Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe
bbc.com
bbc.com
Alcoholic drinks? History of bans like that suggests that it's not a good idea. However that doesn't mean that nothing can be done. Addictions to alcohol, drugs, smoking, gambling damage both the person suffering from them and the friends/loved ones around that person. It is most likely impossible to drive the harm down to 0, but it can be reduced by denormalizing casual alcohol intake and sitations where people are peer pressured into consuming alcohol to fit in (especially in young adults), etc. People addicted to those substances/behaviors need a safe environment, a society that won't prompt them to relapse over and over because everyone around them is a casual user. Those are my thoughts, but I'm no expert.
On the contrary, if we accept that people are mature enough to choose to drink, they certainly should be mature enough to spend $20 opening loot boxes. Fewer cases of cirrhosis, drunk driving accidents, and bar fights from loot boxes.
I would rather not give the government more power.
1. Alcohol may be consumed in moderation for enjoyment with no frustrating effect on our rational faculties. Even the bad effects on health are often overblown. They tend to be chronic and rooted in habitual consumption. Save for people with a predisposition for alcoholism, people generally do not experience compulsive desires for alcohol.
2. Gambling isn't comparable to alcohol. It is intrinsically irrational and inherently exploitative. It is also an intrinsically social and economic phenomenon. It requires the intentional exploitation of one party by another to work.
3. Loot boxes are intentionally designed to manipulate people psychologically for profit. It habituates bad habits by virtue of its very design.
4. While alcohol can be used that way, it is not designed for that purpose nor is its historical pedigree rooted in such malice. I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.
So they aren't comparable. It's not enough to say "both A and B can have harmful effects, therefore both A and B are 'the same' for all intents and purposes".
> We absolutely could do without alcohol too and it's certainly far more harmful than lootboxes by any metric.
Alcohol was not designed. However, marketing campaigns for alcoholic beverages are very much designed. Though I agree that prohibition against drinking won't ever work and would never support it, I do think that prohibition against alcohol advertising and marketing would be a beneficial to society. You are allowed to drink, but you can't try and manipulate people into drinking.
> I would also claim that its addictive potential is lower all things considered.
The addictive potential of alcohol is higher because it is directly chemically affecting the brain. It also causes physical dependencies as well as mental ones. These two often work together and combined are more powerful then the sum of the parts. What is also true is that people who have a genetic propensity for addiction are both more likely then others to become addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, or any other usual suspects. Loot boxes are ultimately causing the most damage to the same population subset as alcohol is.
Black market loot boxes, on the other hand, seem to me to be similar to software and media piracy and illegal streaming: easy to operate, extremely difficult to prevent.
This! I find it so strange that, in 2026, they still casually drink whisky in Hollywood movies and TV shows at the office and at home every time they encounter a tough situation. That subtle suggestion that alcohol will somehow help.
(random research paper but there are many. Nit pick if you like) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6760384/
However two thing can at the same time be true. Alcohol is one of the most dangerous and destructive drugs in society and also whisky in the evening by the fire can chill you out.
What you do do is create a black market, because people will want to buy it cheaper elsewhere. That puts money into the hands of criminals.
Anyone can make alcohol unlike most drugs. It's remarkably easy to make. You just need patience, and raw materials: potatoes, fruit or whatever. You can make it in your back room. The problem is that it is not high quality, and can contain chemicals which can make you drunk.
"Mistakes" in the controlling party's favour are extremely common in such industries. Fluke 100-1 sport betting win? Oops we forget to fill out that mandatory anti-fraud paperwork, bet is off. Lost that 3-2 bet that the favourite would place in a horse race but actually you didn't show proper ID? Sorry that's your problem, we're keeping the money
You may be shocked and horrified to learn that two things can be bad at the same time, even if we only talk about one.
GP's comments trend digital because we're talking about digital games. GP is on-topic, you are trying to derail and delegetimize the conversation.
This forum is a branching conversation pattern. I'm not derailing anything because this isn't a linear conversation. If you want to discuss something else that the parent comment said then make a post against that conversation.
He was very much pro-legalizing online gambling. He had worked for sportsbooks, had done lots of sports betting himself, stuff like that. But has concluded that legalizing online gambling has been a disaster.
