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> and you can buy alcohol at 18 or be given it with a meal by your parents at younger ages, because we didn't have puritans making motorway funding contingent on passing strict drinking laws like the USA did.

16 if you're buying wine or beer with a meal, at least in Scotland. This means that when you go to your mate's mum's pub for a pub lunch on a Friday you need to watch out for your teachers also going for a lunchtime pint.

Man, the 80s were wild.

> Man, the 80s were wild.

Early 90s for me but there was an unwritten rule that the teachers had the nearest couple of pubs and the students had a few further afield. That prevented most unwanted mixing.

But those days are still here in some ways.

As a parent of a 16yo in the UK I can confirm that the vast majority of teenagers have somewhere they can go to get a drink if they really want. Unless you live in the sticks there will always be some pubs that will happily serve 16/17 year olds a few drinks as long as they're not doing shots or obviously getting hammered. Off-licenses are mostly stricter but very good/convincing fake ID is so easy to get nowadays.

What tends to be the limiting factor is money. £7 a pint in a London pub quickly eats away at whatever allowance they're getting or money they're earning themselves, and Spoons (the cheaper pub option) is often stricter on ID/ages than most (some nights/pubs are minimum age 21 which means the fake ID that says a 16yo is 18 is no use).

Chatting to my kid's friends they say that if they do want some kind of a buzz most of their cohort prefer low-grade drug use (weed, ket, etc) as it is considerably easier to get hold of and much cheaper than alcohol. However, as a generation, they tend to be a lot cleaner than previous generations, certainly cleaner than my generation. There are a huge number of them that don't do any drugs, many don't drink alcohol at all but are quite tolerant of friends who do want to drink/take. There seems to be a lot more acceptance and less peer-pressure.

> Lootboxes are not slot machines or FBO terminals. If they can't be "cashed out", they are more like collectible card games... which are also IMHO a plague on humanity, but not the same level of destructive activity as gambling for cash. They do need regulation, given how prevalent they are in games popular with teenagers, but need different regulation from casinos.

Even if they can't be cashed out officially, there are often other unofficial ways. Like selling the accounts in question.

Needing a secondary market to cash out is not the same as the vendor providing both the game of chance and the winnings.

You can sell/trade MTG and Pokemon cards, but that doesn't make them "casinos"

Doesn't stop people from treating them as one, with all the corresponding issues. TBH I think a comparison with CCGs should make people question the CCG model itself, which tends to get far too easy a pass in most people's minds.

Absolutely, I don't think CCGs are innocent. But I do think they're a level of indirection away from straight-up gambling. Being sold a pig in a poke is not the same thing as being offered betting odds.

The “gambling” aspect of CCGs is mostly tacked on by outsiders, though driven by decisions of the manufacturer.

That said, when you have a deck of, say, Pokémon cards in your hand, there’s nothing about it that encourages a gambler’s mindset.

My 8yo has a bunch of Pokémon cards and he just likes playing with them, he has no idea of any monetary value they might have. There’s nothing about the physical product or game itself that betrays that.

It’s the culture created around it that’s poisonous.

The manufacturers are absolutely working to create and profit off of that culture though. For constructed play, booster packs are no different to loot boxes: they only have the effect of increasing and obfuscating the amount of product you need to buy to get the cards you need for a given deck. And they will make very rare, powerful cards precisely because they know it will move boxes.

The games themselves are fine: if, for example, you could just buy specific cards from the manufacturer, fixed price, print-on-demand (and also buy packs for e.g. draft play), then I would have no problems with the business model at all, but it's the sales model that is predatory.

Yes, I don’t mean to let the CCG manufacturers off the hook, but while you can play the card game and have the cards without being exposed to the gambling aspect, that’s not the case in video games where it’s practically forced upon you just by playing.

If someone opposes regulation on X, the first line of rhetoric defense seems always to be "oh, what is 'X' even? Does it even exist? Is Y also 'X'? You don't want to ban Y, do you?"

In this case, if the focus is on the psychological mechanisms that underly gambling (varying rewards) in connection where they are used to compel people to spend vast amounts of money for nothing, I don't see how the question whether or not there could be a monetary payoff is relevant. The psychological mechanism and potential damage is the same.

In almost all US states, children can legally be given alcohol by their parents. The specifics vary by state, but its not the hard and fast "Puritan" rule you seem to think. The uniform 21 years old law is to buy alcohol, not drink it.

