Regulation also means that children are excluded, debt is not allowed, and all chips can be settled for cash when the player leaves the property. Even the comps are regulated. The majority of casinos in the US are Indian casinos. When they aren't and are taxed by the government those funds are usually used to improve and fund the local area giving the local citizens the ability to decide, through legislation, if it should be continued or outlawed.
Finally, Steam pays taxes in the US, so the government is already "getting a cut." Games of chance are not moral. Unregulated games of chance are flatly evil.
Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!
For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.
No, just the promises of going pro. The conversion rate for high school athletes to the NFL or NBA is less than a hundredth of a percent combined. There are kids skipping classes and destroying their bodies thinking they’re going to go pro when they’re not.
Wasted is a rather strong word and yes, the whole argument is a slippery slope _but_ I can imagine sports that are less about glorifying deadly violence in a very realistic manner - the loot box and real money part is just the bitter cherry on top.
Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.
> because of a common, innate fascination with guns
Your brain after 200+ years of american propaganda... it's innate in the sense that you're bathed in it from birth through movies and games, and that a good chunk of your economy relies on producing weapons and using them.
Yet most computer games employ firearms and the targets are other humans, rarely (but of course not never) you hunt and gather food for survival. Don't get me wrong, I played my fair share of games from the earliest 8bit machines in the eighties to modern day shooters but in my opinion glorification comes unintended and killing is a cheap game mechanic, and has always been: here, in backwater European country, middle of nowhere, we have zero domestic gun violence, maybe even 0.0001% is just too much.
And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.
I'm reminded of that scene in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine where he's asking a concerned adult where the violence comes from, and the concerned adult looks sad and confused and says he doesn't know, even though he's standing in front of a nuclear-tipped missile being assembled at the local nuclear-tipped missile plant.
Financialisation is indirect personal violence instead of physical violence. The US doesn't have a problem with that at any scale, as long as the right kinds of people are doing it.
I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?
Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.
No. If you play 1000 hours of a sport, you will at least be stronger, more coordinated, more agile. But the downsides are more about repetitive strain injury and the possibility of screwing up your joints.
Different benefits and downsides.
Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.
Playing football or lacrosse is more "real" than working a desk job. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt and make tools and relied on their wits and strength to survive. Survival in the modern day is mostly a question of obedience.
I think the purpose of exploring virtual worlds like quake or counter-strike or something should not be to escape the real world but rather to experience a new kind of physicality. The purpose of playing games should be to engage in a deeper world which is more "real" than the tame one we are ordinarily subjected to.
It's why I am not opposed to video games. I opposed to overplaying video games because you ruin them, they become mundane and predictable.
How about 1000 hours of chess? Or 1000 hours of warhammer? Or D&D?
One may say you make social bonds playing them, but that stands true for video game as well. Speaking for myself, I definitely spent more than 1000 hours on summoner's rift; 15 years later me and my league friends still playing LOL together and chat about all kind of things on a daily basis.
There's a what? I guess once you've maxed out wasted hours of time playing it, you start wasting money too?
Less absurd than NFTs though I guess