Comment by skippyboxedhero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skippyboxedhero | Hacker News Reader

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skippyboxedhero

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.

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