> When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.
> It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.
The article makes a compelling argument that online gambling is a lot worse than other forms of gambling.
I have a take on this too. You know how scammers cast a really wide net, hoping to get lucky and find suckers? Well, that's really only part of the story, what actually happens is they get lucky and happen to find people when they are vulnerable. That's how smart people get scammed somewhat randomly.
When online gambling is in your pocket, it is guaranteed to be available when you're vulnerable.
This said the gambling bullshit is going way too far and has it's own set of consequences in society. Remember, every time you act like an asshole to maximize the amount of money you can rip off of others, you invite an authoritarian takeover when the average person in society gets tired of your bullshit.
16-yo kids might do some amount of part time work, and should at least have enough of a concept of money to understand why pressing the "more loot boxes" button is a Bad Idea. They're also old enough that they might potentially have their own bank account and their own card, which then caps the damages to their allowance.
I strongly believe that this is mostly performative, honestly
For example, you can get married at 16 in the UK, but can't drive until 17 (it's not a priority as we didn't build so many car-dependent hellscapes), and you can buy alcohol at 18 or be given it with a meal by your parents at younger ages, because we didn't have puritans making motorway funding contingent on passing strict drinking laws like the USA did.
Anyway, what I remember from the UK's Gambling Commission giving committee evidence to MPs on this topic is to ask the question: what is gambling? What activities need strict regulation, audit trails, compliance inspectors, etc? Village fête tombolas? Fundraising prize draws? Radio station cash giveaways? Top trumps? Panini sticker albums?
Lootboxes are not slot machines or FOB terminals. If they can't be "cashed out", they are more like collectible card games... which are also IMHO a plague on humanity, but not the same level of destructive activity as gambling for cash. They do need regulation, given how prevalent they are in games popular with teenagers, but need different regulation from casinos.
Games like Fortnite deserve regulation too, weaponised FOMO to keep money rolling in is sketchy.
Even if they can't be cashed out officially, there are often other unofficial ways. Like selling the accounts in question.
You can sell/trade MTG and Pokemon cards, but that doesn't make them "casinos"
That said, when you have a deck of, say, Pokémon cards in your hand, there’s nothing about it that encourages a gambler’s mindset.
My 8yo has a bunch of Pokémon cards and he just likes playing with them, he has no idea of any monetary value they might have. There’s nothing about the physical product or game itself that betrays that.
It’s the culture created around it that’s poisonous.
The games themselves are fine: if, for example, you could just buy specific cards from the manufacturer, fixed price, print-on-demand (and also buy packs for e.g. draft play), then I would have no problems with the business model at all, but it's the sales model that is predatory.
16 if you're buying wine or beer with a meal, at least in Scotland. This means that when you go to your mate's mum's pub for a pub lunch on a Friday you need to watch out for your teachers also going for a lunchtime pint.
Man, the 80s were wild.
Early 90s for me but there was an unwritten rule that the teachers had the nearest couple of pubs and the students had a few further afield. That prevented most unwanted mixing.
But those days are still here in some ways.
As a parent of a 16yo in the UK I can confirm that the vast majority of teenagers have somewhere they can go to get a drink if they really want. Unless you live in the sticks there will always be some pubs that will happily serve 16/17 year olds a few drinks as long as they're not doing shots or obviously getting hammered. Off-licenses are mostly stricter but very good/convincing fake ID is so easy to get nowadays.
What tends to be the limiting factor is money. £7 a pint in a London pub quickly eats away at whatever allowance they're getting or money they're earning themselves, and Spoons (the cheaper pub option) is often stricter on ID/ages than most (some nights/pubs are minimum age 21 which means the fake ID that says a 16yo is 18 is no use).
Chatting to my kid's friends they say that if they do want some kind of a buzz most of their cohort prefer low-grade drug use (weed, ket, etc) as it is considerably easier to get hold of and much cheaper than alcohol. However, as a generation, they tend to be a lot cleaner than previous generations, certainly cleaner than my generation. There are a huge number of them that don't do any drugs, many don't drink alcohol at all but are quite tolerant of friends who do want to drink/take. There seems to be a lot more acceptance and less peer-pressure.