Anyway, in my estimation the threat of gambling addiction is far higher for teenagers than young children, since teenagers may often have sources of revenue other than their parents, so they can feed a budding gambling addiction longer without supervision, increasing the risk of addiction. 16 year olds don't belong in casinos, nor should they be engaging with loot box gambling.

Ugh, Panini sticker albums and Topps trading cards were my loot boxes as a kid. Far too much money trying to get those last couple you need. Fiends.

> but not the same level of destructive activity as gambling for cash

... are you sure?

Yes, I am very sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_odds_betting_terminal

Buying Pokemon cards in the hope of getting a specific rare one is a pretty niche form of addiction. Compared to walking into a shop, putting in £100 and getting nothing back, then another £100, then another, in the hope of getting £500... it's a lot more accessible, and can easily wipe out your life savings.

Perhaps it's like arguing "which is more lethal, a gun or a screwdriver?", and you're arguing on a technicality that if you're really persistent then they're equally lethal as you can get the job done with a screwdriver, but you're overlooking how much easier the gun makes it.

And having a smaller addiction rate makes it any more moral?

Yes, it does. Only Sith deal in absolutes. You can say the same about, let's say alcohol. For most it's an entertaining social lubricant. For a much smaller number, it leads them to wreck and ruin. Is it therefore a wicked evil sin that no God-fearing person should engage in, and I'm going to ban it to protect the morality of society?

The USA tried that out with Prohibition, and only after years of misery and gangsters taking up power did they realise their mistake. Moral absolutism doesn't work, problem management does.

Per the Gambling Commission in their call for evidence from a few years ago:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-the-gam...

> Gambling is a popular leisure pursuit in Britain. Last year, 47% of adults surveyed had taken part in at least one form of gambling in the previous four weeks [...] Gambling can be entertaining and sociable, and enhance enjoyment of other activities, and the vast majority of gamblers take part without suffering even low levels of harm. [...]

> However, gambling does come with risks, and problem gambling can ruin lives, wreck families, and damage communities [...] approximately 0.5% of the adult population are problem gamblers [...] this rate has remained broadly steady around or below 1% for the past 20 years and now equates to about 300,000 individuals whose gambling is also likely to cause harm to those around them

> This Review seeks to ensure that people can continue to gamble but that the legislation and regulation we have in place addresses as many factors as possible to give the necessary safeguards [...]

Evidence tells you plainly that different forms of gambling are not equal, and don't have the same power to trigger problem gambling in individuals. Coin pushers at seaside amusement parks with a maximum "bet" of 10p are not in the same league as fixed-odds roulette in a run-down high street with a £100 maximum bet. Lootboxes have some level of risk of causing harm, but not that level of risk.

That's all well and good, but then why introduce gambling-like mechanisms (with real money) in new areas where people have not been looking for them, like lootboxes in games or randomized trading cards?

It's a bit as if ice cream shops suddenly decided "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put alcohol into most of our sorts? It's just tiny amounts and alcohol-laced sweets have a long history already, so what's the harm?"

My favourite ice-cream is rum and raisin, by the way...

I guess I'd say the thing to do is to measure harms with direct evidence (e.g. this many people get addicted to lootboxes, they spend this much of their money, etc.) rather than seek an imperfect analogy with an existing but different harm. Lootboxes and fake FOMO are both techniques used by video game producers to fatten their bottom lines by psychologically manipulating their playerbase, let's get that regulated and set controls on it (audience, age limits, frequency, openness, etc.) rather than argue where it lies in the games-of-chance spectrum.

Isn't this Fixed odds betting terminal how most slots work in North America as well? I'm aware of a few places where it isn't required. But the reality is if your RTP is something like 10%, not many people are coming by that often

A fixed-odds betting terminal is a type of slot machine. But unlike other categories of slot machine, it was (at one time) allowed a maximum bet of £100 and a maximum payout of £500. The RTP was around 95%, but allowing such a large maximum bet meant you could easily lose a lot of money, very quickly.

In 2019, the regulations changed to make the maximum bet £2 (50 times lower), in line with most other slot machines.

https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/authorities/guide/page...

OK thanks for explaining that. I have to ask, are people still allowed to go place large bets on things like craps and roulette?

Yes, as far as I know, there are no stake limits on real games in real-life casinos.

The stake limits are for slot machines (online and offline) to stop gamblers rapidly losing their life savings.

The nearest regulations for real casinos are allowing players to set a deposit limit (so e.g. they can't spend more than £X per day) and that games can't run "fast" - no more than 50 games per hour/table. Also the local council controls what the casino's opening hours can be.