Comment on Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread
Goronmon@lemmy.world 2 months agoBut both are gambling.
Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.
People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
It depends on if you value your time or not. That’s what you gamble in WoW. If you don’t get your drop at the end of the raid, you lost time. When a new expansion obsoletes your gear, you lost time.
Oh wait, you literally have to buy play-time to even do the raid in the first place and roll the wheel. Not to mention the (sub)time it takes to level up and gear up.
Yeah. Just because you are not pulling out your wallet at every kill doesn’t mean you aren’t gambling and losing, both time and money.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 2 months ago
In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.
My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.
Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
It is gambling becaae there is a “house” you at playing against, whoever sets the odds and has a financial interest in them.
If you’re playing a singleplayer game, you are still triggering the same mechanisms, but no one is profiting from you staying up until 3am playing a singleplayer game you already paid for.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 2 months ago
So all subscription games are gambling? What about Fallout 76? It’s not gambling if you just buy the game but if you buy the subscription the game becomes gambling despite the game fundamentally stays the same and the subscription doesn’t add any RNG to the game?
Goronmon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If you value your time, you wouldn’t be playing video games at all. As they are nearly an entertaining way to waste time.
All games waste either time, money, or both. So I guess we just have to make video games illegal now. Oh well. Was fun while it lasted.