... are you sure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_odds_betting_terminal
Buying Pokemon cards in the hope of getting a specific rare one is a pretty niche form of addiction. Compared to walking into a shop, putting in £100 and getting nothing back, then another £100, then another, in the hope of getting £500... it's a lot more accessible, and can easily wipe out your life savings.
Perhaps it's like arguing "which is more lethal, a gun or a screwdriver?", and you're arguing on a technicality that if you're really persistent then they're equally lethal as you can get the job done with a screwdriver, but you're overlooking how much easier the gun makes it.
The USA tried that out with Prohibition, and only after years of misery and gangsters taking up power did they realise their mistake. Moral absolutism doesn't work, problem management does.
Per the Gambling Commission in their call for evidence from a few years ago:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-gam...
> Gambling is a popular leisure pursuit in Britain. Last year, 47% of adults surveyed had taken part in at least one form of gambling in the previous four weeks [...] Gambling can be entertaining and sociable, and enhance enjoyment of other activities, and the vast majority of gamblers take part without suffering even low levels of harm. [...]
> However, gambling does come with risks, and problem gambling can ruin lives, wreck families, and damage communities [...] approximately 0.5% of the adult population are problem gamblers [...] this rate has remained broadly steady around or below 1% for the past 20 years and now equates to about 300,000 individuals whose gambling is also likely to cause harm to those around them
> This Review seeks to ensure that people can continue to gamble but that the legislation and regulation we have in place addresses as many factors as possible to give the necessary safeguards [...]
Evidence tells you plainly that different forms of gambling are not equal, and don't have the same power to trigger problem gambling in individuals. Coin pushers at seaside amusement parks with a maximum "bet" of 10p are not in the same league as fixed-odds roulette in a run-down high street with a £100 maximum bet. Lootboxes have some level of risk of causing harm, but not that level of risk.
It's a bit as if ice cream shops suddenly decided "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put alcohol into most of our sorts? It's just tiny amounts and alcohol-laced sweets have a long history already, so what's the harm?"
I guess I'd say the thing to do is to measure harms with direct evidence (e.g. this many people get addicted to lootboxes, they spend this much of their money, etc.) rather than seek an imperfect analogy with an existing but different harm. Lootboxes and fake FOMO are both techniques used by video game producers to fatten their bottom lines by psychologically manipulating their playerbase, let's get that regulated and set controls on it (audience, age limits, frequency, openness, etc.) rather than argue where it lies in the games-of-chance spectrum.
In 2019, the regulations changed to make the maximum bet £2 (50 times lower), in line with most other slot machines.
https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/authorities/guide/page...
The stake limits are for slot machines (online and offline) to stop gamblers rapidly losing their life savings.
The nearest regulations for real casinos are allowing players to set a deposit limit (so e.g. they can't spend more than £X per day) and that games can't run "fast" - no more than 50 games per hour/table. Also the local council controls what the casino's opening hours can be.
In this case, if the focus is on the psychological mechanisms that underly gambling (varying rewards) in connection where they are used to compel people to spend vast amounts of money for nothing, I don't see how the question whether or not there could be a monetary payoff is relevant. The psychological mechanism and potential damage is the same.
Anyway, in my estimation the threat of gambling addiction is far higher for teenagers than young children, since teenagers may often have sources of revenue other than their parents, so they can feed a budding gambling addiction longer without supervision, increasing the risk of addiction. 16 year olds don't belong in casinos, nor should they be engaging with loot box gambling.
By all means game developers deserve to make a living... However, if they're going to operate a casino, they should be treated and licensed as such.
I also think the odds should also be not only disclosed, but made prominent
Typically spelled "gacha", although I have to admit that "gotcha" seems apt.
Having said that, though, when I also combine this news with the attempt to force operating systems into sniffing for my age at all times, I am still totally against this. This kind of over-eager bureaucracy is not good. It reminds me of attempts to prohibit alcohol. Yes, it is not the same, a loot box does not cause physical symptoms really, compared to alcohol or, say, harder drugs - but states seem too eager to want to restrict people. Or monitor them, such as in the case of "age verification". So now this legislation is another basis to support mandatory age sniffing of everyone. So I am completely against it now.
