this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Dude needs to stop playing predatory gacha games.
I don't understand people who WILLINGLY install that shit. They KNOW how they work and are monetized. And unlike gambling at a casino, there's zero chance of you being up money at any point.
The ads are everywhere and the games are often F2P - no barrier to download or install. Excellent for hooking younger kids, especially ones whose parents can't or won't give them access to the old fashioned games.
Arguably the singular upside. You can coast in a Gacha game without losing a ton of money a lot longer than you'll last in Vegas.
I think of them as "Gotcha!" games, cause their point is to trick you.
For forever I thought that was the correct spelling and the entire point
I think that's where the term gacha comes from. A japanization of the term gotcha.
No, "gacha" comes from "gashapon," the crank vending machines, and the name is an onomatopoeia. "Gacha" (or "gasha") is the sound of the crank being turned, and "pon" is the sound of the capsule dropping out.
Addiction doesn't really care about this kind of logic.
gambling isn't an addiction, it's a lifestyle.
addictions counselor here, can confirm Rooskie91 has a pretty accurate response
I'm guessing where you get caught up is in the fact that it's a behavioral addiction , right?
well the medical community isn't far off. gambling disorder is only now just starting to become recognized as an addiction. there's trouble too, because "addiction" isn't an appropriate medical term anymore -- it's "substance use disorder" which encompasses a much wider range of problematic behaviors. and yet! if someone comes in with primary Dx Gambling Disorder, we can't bill that as SUD services because it's technically not a substance lol
behavioral addictions are very similar in how they work and how they're treated. tbh the main difference is just the lack of risk from acute intoxication / withdrawal. gambling disorder can and does completely ruin lives.
Professionals disagree with you.
Like it's in the definition lol.
I feel like it's easy to conflate addiction with chemical addiction specifically. Anything that releases endorphins in your body can become addictive. Watching TV, playing video games, sweet foods, sex, etc, all have the potential to become addictive.
what's next are you gonna claim thigh highs can be addictive? this has the same vibe as "water is addictive" or "you have an oxygen addiction".
I'm going to give you the BoD and say that I think your confusing how addiction works and how the body regulates itself. Also, I should be more clear that anything causing an intense reward response can be addictive. Not just any old response will do, it has be a rush.
Addiction isn't just doing something repeatedly or enjoying something a lot. It's a progressive hijacking of the brain's reward system. It starts with an activity (like gambling) triggering a strong reward response. That response draws people to repeat that activity for the "high". If the behavior is engaged in regularly, the brain adapts over time. The reward response becomes less intense (this is what "gaining a tolerance" is), causing the person to to engage in the behavior more frequently or intensely to get the same "high" as they did the first time. Eventually, the behavior stops illiciting a reward, and you start to get stressed without whatever behavior it is that originally made you feel high. The person is no longer seeking the behavior because their reward system is telling them to, but for relief from the stress and anxiety of NOT performing the behavior. This is where addiction occurs.
Gambling, sex, and drugs all activate activate this feedback loop in the brains reward system. In contrast things like drinking water or wearing boots just just don't engage the reward system in the same way. You can experience this yourself by having an orgasm, drinking a glass of water, and comparing the difference in how you feel afterward. Drinking water and wearing clothes are biological necessities or habitual actions. They're not neurologically reinforced the same way that high reward activities like gambling or sex are.
I think we tend to prefer to think of chemical addiction as the true definition because of opiods like heroin. In the case of heroin, you're not activating your reward system so much as you're introducing a reward chemical WAYYY more powerful than anything your body can produce.
Other drugs don't replace dopamine tho, they just make your body release all of the dopamine it has at the same time, resulting in a similar, but less intense feeling. Getting addicted to these drugs is really no different, biologically speaking, than becoming addicted to a behavior.
Recognizing gambling as an addiction is not a slippery slope to naming more mundane things as addictions. It's the result of decades of work in neuroscience by thousands, if not millions, of doctors.
well said thank you. you might enjoy some of my replies to them. idk how to tag on lemmy or id have
I gamble multiple times every week. I think I would know if it was addictive lmao
here's a quick cheat sheet of current DSM criteria for a SUD:
spoiler
1 increased amt used
2 desire/failure to reduce use
3 lots of time spent on it
4 cravings for it
5 life obligations unmet
6 social relationships disrupted
7 reduction in recreational activities
8 use even in dangerous situations
9 use despite medical risk
10 building tolerance
11 experiences withdrawal
you need at least 2 to meet mild criteria (very easy to meet mild!) and 6 or more to be considered severe
so let's look at oxygen addiction:
we dont increase our use over time, we have no desire or failure to reduce use (even if suicidal it's not about the oxygen), oxygen requires very little time to get, we generally dont crave it cuz we always got it and without it there are no cravings anyway, it doesnt disrupt obligations, doesnt impact relationships, doesnt impact recreation, we don't put ourselves in dangerous situations just to use it, there's no medical risk to consuming it, and we do not build tolerance. we DO experience w/d. so 1 out of 11 aint cuttin it, sorry!!
if you swim a significant amount you'll learn how much time is spent on it, and if you try breathing water you'll start craving oxygen (well probably more craving the removal of co2), also I would imagine that oil refineries could be considered places where oxygen is dangerous but people still use.
