Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.
That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
It's "technically" just, after all.
Edit: I said 'UK' where I should have said 'England and Wales'. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, although I believe both have Adversarial systems they are different in some ways. The US system could, however, be seen as a continuation of the English system.
eats baguette
That said i think it's still better to just ban it.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
There's zero reason for a child to carry cash for no purpose. At any rate their lives are so structured usually that this notion that they're going to run to some store to convert it to prepaid cards is far-fetched to begin with.
I see a failure of parenting that some don't want to give credence. I'm not sure why.
Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home. And yes, people here let kids do that alone. Maybe because we live in a civilized society, who knows.
Yes, but not "instead". Regulate microtransactions, as we do any form of actual gambling.
> Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home.
Bus pass.
None of this makes sense. Some parents aren't doing their jobs.
I still enjoy them though, but I enjoy gambling responsibly!
> https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers
While it won't be true for all kids, personally I felt coin pushers taught me an important lesson about the drawbacks of gambling at a young age - it's obvious even to many children how rigged the penny pusher is. My own son had similar thoughts after a quick try of one too.
I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.
I don't care very much if people gamble with each other, and expect $1 back for every $1 they put in.* But casino games and lootboxes are specifically designed for consistent losses to the house. It's simply another tax, but on the addicted, desperate, and/or innumerate. The weakest people at their weakest moments; and if we're not protecting them, the government has no purpose.
* I actually think that it is good for people who have the same wealth levels to gamble with each other, as long as the outcomes are largely random. The problem is with vigs, and with pots that get too large to cover against a house that can endlessly extend itself.
Enforce 18+ age rating and mandate platform parental controls. If the parents decide to let their child pay for adult content freely that's unfortunate and on them.
Going stricter isn't effective, ID check will become tools for whatever ulterior motives they have.
I believe for some regions, Valve just shows you what's in the "lootbox" (case, whatever), and you have to pay to acquire it before you're shown the next one.
This isn't to say I don't fully agree that this kind of thing is probably predatory and probably unhealthy. But I find most discourse on the topic starts and ends at the shoreline with a version of "there ought to be a law..."
its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money
I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me
EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community.
More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors".
I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like.
On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
Not if your dad is the one buying you the cards.
The ticket conversion rate at these establishments is a worse scam than TF2 knife trading was until this update.
Just curious.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
- You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything.
- The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf.
- It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead.
They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop.
I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.
Other types of partly fake skill games surely should be banned from kids. Like crane games where there is some hidden variable. And well anything in same category.