This 'gambling' in games should have been headstompped under the law decades ago, but has instead grown into a huge ravening monster buying every politician it can. Every time you say we can't do anything about said monster you ensure that whatever happens will be extreme.
Another point of contention is the randomness of packs. The way you play is: You save up to buy the entire set of boosters and already get almost all cards you need for competitive or fun play. The rest you need to trade for or buy individually. It is much more of a social interaction than gambling. The value you get from saving up and trading is easily 10x what you get from opening boosters.
That's why you will never see a bunch of kids queued up in front of a counter frothing from the mouth saying "just... one more!"
Let the child use a separate debit card? Bank cards are personal and work as an authentication factor.
I remember that cartoon. Was it Richie Rich?
If you want to allow Pokémon cards and not casinos you have to accept that your rule isn't just "kids can't gamble".
This same reasoning applies to sex consent, voting, driving, working.
We want to say "only qualified people can do x" but it's impossible to encode this in regulations and it always boils down to the sorites paradox.
So as a culture we have defaulted to "age is a good a proxy for being qualified".
Can a 16 year old magically drive a car properly, but a 15 year old can't? Is an 18 year old magically much more capable doing their electoral civic duty than a 17 year old? Is a 21 year old magically able to consume alcohol responsibly, but a 20 year old isn't?
(Or whatever age cutoffs are appropriate for your jurisdiction.)
We define these cutoffs not because they are magical or apply equally to everyone, but because we have to draw the line somewhere, in cases where we aren't going to do a blanket all-ages ban. Sometimes the cutoff is chosen poorly, certainly, but that's a problem with the implementation, not the idea itself.
The actual reasons is that they hope to have captured the childs' reward system by then. Laura Cress must write articles for the BBC if she stopped she would lose her purpose in life and be forced into rehab, she would experience ego death and ostracization until she builds another system approved skill. Current society is heading off a demographic collapse due to this built up debt.
The real problem is that we have invented a society that is less rewarding than a slot machine, not that humans are somehow built wrong. A slot machine or hard drug can only effectively hack ones physiology, a social system can hack the whole stack at once (Physiology, Emotions, Ego, Social belonging). You can give bad actors the pains of withdrawal, peril, existential crisis and social suicide all in one. There are examples throughout very recent history of each layer being captured more perfectly. Even physiology more perfectly than any drug, think enclosure act, 14 hour workdays in industrial England.
Fine, ban lootboxes, but don't pretend it's to protect youths, it's to utilize "children". society is a massively harmful and evil tool, we must acknowledge that it's pure unadulterated evil that wouldn't blink at killing all youths. This is a fact, not an opinion, morals are just an API for humans that the system uses.
However, we can't set up a force of psychoanalysts to assess every member of society and run chmod on them, so we go with a compromise.
I think they're right, really.
Obviously you need to require enough friction that the experiences are comparable (e.g. no letting someone impulse buy 100 times in half a second without having to re-type their "I am an adult" payment info or something analogous, possibly just a hard ceiling for everyone), but I don't think you can ban everything that touches the same sharp edge, and you can't mandate that parents teach their kids how to handle it.
So I think the best you can do is put hard limits on people's ability to hurt themselves without at least an "are you really sure" check, and maybe something like not allowing cash in the exchange without adult verification so the kids might, at worst, gamble their FunBux they earned playing a game and get burned on having lost a lot of FunBux, rather than their or their parents' cash. (This doesn't stop parents from giving their kids their credit card, but that's not really a problem you can solve...)
Why not, though? Is this a general stance against banning anything, or do you think loot boxes, video games and/or kids are different?
In this specific case, it's because I don't think you can whack-a-mole things that tickle the addictive feedback loops in people's brains everywhere faster than people can engineer their ways around it or find new ways to exploit things that do those same things without being caught in the laws, so I think you need to both:
- raise the cost of making it too painful for people who aren't self-moderating enough and keep the most lethal edges off it (e.g. ceilings on how much you can spend, making you have to take active action that takes more than a few seconds so you can't impulse-click and blow a fortune on One More Hit, no feedback mechanisms that incentivize spending more when you already spent a lot...)
