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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

Buying a CCG pack is a rather detached process; you fork over you money and you get a foil wrapped packet. You unwrap it afterwards and that's fun but it's clear that an ordinary purchase is occurring. That's much less stimulating than the glitzy animation and audio one gets that is carefully designed to give kids the impression that something special and exciting is happening and to spark that bit of hope that they'll get something good. Add on top of that the additional animation/voice-over when they do get something good to reward them and it's therefore not surprising that children are strongly attracted to it.

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I don't really think is a strong argument.

You can present it wrapped in whatever glitz (or lack of) that you want, but the process is pretty much the same.

You're exchanging currency for a chance at getting something from a known subset of items.

There’s a huge difference.

You could write a terminal program in which people can buy and open loot boxes; I guarantee you it won’t be as “effective” as a fancy loot box ceremony in an AAA video game.

(I put effective in quotes because it depends on what axes you’re looking at.)

Pokémon cards are clearly different enough is enough ways that they don’t cause the same amount of harm to anywhere near as many people as other forms of gambling do (such a pokies machines in bars and loot boxes in video games).

Sure, the core process may be the same, but that’s not all that matters. It’s how it connects to everything else and what the overall resulting effect is.

I think a big part of the difference is that a kid is much more aware of the money involved when they hand physical cash to someone.

It's very different than having a number invisibly go down from your playstation gift card or a number invisibly go up on their parent's credit card.

There are countless adages like "Presentation matters" in business, "You eat with your eyes first" in cooking, "Dress for success" in interpersonal relations, etc. that all boil down to how appearances and the pomp and ceremony of an interaction can elevate it into something special. That's very well established.

Regarding currency, the real-world monetary cost is kept discreetly out of sight of the player, much like tokens are used in casinos, as part of the sleight of hand. They're not exchanging cold, hard cash; no, no, that would be crass. They're merely exchanging "gems", "crystals", "orbs", etc.

Fundamentally, I always wondered if the movement away from physical currency-- whether it's in-pp payments, general ecommerce or just the growth of credit/debit-- has a psychological impact on how we spend.

If you have to hand over some number of physical tokens, and actively see your stash of them diminish, it's going to hit differently than letting someone handle your card, and then a number that you have to log into the bank to even see goes down.

I see ads for programs where you give your kids their allowance on a prepaid debit card, so it could get to the point where you could reach maturity without ever touching a dime. Will those kids be as frugal as the ones who got notes?

Perhaps the biggest difference, to me, is that when you buy a CCG booster pack, you can resell the individual cards (the publisher cannot forbid or, realistically, attempt to prevent this).

When you buy a loot box, you get some bits set on your account with the loot-box-seller. You can only resell them if the publisher lets you, and only via publisher-approved methods.

The reason this is a meaningful point of difference is that you no longer have the "I want X, and the only way to get it is to keep buying loot-boxes and hope". If you want a specific M:TG card, someone is happy to sell it to you for the right price; you don't have to dig through booster packs.

That's the old way of doing it. Now you open it years later on a stream in front of thousands of people.

There is absolutely glitz in card opening. No there's no sparkling lights and sound effects emitted from packs but look at hyper rares or secret rares in Pokemon for example. It's glitz. Special card frames, new holo designs. Always hoping you're going to get that Rainbow Charizard and not crap. Putting the rare at the end of the pack to increase anticipation. Magic has recently extended what is possible to get in packs the same way too.

I think I agree with you, but then what about something like Hearthstone? How much glitz would they have to add before a digital version of the same phenomenon be considered gambling, if presentation were the metric?

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