How is that the same? You can earn real money in a physical casino, here you cannot
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.
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 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.
This does not match my understanding or experience at all. Please share a source if you have one.
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.
Simply said lot of "games" are disguised Skinner boxes, people with addictive personalities are very vulnerable to those.
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.
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.
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.
If they never paid out, people would never go and the casinos would not exist
> 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.
If the average person would win money, the casino would cease to exist.
Sounds like these apps are more honest.