Allowing trading is a big part of it. Most online games never allow trading the things bought with real money, they get tied to your account. I guess as a way to prevent CC fraud but it still contributes to the issue.

You can't return an opened pack of Pokémon cards and more than you can get your money back for a used lottery ticket. It's absolutely gambling. Low stakes gambling maybe, but it's still gambling.

If you want to allow Pokémon cards and not casinos you have to accept that your rule isn't just "kids can't gamble".

>No child will bankrupt a family at a trading card game store.

Let the child use a separate debit card? Bank cards are personal and work as an authentication factor.

You implicitly assume that age is a proxy for ability, but that's not the reason for these laws. Age is a proxy for membership in a social class where discrimination is permitted. Otherwise we would prevent people from voting, which Americans did with Literacy/IQ tests and Blacks.

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.

Clearly they do and many people can safely do things that are illegal and many people should be prevented from doing things that are legal.

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.

While I think education matters, I also think at some point if something is purely negative for society one should restrict it, rather than try to reach an ideal state were people are educated enough to handle it right.

It Is illiberal but I don't see an argument beyond the slippery slope one at this point in my life.

Just trying to get normies to understand that slot machines aren't "hot" and "due" for a jackpot because nobody has won recently is virtually impossible. Stats class is hard and people don't really trust what they've learned anyway. A huge portion of the public even believes in such a thing as a person having "good luck". It's nonsensical, tantamount to believing the god of fortune is going to intercede on your behalf, but people really do think this way.

It's a good smell. My kids are opening packs and I can totally recall the sensation of opening mtg cards in the 90s.

I do, generally, think that banning (or legalizing) things in their entirety is often ineffective, and if you just make them entirely and equally illegal/legal you no longer have any levers to stop people making them as toxic as possible. (Look at how insanely pinpoint-targeted at addiction exploitation sports betting has become in the US, for example.)

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.