the game developers know this), you receive a digital asset that can't be traded. Not only are they randomized, but in the event that you win a desirable prize (and these are few and far between. What is a loot box but a way to groom children to gamble away their money? And even worse, there's no return on these boxes.

I will forever maintain that loot boxes are inherently worse than casino gaming because they target people who haven't had the education to understand probability, and laws should be altered to regulate them just as all casino games are regulated. There were a lot of nice and talented people at that company, but It definitely wore on me the feeling that the work I was doing was making other's lives worse. Every time metrics would be celebrated I always thought about the potential person playing those game's wasting a whole bunch of money on 'Just one more spin' (Although the article suggests that's not the primary motivation behind the addiction).Ī coworker told me a story of how some of the slots went down over a long weekend, and they were inundated with angry emails asking for a fix. There was also an autospin feature where you could spin at high bet amounts (The largest I remember was $200) over 100 times. Since every slot game is essentially the same the only reason a game might perform higher was because the art, sound or minigames were more attention grabbing and addictive.

I always felt sort of bittersweet when the company would announce metrics about how high performing our games were. Occasionally a game would have a 'minigame' on certain rolls but those never changed the outcome of a spin. Every game was fundamentally the same, it was just different skins on top along with slightly different mathematical models for each one. We didn't handle any money directly, just licensed out the slots to casinos who would buy them. I briefly worked at a company that created online slot machine games for online casinos. And when some other unlucky person who is, for whatever reason, predisposed to problem gambling becomes addicted to this app and it ruins their life and possibly the lives of their friends and family we’ll again focus on the “personal responsibility” of the victim and ignore the system and industry that not only facilitated but targeted and then nurtured the victim’s problem in order to profit. And while the woman shouldn’t have embezzled funds from her employer we’ve sent her to prison and then allowed the obviously exploitative app to continue operating. (Or at least we think it is!)īut, like the app in the article I linked, what’s a casino that takes in real money but never pays out? It’s hard to see it as anything other than predatory. I think those of us who aren’t problem gamblers have an easier time turning a blind eye to the predatory nature of gambling because for most of us the fun is winning a few bucks on a penny slot or putting $10 on black. It’s clear that the prospect of winning money isn’t the primary motivation for most problem gamblers and gambling addicts and it scares me to think of the implications, especially when helped along by technology. I think about this Australian woman all the time.

Hyperfixation vs hyperfocus