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by sourcepluck
591 days ago
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> I think of smartphones and the current app ecosystem as more like a swiss-army-knife of spyware and ad tech shoved into a package with as many sensors as possible, to monitor the population. And so, it had better be addictive. Because the underlying act of looking at one and spending so much time with one is, and always has been, antisocial and therefore somewhat repulsive. It took a great amount of marketing to normalize it, and people still rebel against it. I just wanted to highlight this section of your post for anyone skimming to have more of a chance of seeing it. Excellently put. I would add - and think it's essential - that yes it took a great amount of marketing, but also a great amount of people who could have said or done something turning a blind eye and not sounding the alarm. I'm thinking mainly of developers who were happy bringing home a fat paycheck, and governments who were happy to have more information about their populations. |
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Still, I think gambling can be ethical. If done right. Giving a fair shot at a 97% average payback to consenting adults is at least as good as selling them garbage tokens.
So a bit of a side-track: I did design a slot machine (Flash, online) back in 2010, that let you build up bonuses and see how many multipliers you had built up until you were ready to use them on the next spins. That was when I was running my casino. I thought it clever. A player could use them at any time.
I tried to get that slot machine design approved through the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and they told me it would be illegal. A machine couldn't have a "memory" like that, which would entice players to keep adding money to get back their built-up bonuses. I countered that the player could run the bonus feature at any time, but, apparently even that violated the rules. If the player ran out of money, they'd still need to add more to trigger the bonus they'd accrued.
Flash forward to this year, I'm in Vegas and basically every slot machine is some variation of the fireworks/dragon machine where 3 separate bonuses build up over time... but not in any clear way, and where the last part of the bonus could take forever to actually be hit. Nor can the player force their bonuses into play. I dumped $700 on a machine, $100 at a time, explaining to my partner why this type of game was illegal 10 years ago, until I gave up on the SOB.
I'm mentioning this because, as a dev of casino games, I myself would have considered that type of game to be completely unethical. I don't specifically blame the devs; I think regulatory capture by companies like Bally has a lot to do with it. We had laws that prevented the worst kinds of addictive stuff from being peddled to the public, and those have been directly attacked and chipped away at.