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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fair enough to ban apps that resemble the aesthetics of gambling

Woah, not even age-restrict them, outright ban them? Personally, I think it is ridiculous that a game like Balatro is considered to "resemble gambling" if a game like Solitaire, Minesweeper, or Pac-Man is not. A game that involves risking virtual (or actual) money on a minimally semi-random outcome can be classed as "resembling gambling", for sure. Nothing else should.

Balatro's various bannings are particularly egregious, as it in fact does not involve risking money in the gambling sense. It has cards, and it has a concept of money (though in Balatro, barring particularly constructed setups, $25 is generally a lot of money, "dollars" doesn't meaningfully correspond to any real value of currency), but there's no "bet this much money on the outcome of the cards".

(Sure, a contrarian could construct "Yeah, but when you're buying rerolls of the shop you're gambling on getting a desirable outcome", but, let's not pretend to be stupid just to be contrarian, that's not where the bans are coming from. They're coming from "I see the word 'dollar' and the word 'chips' I see cards and poker hands, therefore it's gambling, and I'm literally not going to spend 30 seconds thinking about this even though it's one of our biggest sellers.")

The biggest thing that sets Balatro apart as not gambling to me is you never bet anything of any value. Anything you do only affects that individual <1h run. No money involved, no long term items, literally just fake chips and fake dollars for that specific run, and when you win/quit/lose you're back to the same position you started at.

It isn't just that you don't bet anything of value. You don't bet anything, period. There is no wager. There is no bet. There is no way to put up $5 and if the outcome goes your way you get $20.

You may, with all the various features in the game, be able to construct something that has that effect, although it would still require some squinting and blurring because there is certainly no dialog that ever pops up saying "Bet how much: _____". I'm hedging just because there's an awful lot of features in the game and you can do a lot of weird things if you try. But nothing is immediately coming to mind, without so much squinting that you'll turn Final Fantasy X into a "gambling" game because "you might run around starting fights to get rare loot" or something of a similar level of "possibly true in a really abstract sense but not a useful definition". You can, philosophically, define gambling down to "putting any sort of time or resources in for an uncertain outcome of any sort" and do useful math on such definitions but that's not a useful definition for the discussion at hand because that just describes life, and all games except deterministic solitaire games, which are a legitimate category but also a small minority.

Balatro literally teaches poker hands, so yes

Genshin Impact teaches how to blow hundreds of real dollars on "pulls" that may or may not give you anything of value. This is much closer to the essence of gambling than poker hands.

Gambling is not cards or slot machines or pachinko balls or any of these aesthetic elements. It's the wagering of real money on an uncertain outcome. This is why sports gambling is gambling even though it doesn't involve any of the above aesthetic elements. Genshin Impact is much closer to gambling than Balatro.

I think both should be banned

Enter a game that simulates what genshin impact does but without the money element. To be banned next?

What about Yahtzee? Monopoly?

Yes, and rock and roll is the devil’s music.

Pac-Man literally teaches you to eat unknown white pills.

It's actually amazing that people are able to play it without becoming drug addicts.

The most powerful hands in Balatro aren't real poker hands.

Pac-Man is completely deterministic and doesn't have hidden information. There's no gambling, it is all skill.

But yeah, if you're banning a game because it has randomized drops or chance based mechanics you're not going to have much left.

What are the "aesthetics of gambling"? Do all games involving dice rolls resemble that aesthetic? If gambling aesthetics change to resemble popular game aesthetics, does that expand the list of games you'll ban?

I'd say that any game that has chips, bets, and poker hands

> If gambling aesthetics change to resemble popular game aesthetics, does that expand the list of games you'll ban?

Yes

It sounds like you want to ban knowledge of gambling.

Yeah

Luck Be a Landlord features none of these things.

Balatro doesn't feature bets.

But not to ban games running on actual gambling? As long as FIFA still has lootboxes it's hypocritical.

I'd angle the bar even lower at that end. Any game that involves virtual money, that can be purchased with real money, and a random element should be classed as gambling. That would include things like Pikmin Bloom.

>But not to ban games running on actual gambling? As long as FIFA still has lootboxes it's hypocritical.

I'm ok with banning lootboxes.

Better ban Windows, then. It ships with a app called "Solitaire", which uses poker cards that "resemble the aesthetics of gambling".

Won't somebody think of the children??

I would suspect if someone tried to ship a full windows OS on the Google play store, that would also be banned for trying to break the app sandbox.

> Better ban Windows, then.

Yes. No need to qualify it. Windows simulates gambling every time a new version comes out and it asks you to upgrade!

Gambling with Klondike solitaire is actually a thing some casinos offer; you buy the deck for $X per card (e.g. $52) and get paid $Y for each card you get to the foundation (e.g. $5). IIRC, some versions of windows solitaire even offered that style of scoring.

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