When does a game become gambling?
If you've been to a gambling expo in the
past, let's say, two years, then you
probably saw something interesting.
Guitar Hero, Space Invaders, Candy Crush -
skill-based games that allow the
player to rack up winnings when they
achieve a goal, or lose money when they fail.
Casinos are turning to these skill based games,
or hybrid skill and chance games,
due to a demographic shift. You see,
young people don't really like slot machines,
so to attract them youths, the
gaming industry
well okay not the gaming industry you're
thinking of, the other one that makes
like slot machines and video poker and
stuff. I mean technically gaming industry
is the proper term but just for the sake
of clarity I'm gonna call them
the casino industry.
Anyway, the casino industry is hoping
that game based machines will pull in a
fresh batch of young millennial gamblers.
They've even rewritten gambling laws to
accommodate new machines that rely on
performance rather than mere chance. But
it isn't just the casinos who are
getting into videogame gambling. As you
have probably heard, Valve is currently
cracking down on third-party websites
that leverage Counter-Strike GO weapon
skin trading as a form of gambling.
With all of these factors coming into play at
once, designers have to start thinking
seriously about how they want to
approach gambling in games, even if,
like Valve, they don't intend for people to
use them for gambling.
This raises a lot of ethical questions
that the industry hasn't had to consider
before, so let's go ahead and try to
address it now while it's still on the
horizon.
First of all, just to say this upfront
there's nothing inherently wrong with
developers creating games for the casino
industry. Gambling is legal in many
places and provided developers go about
it in an ethical manner and abide by
local laws
there's a lot worse things you could be
doing as a high-tech company. In fact,
when we started looking at this topic we
were ourselves initially worried that
the melding of video games and gambling
might make kids more likely to form a
gambling addiction later in life, but
gambling addiction experts that we
consulted shrugged off that idea.
It turns out that gambling addiction
rates remain pretty consistent either way,
and though a childhood affinity for
games of chance
can predict future gambling behaviours,
there's no evidence that these games
somehow turn people into gamblers which
I mean I guess that makes sense;
it's not like everybody who spun the
wheel in Candy Land became a roulette
fiend, but there are still a lot of
things to consider: the first is the
worrying possibility of what may happen
when we combine the incentivized
feedback loop of games with the already
addictive practice of gambling. We've
talked about this a bunch of times
already so I won't repeat myself talking
about that danger. You can see our
episodes on humane design, exit points,
and the Skinner box if you want to dig
into that subject more yourself.
Suffice it to say that building a
humanely designed casino game will be a
very hard line to walk,
but that's not to say that it can't be
done. Second: if a designer decides to
make a casino game, or adapt a game
they've already made for gambling use,
the casino version needs to be different
in immediately obvious ways, by which I
mean police should be able to easily
tell them apart without any special
training. We've already seen machines
come out of China that are basically
slot machines disguises arcade games and
that's allowed unscrupulous arcades to
double as gambling dens. Third: designers
need to make sure that these games that
they're making are actually games, not
just glorified random number generators.
One of the good things about casinos
deploying skill-based games is that they
provide inherent entertainment value.
They aren't just mindless slot machines or
roulette wheels where players get hooked
on dopamine, they're more like poker: a
thing you can enjoy in and of itself
with winning money just being a fun
bonus. It's better for the casino too.
I mean, part of why Millennials hate slot
machines is that they aren't inherently fun
to play. But ok, enough about casinos.
What about a normal shooter with loot boxes
and item drops? How can a developer
ensure that they won't end up in Valve's
position where their game becomes an
unintended venue for wagering?
The simplest solution is to take the
Overwatch or Hearthstone route where you
don't let players trade digital goods
from loot drops. Now I understand that
suggestion may not be the most popular
one because, boy, we dropped just as much
money as anyone else trying to get that
Mercy halloween skin, but that system
does at least ensure that developers
aren't exposed to legal challenges
because no transaction between players -
no trouble. But there are legitimate
reasons to want players to be able to
trade loot.
After all, it creates a player economy. It
fosters social interaction, and it gives
loot a sense of value. Trading
opportunities make it more exciting when
a player hits the jackpot from a random
drop, and it offers them some
consolation if they get an item they
can't use. So how can developers regulate
trade in a way that isn't
open to bad actors?
Well, first let's review how skin
gambling works. In Counter-Strike GO,
players can obtain skins for weapons or
characters via in-game loot drops, with
certain skins being rarer or more
sought after than others.
Players can then trade these skins to
each other, or buy and sell them for
funds in their steam wallet. But, they
can't sell them for real world currency.
However, third-party gambling sites,
unaffiliated with Valve, have offered
venues where people can use these skins
as casino chips, betting them on
professional CSGO matches or even at
simulated table games like roulette,
blackjack and slot machines. When players
win or lose, the skins they have wagered
get automatically traded through steam
via bots controlled by the third-party
gambling site, which also offers to cash
those skins out for real currency.
Now, obviously this is illegal. And worse, a
lot of underage kids got sucked into
skin gambling. Valve is currently
cracking down by sending
cease-and-desist letters but there are
other things developers can do to make
sure that gambling doesn't become an
accidental feature of their games.
The first is to monitor transaction
volumes, and flag accounts with
substantially higher activity than the
mean. Now sure, some of these will just be
power players, but at least it narrows
down the data set to help discover the
bad actors. Developers can also track
one-way transactions where a player sends
skins to somebody while getting nothing,
or something of negligible value, in
return. If a developer can easily
identify accounts that seem over-generous,
they've gone a long way toward
identifying who is giving or getting
skins from an external bet. After all,
power players are trying to make a
profit, not give away stuff for free.
Another avenue for shutting down the
trade is bot hunting. Many gambling
sites execute these trades via bots, and
if developers can detect those accounts
and lock them out, it
will go a long way toward killing the
site, because let's be honest, if players
bid skins at one of these sites and then
never get those gambled assets back
because the bot accounts got locked,
that site is going to lose its customer
base pretty quickly. And while it is true
that gambling sites will just turn to
vpns or domain masking to create new bots,
well, there are tools to counter that too.
Just ask Netflix. But probably the best
way to keep players away from gambling
is by informing the public that many of
these sites just aren't fair. After all,
legal casinos are heavily regulated to
ensure that gains meet payout standards
but underground gambling operations? They
can offer crooked odds. In fact, that
whole Valve case first broke when it was
revealed that the youtubers doing how-to
videos about a gambling site actually
owned the site they were promoting. Some
even got the numbers ahead of time so
that they could demonstrate how easy it
was to get a large payout. And that
revelation damaged those sites as much as
any cease-and-desist. If developers are
willing to talk about these sites in
terms of consumer protection it might
prevent people from going there in the
first place, and prevent their players
from getting burned at the table. Now,
this is a rapidly evolving topic, and
likely to shift in the next few years as
gambling sites find ways around
roadblocks, but it's important to keep it
on our radar. The more games become an
integral part of our lives, the more
real-life problems they inherit. That's
just the price of success.
See you next time!