammer credo

Easy to say when it's not your loved one.

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