Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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