LBAL and Balatro being banned or 18+ age-gated for having gambling "vibes" despite not actually simulating gambling, while the stores are full of gacha games which are designed to bleed players dry through real-money gambling mechanics is a ridiculous state of affairs. The latter makes Google and Apple insane amounts of money though so of course they're not going to do anything about them unless their hand is forced.
Balatro having an 18+ age rating is insane. The only thing gambling about that game is it uses poker hands for scoring, and has an element of luck. How is that different to any other mobile game with a luck component (see 99% of them) with a scoring mechanism inspired by poker?
To me gambling requires betting of long term/valuable resources. In Balatro, the only thing that you'll affect is each individual run, you're back to square one after each as it's a rouguelike. Games like Clash Royale where you can spend actual money on chests for items that affect the game long term, not just for a single match, to me is actual gambling, whereas playing a poker hand using fake chips that only affects that single <1h run absolutely isn't.
It looks like whoever came up with the ratings just saw it uses poker hands for scoring and represents a score with chips, therefore it's gambling, and gave it an 18+ rating, when you're not actually gambling anything (either real world money, or long term items in the game)
PEGI can't even make their minds up, I believe it was originally given an 18+ rating, which was amended to 3+ when the publisher appealed, and then it was amended back to 18+ unprompted.
The fact that Fifa(sorry, EA Football) has a 3+ rating while having the most predatory gambling mechanics in any video game but Balatro gets 18+ is just proof that the system is not working correctly.
Looks like the stores allow apps acting like a casino and they’re only against apps looking like a casino.
Perhaps LBAL should get reskinned (with no slot animations and with some pocket monster collection instead of cards, or similar) - with no change to the gameplay.
"Gambling" restrictions in apps and media are never about the actual dictionary definition of gambling. They are about traditional visual and audio patterns. Does the app look like a casino game? If it does (but no wagering is happening), then it's gambling, and if it doesn't (but wagering is going on), then it isn't gambling. Raters probably have a list of checkbox items (icons typically associated with cards and chips, green felt, red-and-black color schemes, maybe certain sound effects), and if enough of them are checked, it's "gambling". If none of them are checked, like an anime-themed gacha game, then it's not gambling. It really probably is as simple as that.
It's just like "sexual content" ratings in TV and movies. It's not really about sexual content. It's about whether or not you show a nipple or genitalia. A show can have plenty of steamy sexual stuff but it's unlikely to be classified as sexual content unless it visually contains key checkbox items. Likewise, if it merely shows a body part in a non-sexual context, it gets labeled as sexual content.
I think that's exactly the point. And maybe from a business perspective, that's the correct (if cynical) decision -- the behavior of "activist" groups and/or public outrage seems to be driven purely by optics and screenshots, not substance.
The generation of gambling addicts who were raised into it with mobile gacha games isn't quite grown into adulthood yet.
Anti-gambling activists have limited resources too. They're going after what they recognize, which is casino gambling and simulations of it. This new shape of gambling just isn't on the radar of non-tech people yet.
I'm imagining exactly who makes these calls, if a human is even involved, as someone spending five seconds on a moderation app looking at screenshots and immediately pushing the "gambling" button so they can go on to the next task more quickly.
It doesn't have to be a human, either, at this point it could be AI trained on the same bad answers.
Everyone is paraphrasing what the judgement is. It's easy to find on pegi.info:
> This game teaches - by way of images, information and gameplay - skills and knowledge that are used in poker. During gameplay, the player is rewarded with ‘chips’ for playing certain hands. The player is able to access a list of poker hand names. As the player hovers over these poker hands, the game explains what types of cards the player would need in order to play certain hands. As the game goes on, the player becomes increasingly familiar with which hands would earn more points. Because these are hands that exist in the real world, this knowledge and skill could be transferred to a real-life game of poker.
Their issue with Balatro is that it teaches poker hands.
Now search the PEGI site for 'poker' and you'll find numerous games with Poker in the title which are rated 12 and 16. 'Poker Smash' for Xbox and 'Poker Masters' for PC and three other games are even rated '3'.
It seems that ratings have changed over time - early 2000s were much more leniant on gambling as a topic. Every game on Google Play with Poker in title, bar one, which I found had an '18' rating.
In the first three generations of Pokemon, Celadon Game Corner has those in-game slot machines where you can bet and win tokens. In gen four, the Japanese games keep the Celadon slots, but in every other release they got replaced with a minesweeper-y game to appease PEGI.
I find it an interesting commentary on child protection laws (and standards organizations that don't reach the level of legal enforcement) and related to an idea I've had for years, that people are interested in appearing like they are protecting children more than they are interested in actually protecting children.
> The latter makes Google and Apple insane amounts of money though so of course they're not going to do anything about them unless their hand is forced.
Similarly, they avoid drawing attention to their shenanigans by keeping the vibe clean
I just checked and Genshin Impact has a 12+ rating in the App Store. AFK Arena is rated 9+. Many other gacha games are 12+. This doesn't seem like a "higher age rating" to me.
