A Mildly Satanic New Video Game That You Can Only Play Online with Money

This is a new trend starting in gaming industry. Apple has now started approving skill-based "gambling" games. One such example is Dollar Candy created by Ian Ippolito (who also created PlanetSourceCode.com and rentacoder.com). These games are addictive, you play against real human and there is money on the line in each game.

Gambling had been banned for a reason for long time in many cultures - it's all too common for poorest people to blow up their earnings in the hope of a jackpot. They do so not because they are less smart but because they are too desperate and don't have any other opportunity to making it through. Now game creators have found a loop hole in the law aka "skill-based" games. I can see lot of people barely making ends burning their kids school money in these stuff while standing in grocery lines.

What I thought was compelling is that a well-known indie game developer had the really smart idea to target the online-poker skilled-game competition niche that's opened by short-sighted US laws

I set my expectations low when I saw the empty hype the beginning of the article was building up, but this game actually sounds quite strategically interesting.

I definitely see why this is the kind of game that isn't the same without money, much like poker and backgammon. I hope there's some kind of micropayment platform that it could eventually support to avoid the credit-card fees and the check-mailing fees.

(No, not bitcoin. Most people can't use bitcoin.)

The success of this game is partly predicated on player trust, i.e. how do I know that it's not being rigged against me by the operator? It is a game of skill, but gives the player imperfect information (unlike chess), leaving the possibility of various forms of cheating and fraud.

I am interested to see how this could be addressed.

Jason Rohrer's games are fantastic - I'd recommend his game Passage, which only lasts for five minutes.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/