Gambling forms addiction in the same way as social media. It forms skinner boxes of sorts.
That feels an awful lot like saying opiates are fine just don’t get addicted. It’s easy to say when you aren’t susceptible, but clearly some people are and it’s not very productive to be dismissive of the primary way they make money.
A better comparison would be alcohol. Many people consume alcohol but very few people become alcoholics. Maybe it is genetic predisposition or environmental/mental factors that lead people to abusing it.
Similarly with gachas, millions of people play them as free to play, without ever spending money. A lot of people spend 10-20€ a month and very few people spend hundreds or thousands of euro every month.
As far as honkai star rail is concerned, i enjoy the story, environments, music and the characters and i recommend it. You dont need to spend and you can do everything(or miss like 5% of the rewards, if you dont want to tryhard) without ever spending money.
The main selling point of the game is the story and you can do that with any characters. If you dont want to participate in the endgame, you can ignore it. Ultimately it is a singleplayer turned based "rpg", though it is actually just an anime+idle game. Every 40 days, you get a new episode/season.
You can still be addicted, even of you don't spend a dime.
Sure but then you only waste your time. Some more casual gachas, like star rail, are deliberately designed to be casual, in order to increase their retention rate(ie keep most of the players playing in the long term). They dont require much time daily(you can afk do the dailies in the background within 5mins) and while there is replayable content, it isnt necessary and eventually you will be done with that too.
Some gachas are more hardcore, demanding more time, which enables them to have a smaller pool of players who are more dedicated(ie less likely to quit because of sunk cost).
I assume addiction rates are higher on those gachas, then again mainstream casual gachas like star rail, have tens of millions of players, so maybe they have more "addicted" players(total, not as a percentage).
not true at all. you can absolutely fuck up your social life and work life by paying free games. you can fuck up your medical life too. easily meeting criteria for gaming disorder mild severity without ever spending a dime
I think there may be a slight difference between doing heroin and playing a video game where you get anime girls by chance.
They are not a great analogy because they at least have a legit use in medicine.
That said, not really sure what the best analogy for SAAS slot machines would be. Even playing them for free you still have the sensation of pulling down on the device (phone screen/machine lever) and then the "spin" with variable rate rewards.
They do, but given everything Purdue’s done I felt it was fitting. Fine as a concept, awful when the sole goal is extracting money.
Because your top level comment makes sense while the rest of your replies devolved into a caps-locked crash out aimed at anything resembling nuance. Now I'm more convinced you're 14.
Exactly. I have been gaming for decades, yet I never played any of these. Only heard of WOW and Apex Legends out of all the names, no idea what the rest are.
It is possible to spend your money and time on games that provide the entertainment you’re looking for, but not exploit you.
Gacha?
All (or most, don't recognize some) of these are gacha games. You get characters by participating in essentially a slot machine (hence the name "pulling"), more or less. The more powerful characters have lower odds. You can do dailies for pulls or you can spend money to pull more often.
Huh, that sounds like shit. Why would anyone play that?
I know when Factorio introduced quality some people complained it was like gambling, but in Factorio its done at a level where probability just averages out. I want a rare shiny iron plate and 2% of the time I will get one. So if I make 25,000 iron plates per minute I will be getting 500 rare shiny plates a minute.
Why do people gamble? Because that’s what this is.
The companies don’t even care about the average player. They are trying to hook rich people with more money then sense, aka whales.
A long time ago the industry realized an extremely small percent blows way more money than all the others combined.
If you ever played a game with any kind of monitization and asked yourself why everything is $40 and how the average player can afford it, this is why.
EA's Real Racing turned into this pay-to-play shit. I genuinely enjoyed that game back when it came out, then everything started to get monetized and you had to do various things fairly often if you wanted to make any sort of progress.
Why can't I just have a fun realistic racing game that doesn't try to cram "upgrades" that cost real money down my throat?
I hear ya. I am getting real tired of the paywalls and the rent seeking in something I paid for. It used to be confined to free to play games but it has gradually started to creep into fully paid AAA stuff now and that’s just unacceptable to me.
So the 1% are the problem in games as well.
lol, precisely!
I played Arknights for a bit because there's actually a pretty solid tower defense game in there. There's not a big selection of good games for Android and I wanted something I could play when I have no laptop with me.
Unfortunately the good gameplay is buried under tons of attention hogging gacha bullshit.
I stopped playing once I realized that I was spending more time doing chores than actually playing through interesting content. Also, while the BGM is nothing short of lavish, the presentation of the story is like a very cheap VN, which basically killed any hope of getting engaged in the story or the characters.
I didn't spend much more than maybe twenty bucks on it so it's not too bad given the partially solid gameplay. But yeah, I'm done with live service bullshit games.