In the Mac app store, where Baltro is an arcade game:
Age Rating
12+
Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling
Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes
While we are at it, WTF is with us as a society normalizing gambling behavior with places like Dave n Busters and Chuck-e-Cheeze and their ticket machines? That stuff is probably worse than gambling from the perspective of ROI.
I wonder if it is thought of as not really gambling because the ROI is so bad. The rewards have very little actual value, so fun must come from playing the games, and the toy is just a little trinket at the end. And if a kid ignores the tickets and just plays the games they like, they’ll probably have more fun. But the ticket minigame is something that some find fun, so…
Anyway, I think this is wrong, because kids are mostly playing with their parents’ money. So it still becomes a system with a positive ROI from their point of view.
If you grew up in certain communities or religious groups, standard playing cards were forbidden items because of their association with gambling.
In many of these communities, obvious replacements like Rook decks [0] are somehow perfectly fine. Even though you can easily emulate a standard deck using this deck that consists of about the same number of ranked cards divided into 4 suits.
Two things that are practically identical, but one is "evil" and one is not purely by association of how some people use one of the things.
As a species, we draw some pretty weird dividing lines.
Past weirdness in the rules adopted by certain groups is not a strong argument for these rulings against gambling themed non-gambling games while non-gambling themed gambling games receive leniency. Rather, it speaks to the remarkable superficiality of these arguments.
You (and I) have the luxury of irrelevance and thus can be flippant in our opinions... so I see your point but if I were actually in charge of a community and a significant percent of my small community was diseased with addiction to gambling, banning playing cards seems pretty tame and reasonable.
Pretty ineffective, though. You don't need playing cards to gamble. The cards and the games that use them bring some established context and process which is certainly convenient, but they're not required to gamble. If people want to gamble, they'll tend to find a way. All you really need is 2 or more participants and an outcome to observe.
Two shepherds watching a flock of sheep can gamble between themselves on which side of the field the sheep will mostly be on at mid-day.
For my own perspective as someone who did grow up in a "no playing cards" religious group, it didn't help much regarding gambling. My siblings and I made wagers on random things all the time, including card games we made up ourselves with Rook decks.
The "evil" connotation did have some particular effects, personally. I remember around age 8 or so, some classmates with a standard card deck taught me how to play "Go Fish". No wagers, just playing the game. I was still apprehensive to join the game, and I spent the rest of the day alternating between being afraid of my parents finding out and worrying that my soul had been damned.
It's 1880. you're the mayor of a small town of 300 people and two girls have been sold by their families to pay a gambling debt.
A mother appears in front of you, with haunted eyes and a worry-worn handkerchief in hand. "You cannot save those two missing girls, but you have to stop this from happening again! Help those that cannot help themselves."
What do you do, Mayor Sjsdaiuasgdia?
My guess? exactly what rational people did
* Be vocal about the worst-case scenario
* Criticize those that ignore the warnings
* Ostracize those that ignore the criticism
* Do your level best to discourage "gateway" behavior as best you can
but maybe they're fools. What would you have done? Tell us, Mayor Sjsdaiuasgdia!
Maybe I'd give a little thought to why selling their daughters was or seemed like the only solution to those families. And I'd definitely want to track down and prosecute the people who are going around buying children.
I don't disagree with any of your bullets, but none of those bullets actually require saying "playing cards are evil." They all work just as well with a theme of "Gambling can be fun, but it's addictive, and you might not know you've lost control til it's too late."
Same thing that's done nowadays, steer the riled-up citizens to label the establishments where gambling takes place as nuisance properties shut them down.
Is it? If you go to any casino you'll see playing cards plastered on every wall and suit themed decor. Even games without cards use red/black. Media depictions of gambling are usually cards. People who go to Vegas take home a souvenir deck of cards. Casinos
A deck of cards which you can use to play non-gambling card games but that doesn't use the same "branding" I'm sure works really well. It's hard to feel "cool" when you're playing with a Fisher-Price deck.
Yes it is, potentially. Where I live (and grew up) the only game played with these type of cards is Poker, and we didn't exactly play Poker growing up - so all our local games use a different deck of card. And in other not-too-distant regions they use yet another deck or two.
This might be the "worldwide standard" but that doesn't mean anything.
No joke, growing up in a religious community that banned playing cards, I was given a ton of caution about dice.
Dice for determining movement in a board game was somehow totally fine, but making anything more than that dependent on the outcome of a dice roll was considered evil.
The whole "devil is in this object" idea is something Christianity has been working to stamp out for centuries, and yet it keeps surfacing with our country cousins out in the hinterlands.
Every major religion is comfortable with the concept of needing to go out into the sticks and unfuck the rubes before they start sacrificing children to their goat god.
Yes but what if that duck statue is so appealing that you find yourself addicted to ducks, visiting pet stores looking for ducks, or wandering late at night in parks with feed in your pocket?
A subset of people come in an use something inappropriately, introducing risk for everyone else, and the easiest/cheapest way to control this is by restrictions on access to the item/tool.
Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
> If you grew up in certain communities or religious groups, standard playing cards were forbidden items because of their association with gambling.
I was told it was because the face cards were derived from Tarot cards. Playing Uno or Rook (which had only numbers on their cards) at functions was considered just fine -- although of course any poker chips would have been so obviously Right Out that nobody even thought to ask.
