Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12
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While the game can be "addicting", it is mostly because it is fun to play. Not all "addicting" forms of entertainment need elevated ratings because they are fun to consume. We don't increase the ratings for binge worthy TV shows and we don't restrict books if they are page turners, so why should we with a video game. At some point people need to regulate the use of their time themselves.
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Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There's a big huge difference.
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I can't speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
But Civ is more just "addictive" because the gameplay is fun. That is not to downplay that but it is generally closer to "escapism" than not when you get into that "one more turn" cycle and realize it is 3 am.
ARPGs were very much designed around skinner boxes/operant conditioning chambers which are one of the core tenets of how things like slot machines are designed. We can see similar (and it was outright acknowledged by many reviewers/influencers) with games like Vampire Survivors.
At the end of the day, the reality is that the "This is fine if you are 13" system is idiotic and what we actually need is fine grain warnings... which will go down great in an era of "Eww, trigger warnings are woke". But, like, I have a cousin who is well aware that he is incredibly prone to addiction when it comes to gambling and on many occasions he has texted family and friends to ask if it is "safe" for him to play a new game. And... it is kind of concerning how often the answer is "no".
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They extract time
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Factorio has extracted £60 from me for the base game and new DLC! I've only played 2100 hours, that's almost £0.03 per hour. Complete bullshit how expensive everything is now...
/s Factorio is very good
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At this moment, any teaching or glamorisation of simulated gambling automatically leads to a PEGI 18 rating," the ratings board stated
Who's the clown now?
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I think it's more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it "immoral" without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.
This is Kyle's Mom's version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.
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Honestly... yeah.
How many millennial/genx gamers have stories about staying up all night playing Diablo 2 or WoW? Hell, it was almost a requirement for any games media person to have an "I almost flunked out of college because of WoW" story.
It was hard to care TOO much with D2 because any additional monetization was mostly illegal gold farmers (and let's ignore the various former devs who have acknowledged they were involved in those...). But starting with WoW? That was a subscription model. That "I need to run this raid 500 times to get the drop I want" equated to increased subscriptions which was profit. Again, there were limits-ish in that very few people ran multiple accounts so it was a fixed cost per year. But it was still there.
Fast forward again and we have the same concepts going into loot boxes and, eventually, gacha games where it is 100% predatory and basically what the majority of successful live service games are built around.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren't susceptible to. But it is also important to actually think critically and wonder if you REALLY like the gameplay of that game or if you just like the flashing lights and sparkles of a good drop?
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I can't speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
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Awesome, I'm glad the dev held his position! He's right that it's incredibly moronic to have games like FIFA with actual gambling mechanics rated lower.
Balatro will get you hooked on lovely indie games, not gambling
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I don't know that I'd agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
I've read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?I don't think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.
Ratings should be informative and harm based. "This game is full of violence" and "this game has gambling". Factual.
A game being prone to being played alot isn't factual, it's just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you're just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it. -
Awesome to see them win this. If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit, the roguelike that uses playing cards in the same way Go-Fish does definitely shouldn't be smacked over this.
Fuck EA and all the loot box game makers that don't get hit with this crap
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Ugh, I remember those days well. I saw personally what MMOs did to two friends of mine (one from high school and one from college), and how the high school friend was able to really pull himself together and make a good life for himself after we helped pull him out of MMO addiction, and how the college friend we couldn't help just wallowed in a sea of empty energy drink cans and turned EVERYTHING into WoW during that time. I don't know if he was able to build a solid life/career after college, but I could imagine him looking back at that time and wanting more from it. Either way, I saw both their situations and vowed to never pick up an MMO because I didn't want the same to happen to me. Just because an addicting game isn't extractive of one's money doesn't mean it's not harmful if you have a hard time with self-control and moderation. You either lose your money directly or your time, which may cost you money in other ways in addition to other indirect costs. Ultimately you'll end up losing something of great value you will unlikely get back, if ever.
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Kyle's Mom
Who now?
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Have you ever met my friend Kyle's mom?
She's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world -
Just cut a few murder scenes and all the blood out and it should be fine
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The publishers own PEGI.
Whatever rating they want, they get.
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Link for context…
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/s/LS2QpCbwqw -
Precisely that.
I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle's Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in "Blame Canada") misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein's revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.
Note that this not only predated Saddam's actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it risen to the height -- or sunk to the depths -- it's achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80's and '90's already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.
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