π€‘π€‘π€‘π€‘
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
413 points (100.0% liked)
Games
18189 readers
679 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yes, it's the game with the jokers
What? Did the playing cards have their tits out or something?
It was imagery of gambling. And yeah, that tracks.
Sure, but there isn't any actual gambling, and Balatro works a lot differently to actual gambling. It's not the gateway drug PEGI seems to think it is...
Their reasoning is because it uses poker hands, it teaches you poker which could lead to gambling. Pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, the hands are what make poker dangerous...
My concern with poker has to do with betting, and therefore risk-taking, and Balatro doesn't have that. Learning how poker hands work is an academic exercise, and I absolutely encourage it, since it's such an important cultural thing (i.e. shows up in lots of movies).
So yeah, absolutely ridiculous.
load more comments
(1 replies)
But there is imagery of gambling. If GTA had a casino and people playing the cards, they'll get a similar rating for it.
Super Mario 64 DS had you sitting at a poker table in a casino playing poker. New Super Mario Bros had the same poker game, but I'm not sure if that one was in a casino. PEGI rated both of them 3+.
The poker game in both games is in a very obvious casino environment. PEGI is smoking something.
Smoking that Nintendo cash.
Not to mention the pokemon games, many of which had slot machine minigames.
I'm sure GTA would get hit with a higher rating for other reasons first...
The reason gambling is a problem is because it's easy to get addicted to chance, which is particularly problematic for games with a negative expected return and high chance-based payouts. For those games, the house always wins, but the player keeps playing because they think they'll get lucky and beat the house. I am 100% against anything of that nature in games.
However, the only "risk" in Balatro is not scoring a high enough score and having to start over again. This has much more to do with other "roguelikes" like Slay the Spire than actual gambling, because you're not really staking anything. LIterally, the only overlap is that poker terminology is used (hands, "blinds," chips, etc). The actual mechanics have nothing to do with gambling.
MTX are bad because the house (publisher/devs) wins due to preying on the player, so they should absolutely be rated higher than a game like Balatro, which doesn't do anything of that nature at all.
I would have no problem with my kids playing Balatro, and I may even pick it up to play with them because it has fun mechanics. They've watched me play Slay the Spire and Inscryption, and Balatro looks very similar to those, with the main difference being the look of the cards and mechanics for scoring. That's it, there's no gambling.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It's really more like a poker themed maths game. Would probably be good for a kid to pick it up. (They may or may not turn into a poker pro later in life too!)
It's a shame this gets 18+ while the MTX fuelled FIFA games all get 3+ ratings.
It's E in America according to IGN.
If it's E in NA, then why is it rated 18+ in Europe?
"Gambling," because it uses poker hands, I guess.
Which is completely stupid because there's no gambling in the game at all, poker hands are simply used to score points. It's completely nonsensical.
NA mostly uses ESRB while most of Europe uses PEGI as their rating board. They're different organizations so they can have different criterias for rating as well as different inspectors actually doing the rating.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I put this in the other post too. This is literally their description on steam.
Combine valid poker hands with unique Joker cards in order to create varied synergies and builds. Earn enough chips to beat devious blinds, all while uncovering hidden bonus hands and decks as you progress. Youβre going to need every edge you can get in order to reach the boss blind, beat the final ante and secure victory.
Combined with playing actual poker hands, yeah that's going to get tagged for gambling. They knew what they were doing and this performative outrage is a viral marketing campaign.
If Balatro is gambling then so is every game that has a chance based mechanic. Genshin Impact is PEGI 12 and you can spend money on loot boxes, which is absolutely gambling. Balatro is identical to Hades, except you fight with cards.
The law is poorly written, or is being applied incorrectly here. Balatro is in no way simulating a casino, which I'd be more inclined to say games that do that should have a more mature rating. Bit of a slippery slope though, nothing stops a casino from adding a new game that mimics an existing genre of video game mechanics, and then regulators saying the entire genre is gambling. It's all pearl clutching, not backed by any science, etc. made by the same people that want to ban Mortal Kombat and think Counter Strike causes school shootings.
They could release just swap a dozen words, it wouldn't get this rating. None of those words are required for it to be a good game. The essence of gambling that society wants to protect children from is not part of Balatro any more than it is Solitaire.
want to ban Mortal Kombat
To be fair, Mortal Kombat is pretty brutal and I don't want my kids playing it until they're older.
Eh I played when the OG Mortal Kombat came out all the time at the local pizza place when I was like 9, and I turned out fine. I've only murdered a handful of people so far. It's not like I became a cop or anything like that.
Yeah, I'm not worried my kids will become serial killers or something, but I am a little worried about them "playing" Mortal Kombat in real life w/ their friends. I had friends who practiced "professional wrestling" moves, and I'm worried someone could get hurt reenacting what they saw in the games. My kids reeenact DND/FF-style things w/ friends, and fortunately that's pretty harmless.
By the time I was about 12 or so, I stopped doing that kind of reenactment, so I think that's a decent time to let kids start playing those games. I've played a ton of violent video games (lots of Halo, GTA, etc), and I'm pretty chill and would never hurt a fly. Video games don't cause misbehavior, but they certainly attract deviants who would likely hurt others anyway.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Super Mario 64 DS and New Super Mario Bros both include poker. PEGI rated them 3+.
load more comments
(10 replies)
I suppose playing cards in Europe are considered "gambling materials" under that logic and aren't allowed to be sold to people under 18? That would be absurd.
load more comments
(11 replies)
Performative gambling is in no way worse than real gambling. If every other lootbox game got 18+ you would be completely right, but we need to look at the context for this.
It's not performative gambling. It's not any kind of gambling.
Gambling by definition requires making a wager that you risk losing. That literally does not exist in Balatro. There are no wagers at all, not even for fake currency/points.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(12 replies)
If that's what it is, maybe I'd pick it up to support them, and play it w/ my kids while teaching them how poker works. I'm 100% against gambling, but I've taught my kids how blackjack, roulette, etc work because I think they're interesting games. In fact, I've taught my kids how card counting in BJ works, and I do it as a hobby (again, not with real money). I have a zero tolerance policy for gambling (they can do what they like when they're adults though), but I have absolutely zero problem with gambling games. You do you, as long as you understand the long-term statistics and don't use actual money while living at my house.
If I lived in the EU, I'd definitely buy this game for my kids as a protest. Screw this pearl clutching.
That said, I have a strict rule about actual gambling in my house. I've told my kids I won't let them play anything that has microtransactions, full stop. They really want to play Fortnite, but that's a big no from me, even though many of their friends play. I've told them they can play pretty much any game they want, as long as there are no MTX, and basically every F2P game has that crap.
The irony is that you can't really teach someone who doesn't know anything any poker anything more than what the hands are, and which are considered better than others, by playing Balatro.
Everything else in Balatro is completely divorced from poker. There are a few other shared terms, but they're defined completely differently in Balatro than in poker (e.g. a "blind" is a stage, 3 stages in a level (small/big/boss), and the levels are called "ante"s, also totally different from what an ante is in poker.
Exactly! And most of the concepts behind the hands are present in other games (double and triples, straights, etc). I played Yahtzee as a kid, and that has pretty much every hand from poker (aside from a flush, because dice don't have suits). If Yahtzee is offensive to you, I don't know what to say...
load more comments
(4 replies)
Between you and this news story, I'm pretty sure the rest of the world is dumber than Americans now.
We're all dumber than each other, it just depends on the category.
Didn't one of the ea sport games have a literal slot machine you buy tokens to spin as part of their MTX?
view more: next βΊ