I know there are no gambling mechanics in the game, but it is certainly poker themed so I feel like I’d be hard pressed to argue that it doesn’t contain gambling imagery, and it certainly instructs about how poker hands are constructed (in the sense that if you didn’t know what a flush was, you will after playing Balatro). I feel like they may have run afoul of a technicality.
That definition is not just loose, it’s missing all of its screws completely at that point. Gambling is also assuming you’re putting something of actual value at stake. Nobody would use gambling for a bit of randomness in a game with no stake.
Are you gambling with yourself in a game of solitaire? Or if you hope the Pac-Man ghost will go left instead of right at the end of the corridor? In isolation, obviously not. I’m assuming you’re playing to have fun, and “losing time” or reaching a game over state earlier will not have a significant impact on anything.
However, if you’d bet $10 with someone that you’d win those games, yeah, it becomes gambling.
Aaaand that’s why microtransactions blur the line so much and gacha/loot boxes should be considered gambling adjacent. Not just any incursion of randomness.
Not that I’d exactly call it gambling per se, but I have friends who definitely scratch their gambling itch with high risk RNG game mechanics that don’t cost IRL money.
Path of Exile, for example, is great at this. You can invest a whole lot of time/resources into a craft, and then the final step, it either bricks or becomes a best-in-slot item. The game is littered with this sort of mechanic, and you definitely get a rush when you coin flip with several hours of your life on the line.
So while I agree with you, I can also kinda see their point.
I’m not particularly interested in getting into a deep dive on this, but couldn’t you argue that your time has a value and thus is a stake, or your feelings of success/failure in a given moment as response to a game state are “at stake,” or the given entry price (eg $15) of buying the game from Steam?
My ultra religious father made me throw out a kid’s magic trick prize from a breakfast cereal box when I was a kid. He told me knew it wasn’t gambling (it had three loose playing cards), but we needed to avoid the appearance of evil.
Wouldn’t surprise me if some fundie reported the game under similar pretenses.
Nuts. My parents didn’t let us play with playing cards and instead used cards from other games. Fortunately they don’t have the same opinion anymore, and we play with playing cards all the time.
I don’t really understand that whole line of thinking. You can gamble with anything, so the medium isn’t going to encourage people to gamble. Instead, just teach kids what gambling is and why it’s bad instead of banning anything used to gamble.
I don’t let my kids play F2P games because they have the same draw gambling does. I let them play with face cards though, because why not?
It doesn’t really teach you how to play poker or gamble though. You don’t bet anything, and sure you might learn what a ‘flush’ is but it usually doesn’t contain a ‘4-of-a-kind’ at the same time.
Yeah lol learning poker hands is all it does, which is trivial. The hard part of gambling is learning odds and how to bet. There is a little bit of odds calculation in the game, but it’s incredibly unrealistic with all the modifiers, and they change on each run.
Absolutely fucked up that games with legal gambling (loot boxes) can be rated E, but the second an indie dev makes a game that has cards in it and a poker scoring system, they suddenly act like rabid dogs.
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