614
Doesn't matter in the slightest.
me, age 12, San Andreas
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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This post is clearly full of people WHO CLEARLY HAVE NO GAMBLING PROBLEM.
The arguments are even more ridiculous if you substitute an addictive drug for gambling.
"But vicodin and oxy are legal, how's that fair!" "Plenty of kids are prescribed painkillers in other countries and they are fine!" "The regulatory agency is just trying to punish heroin for being way better than the rest!" "I think all drugs should be legal, anyone should be allowed to make whatever mistakes they want with no oversight!"
We can all imagine the imagery of balatro being somewhat a problem.
But less of a problem compared to games with actual gambling for actual money in the form of lootboxes or gacha mechanisms?
If you can get that to make sense, i'd love to hear it. Can there be a serious warning regarding gambling on balatro? for sure. But how is gambling imagery 18+, and actual gambling with actual money 3+? That's just insane.
What is most likely to get kids to become gambling addicts? Them learning pokerhands via balatro, or them gambling real money on lootboxes & gacha games and getting addicted to the thrill of winning after gamblling money?
But this is like saying "ski ball is dangerous because it's a gateway to beer pong. By the way we see no issues with kids playing vodka pong"
Tell me you are corrupted to the core, without telling me you are corrupted to the core.
I wish this trend would die out. Tell me your x without telling me your x is so fucking pretentious and annoying.
Tell me you're on the internet too much without telling me you're on the internet too much.
The reasoning in question:
This game teaches - by way of images, information and gameplay - skills and knowledge that are used in poker. During gameplay, the player is rewarded with ‘chips’ for playing certain hands. The player is able to access a list of poker hand names. As the player hovers over these poker hands, the game explains what types of cards the player would need in order to play certain hands. As the game goes on, the player becomes increasingly familiar with which hands would earn more points. Because these are hands that exist in the real world, this knowledge and skill could be transferred to a real-life game of poker
So, this game teaches skills and knowledge that are used in poker. The skills in knowledge are limited to... playing and making poker hands. That's it. Also, "as the game goes on, the player becomes increasingly familiar with which hands would earn more points" -- is hilariously funny. The idea that knowledge of what a poker hand is is anything related to the dangers of gambling is ridiculous.
It's really dumb if you know the two games (poker and Balatro).
Poker is a game of incomplete information where you need one single higher ranked hand than him per round. The stakes are money you bet that your hand is better. Bluffing is an important part of the game.
Balatro is mostly a game with complete information (apart from the order of remaining cards in your deck and certain bosses that flip your cards). You bet no money. There is no bluffing. Money does not correlate to chips. It is about the rating of your hand (poker has no rating, only relative ranking). You play multiple hands. You can't fold. Cards can be improved, ratings can be improved, the decks can look nothing like poker decks, etc.
I keep pulling the hermit card out of my tarot deck, but it hasn't doubled my money! Have I learned incorrectly??
One "teaches" you to gamble, the other allows you to gamble. And the one that just teaches you has a higher rating. Crazy.
Totally his fault for not heeding the ancient warning.
Give a man a fish, you get PEGI 3+. Teach a man to fish, 18+ you sucker.
I know this is anecdotal but I'm now living in a ditch because of Balatro. I never gambled before in my life and all the poker knowledge Balatro me taught caused me to start extreme gambling and now I'm dead in a ditch.
Pics or it didn't happen.
Can't. I'm a little too dead for pics
Yup that checks out. Say hi to Betty White for me!
have some passerby take the picutres, you dummdumm
Ok, I'll believe you this time...
As the game goes on, the poker hands also get increasingly unrealistic and different from real poker including things like five of a kind, and a pair being worth more than a royal flush.
If you tried to take the skills you learn from balatro to a poker table you would get kicked out basically immediately.
I place a torn up joker on the table, a tarot card, a llanowar elf card, and a pair of threes
"So with my score multiplier basically I own the casino."
The dealer frantically calls security
I've never gambled, but I'm pretty sure if I got 1.630e11 chips at a casino, something bad would happen to me, the casino, and the economy if I cashed it out. I think that's 84 billion chips....
It's 163 Billion chips.
1.630e11 is the same as 1.630 x 10^11
Which probably wouldn't be that bad for the economy, but it might bankrupt the casino, depending on the value of the chips.
"Sir, you can't bring stone slabs to the table and play them as if they were cards. Also, where did these glass shards come from?"
If you search for "poker" on PEGI's site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold'em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.
The pathetic thing is games of the ilk of balatro and luck be a landlord (also OG peggle) are actually the kind of game that plays with your gambling impulses but in a healthy and fun way, these games should be celebrated for subverting the language of gambling to make something beautiful, how pathetic to have so little actual understanding of video games and yet have this kind of power to impact the industry.
I've always suspected I might be susceptible to gambling addiction so I stay out of casinos.
Instead, I go to the arcade. Which is like a low stakes child casino. Win a bunch of tickets and then either buy something stupid with them, or, just straight give them to some kid.
My point being, we've specifically constructed casino-like facilities for children and it's regularly accepted, so why should Balatro be different?
Gambling at an arcade is exactly the same. All you've done is lower the stakes so hopefully it couldn't affect you.
Yeah how dare you pay $9.99 one time to gamble all you want! If you're gonna get those dopamine hits, you better be spending real money at the tables!
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Is the rating purely because it uses playing cards? Poker hands?
Yahtzee and literal poker with betting are included in Nintendo clubhouse/worldwide 51 and it's rated Pegi-12.
Would balatro get a pass if it used cards numbered 1-13 instead of traditional cards?
This whole thing is bonkers.
Anyone can walk into a store and buy a deck of cards.
I bet the gift shop of any casino in Las Vegas would sell a souvenir deck of cards to a kid without a second thought.
Kmart and target both sell literal "poker kits" with decks of cards and chips with no restriction on who can buy it. In the toy section with the other board games no less.
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