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How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life
promoting gambling to 18 year olds is the latest way in which college sports are distorting the goal of college. at uc boulder, the school gets $30 every time someone downloads an app and makes a bet. the faculty managed to ensure that this money went to the right causes, though:
Gambling for children is the new frontier.
With much of the gambling market having sat at relative stagnation compared to the explosion of other recreational markets through various internet activity, we are finally seeing a proper proliferation of gambling. From kids buying lootboxes through ingame apps, which sits at a similar place as kids buying Pokemon cards. Which, differing from Pokemon cards, devolves into straight up gambling through third party websites. Where there is no definitional difference between third party websites that facilitate the gambling of various video game tokens and actual online slot casinos that accept direct money deposits. You have an entire arc where you can go from child to adult and develop a compulsive gambling addiction.
This is then compounded through video game streaming culture where people are gambling away 'fake' money to promote gambling facilities. Where, through affiliations with streaming sites and gambling sites, they receive money from every aspect of their activity. Be that persons who watch and give money to the stream, or kickbacks from the gambling website for each person that signs up through their affiliate link. The fakeness of the endeavor then reaches glorious heights when sometimes the streamer owns a part in the gambling website they are gambling on and receive better odds at winning. Giving them a perfect opportunity to advertise just have much fun 'can' be had. Outside of that there is also always the incentive for the streamers and gambling facility owners to do dealings under the table.
This isn't some dark corner of the internet, or some little known website run out of Malta where you can play online versions of slot machines at a slightly higher RTP. These are the biggest mainstream titles in one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world. These are made to be addictive to children. Specifically engineered by our fine class of programmers and designers to get them to spend money. To get them hooked on gambling.
I mean, could you imagine, when you were a kid, your parents buying you a toy that came equipped with a functional slot machine? Where you could take a 20 dollar bill, put it into the machine, and potentially receive a new toy? What if, instead of being saddled with the reality of having to make a new toy, the company that owns the toy can just print out a card that you want? But that still costs some money. What if the company can just conjure up a pixel that it displays on a screen? Completely divorced from the burdens of traditional money based gambling, these fantastic designers, psychologists and programmers can create a gambling environment where the only worry is how to most effectively direct children and teenagers into a cycle of gambling addiction.
You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.
The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.
If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.
Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.
It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.
The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.
So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.
I dunno if I'd say that (wouldn't The Three-Body Problem count?); even within just the realm of Chinese gacha games specifically, Girls' Frontline and Arknights came first. Definitely the biggest, though.
Azur Lane was Chinese too, right? Not the most prestigious cultural export, but they conquered the USS Iowa when the Japanese couldn't.
Huh, I thought Kantai Collection (the Japanese ship-girl game) had the biggest claim (or at least the first) to ship-girl-ing the Iowa, but I guess Azur Lane went a step further. But yes, AL also came before.
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