(FYI later on I looked it up and the face cards do not derive from Tarot cards; but these discussions happened before the World Wide Web.)
same is true for mahjong in china. because it is used for gambling it gets shunned by people who dislike gambling, although it is a perfectly fine game otherwise. we loved it as kids so much that we were the only ones who kept borrowing it from our local game library and we bought it when they sold of unpopular games. i suppose for chinese it feels like playing poker just for fun.
Balatro is similar, it leans heavily on Poker aesthetics but mechanically the only thing it has in common with Poker is that it starts with a standard 52 card deck and the hands you can play are (mostly) the ones used in Poker. You could play it for a hundred hours and still have absolutely no idea how to play Hold'em.
>You could play it for a hundred hours and still have absolutely no idea how to play Hold'em.
On the flip side, it's super similar to those video poker machines in bars and restaurants. If you allowed the option to increase the bet and got rid of the special joker abilities, it's basically the same thing. People claiming otherwise are being willfully ignorant. I love Balatro, but it's definitely gambling adjacent and depending on how rules/laws around children gambling are defined, it probably should be age gated, or those rules/laws should be updated to reflect reality, you can't have it both ways. But also, I'd say the same about all of those games with gacha and lootbox mechanics.
Now based on this thread, I’m very confused as to what Google is trying to ban or what the law (are they trying to comply with some law?) actually says. Balatro is not gambling, it has a gambling aesthetic but no actual money changes hands. Lootbox games are gambling, at least if we accept the idea that the things in the loot boxes have value; money goes in, and then you get something out with a random component to the value. But they don’t have a gambling aesthetic, they are usually wrapped up as something related to the game, right?
I could see Google wanting to comply with some directive not to “glorify gambling” or something along those lines. This would be independent of whether or not the games actually are gambling.
Anyway, I don’t think people are being willfully ignorant. I think they are just assuming Google is trying to regulate actual gambling. Not gambling aesthetic for non-gambling. But I have no idea what Google actually is trying to do.
I will note that it is pretty suspicious that the one type of gambling they managed to regulate is the one that doesn’t make them any money other than the first purchase…
> On the flip side, it's super similar to those video poker machines in bars and restaurants.
Other than playing cards being shown on screen, it's not.
> If you allowed the option to increase the bet
There is no betting in Balatro.
> and got rid of the special joker abilities, it's basically the same thing.
So completely change how the game works completely then it's "basically the same" as video poker? Do you hear yourself?
> People claiming otherwise are being willfully ignorant.
People claiming otherwise can tell the difference between 2 games using playing cards.
> I love Balatro, but it's definitely gambling adjacent
Again, there is no gambling in Balatro.
> and depending on how rules/laws around children gambling are defined, it probably should be age gated, or those rules/laws should be updated to reflect reality, you can't have it both ways.
Gonna ignore this because you haven't explained in any way how Balatro is in anyway "gambling adjacent" other than your made up situation where if you completely change the way the game works it becomes gambling, which of course is nonsense.
Ironically, the reason some states allow “video poker” gambling machines and not slot machines that look like slot machines is that poker is at least partially a game of skill.
Even though video poker as it’s typically implemented and played is essentially indistinguishable from a slot machine — if there is user choice of what cards to swap in a hand, the machine will indicate and default to the option with highest expected value, so user skill is irrelevant.
IIRC even the author of Balatro has said he would be fine with any state in which his game gets rated the same as games with actual gambling, instead of those games getting a 3+ rating.
It is like chocolate cigarettes, they are not real cigarettes, they don't have nicotine nor smoke, and yet they serve to present and normalize real cigarettes to kids, so there is an argument for banning them. Where you draw the line is a difficult ask (a chocolate with packaging and wrapping copying exactly a cigarette pack seems like a clear case, but what about cylindrical chocolates that vaguely resemble? Probably not).
I think it is fair to argue where to draw the line, but I think some "looks like gambling but without gambling" do in fact deserve more scrutiny just because of the resemblance.
(On the other end of the spectrum we as a society should really crack down on the "doesn't look like gambling but is gambling" epidemic.)
To extend your analogy, banning Luck Be a Landlord while allowing lootboxes and the like is kind of like banning chocolate cigarettes while allowing kids to have nicorette gum.
One of them has the aesthetic, one of them has the actual negative thing.
The aesthetic being banned is supposed to be in support of reducing the impact of the actual negative thing, but the actual negative thing is being PROMOTED instead of banned.
It all feels very pants-on-head kind of up-is-down logic.
This is the sort of hysteria that got comic books censored in the the 1950s and "violent" video games in the 1990s. The argument that fictional depictions of undesired behavior cause real cases of it just isn't supported by evidence, but only assumed.
Gambling is not when a lot of colors flash by on the screen, no matter what kind of pattern they flash by in. Gambling is when you bet real money on a game of chance. If simulated gambling includes simulating any game commonly gambled on even when the actual gambling part is removed, does it include dice?
Spending money to win is synonymous with gambling. virtual money that gets renewed when you start a new game is as much gambling as shooting hellspawn in Doom is murder.