- limit how harmful it can be to people who are too young and haven't yet learned what it does to them and that they need to be careful (e.g. use something like having access to a credit card you can input on request as a proxy for verifying you're an adult, and try to ensure any of the foam padded Kid Slot Machines(tm) can't be traded in a useful fashion for cash or paid for with cash, even with verification)
In some sense, the original video games with this kind of feedback loop were arcade games - you got a variable amount of reward for your input token, and they had to give you enough to convince you to keep doing it. Microtransactions with lootboxes are just that feedback loop taken to the logical limit, but I don't necessarily think people who hate microtransactions would consider games like that as a similar evil, precisely because, like physical blind boxes, the quantization and scale is so much smaller, and it's so much higher friction to blow a fortune on it.
Just ripping packs hurts my soul. What a waste.
The proliferation of gambling over so many domains has radicalized me against it in a way that I didn't think would've been possible a few years ago.
I grew up in Italy when sport betting was illegal and you had to do it through illegal channels, and I did it now and then like everyone else, and thought we should totally make it legal.
At some point all betting, slot machines etc.. became legal and it's been a disaster and I'm also totally radicalized against it.
On 100 EUR you will get → 79 back, if you put them again in the machine you will get → 62.41 → 49.30 → 38.95 → 30.77…
It Is illiberal but I don't see an argument beyond the slippery slope one at this point in my life.
I am right with my late grandfather, a Baptist preacher, on the subject of gambling after watching people back home constantly checking their phones during the college bowl games and periodically sighing and cussing over the performance of teams they had never cared about before.
Between the 24/7 gambling and the easy answers machine being in their pockets (“well, ChatGPT says…”), the resulting brain rot hurts my soul.
Aggrieved parties can partly get restoration. That way there never is enough political momentum to legiferate them. Try to resell your Fortnite account and they close it.
Pokemon cards have utility within the game of pokemon. They additionally have value in secondary market places which is not strictly tied to the rarity of the item. These markets are not required to exist for the game to function.
Lootboxes, especially for competitive games, do not have any utility within the game and are often cosmetic. Their value is strictly tied to the rarity of the item which the vendor fully artificially controls. Absent the secondary markets the cases would not be purchased and the items ignored.
So you have a choice. You can make pay to win items and publish the probabilities of actually winning them. Or you can have items that can't be traded. Otherwise you're trending very close to widely known regulated activity like gambling.
Whereas gacha games and lootboxes are notorious for unpublished, ridiculously bad odds for "desirable" things with no way to outright purchase them.
meanwhile, one of the game that would have been affected by it, Counter-Strike 2, is already rated M by ESRB [1]. it is undergoing a major case in NY as we speak, and there are many professional players, also recognized by the devs, that openly stated they played the game since their early teens. [2]
it does mean that a lot of more suitable games for younger audience, such as the sports title released every year. but a lot of them already have free titles with pay-to-win mechanics. i wonder if the enforcement would really differ any more than it currently is.
I don't think I have ever paid attention to a single age rating in my entire life. Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways?
Very spiritually European move.
What regulators should do is focus on easily applicable percentage-based fines. Make sure it's not just another line item.
You mean when you've selected games for yourself to play? That's... fine.
If you mean when you've selected (or allowed) games for your kids to play, that's... pretty irresponsible.
This law in worst case doesn't cause any problems and in best case solve problems. So win-win.
It's my understanding that lots of parents use these numbers as guidance. I will make my own decisions about what my child can play, but the ratings and all the labels makes it much much easier to make an informed decision.
For the parents that are not into gaming, being able to just go by these numbers is much better than having no such guidance.
> Does anyone do outside of fundamentalist parents who wouldn't let kids play most video games anyways?
Yes. In fact I believe they help breaking down the fundamentalism by making it so clear that gaming is not inherently bad or good for your child. It all depends on the content.
I am not interested in playing hours of videogames to be able to decide. Not in googling through ai-slop and idiotic gamer videos to find out what is in.
edit: I'm pointing out the UK has apparently decided lootboxes are not gambling, because if they did classify it as gambling it'd be covered by existing gambling laws that restrict it to 18+.
Not that I personally hold that opinion, though I can see how I could have phrased my original message better.
It's a stupid decision by the government, they should be 18+ and recognised for being gambling.
Wow, considering how the UK has been going full Taliban on everything why stop at lootboxes? Guess the politicians are getting some money/bribes from the lootbox companies.
A: The UK Government has decided that lootboxes are not gambling. B: The UK government has not decided whether lootboxes are gambling or not.
The current situation is a lot closer to B than A. The UK Government has decided not to extend the existing Gambling laws to cover video game loot boxes. The existing laws did not automatically cover them, so a decision has to be made whether to amend the laws or not. Instead it has asked the industry to self-regulate. In 2022 there was a review that asked for improvements, restricting some access and mandatory spending controls. There have been other reviews and studies.
It seems quite clear that the industry is not doing enough (no surprise, it's a cash cow for them) so it's likely to mean the Government will crank up the legislation to force their hand, but the wheels of Government move slowly; way too slowly for many people who have been affected by this.
How much access to money parents want to give their kids is up to the parents.
What people do with their own money, including kids, is up to the people.
WHY are countries not enacting laws that punish companies for once? Say something like:
• "After 3-5 purchases of the same item with random contents the buyer should get the content they specifically want."
• "No item with random contents should cost more than N $\€"
• "Buyers should have N-M hours to get a refund for an item with random contents"
That way you could keep the "fun" and spirit of gambling without its destructive spiral and stuff
I have kids and as a parent I use these ratings as a very loose guide combined with my own experience and understanding of the game in question. Other parents ignore them completely.
I agree more could be done to directly affect the companies, and there have been a lot of legal cases surrounding loot boxes aimed at children.
But this is a good complement to that. It makes it easier for parents to get aware of the issue.
For instance, by being used in further legislation to mandate age verification on all operating systems. Lo and behold, that is already happening - see California.
One can not view a single law and assume it is isolated, when in reality this is a move by lobbyists to further restrict people and sniff after them (see MidnightBSD giving in and adding a daemon that sniffs for user data; I am 100% certain systemd on Linux will follow suit, via a new systemd-sniffy daemon). Some companies pay good money for such legislation. So the answer to your question is very simple, actually. You just should not view it as an isolated way while ignoring everything else - lobbyists are sneaky. It reminds me of Google claiming it has no problem with ad-blockers, then they went on to destroy ublock origin (https://ublockorigin.com/).
They've already enacted mandatory age-verification-via-ID to use apps/features.
It seems they're gonna put as many "gates/fences" at every N age years to make sure they can surveil as many people in distinct age brackets as possible.
Up next: Be of at least N years to watch cartoons with animated violence?
I agree with some of your other points, though: we should have legally mandated return periods for this sort of thing. Not sure how you'd enshrine price limits into law, though; that seems impractical.
Thinking in childrens' terms:
• Any microtransaction <$1 is fine, up to 10 per week or 20 per month or whatever
• Anything between $1-$10 should be more limited
• Anything $10 or above should be limited to 1 per week
• No microtransaction should cost more than 50% of the game's own full price, if the game isn't free
"Traditional" gambling is already not allowed below 18yo
Age ratings are an aid but still require passing good habits and developing your child’s ability to think and solve this for themselves. So not letting your kids get addicted to in-app purchases sounds like good parenting. Keeping your kids away from tablets and smartphones until they’re 16 is even better parenting.
And if a parent is blindly skipping an age verification screen for their kid without figuring out why that age verification is there in the first place, then they're a bad parent. You can't really fix that, unfortunately, outside of extreme cases.
And "learning" about gambling doesn't need to happen at 8 years old. What a fucking delusional view
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_waOkwIpWxg [video][18m]
That's not how I use the term. I think of a loot box as a treasure chest or similar that you discover while exploring which, when opened, gives you some loot!
On the other hand if you're talking about a package with a random assortment of stuff in it that you buy without knowing what's inside, I call that a "grab bag" or "mystery bundle".
Am I too old? What games were primarily responsible for changing the vocabulary?
The model is very strongly associated with the rise of "live service" gaming, with Overwatch and Battlefield being some of the more notorious offenders.
They usually have a very involved opening animation with music and sounds specifically designed to maximize the feeling of anticipation. Once you see it it feels completely different from what you are describing, because it’s so obviously trying to maximize the gambling aspect of it. It’s like confusing genuine love with prostitution.