Gaming or Gambling? Part 1

There are many definitions of a game. Nonetheless, I argue that there is a fundamental random component to every aspect of a game. To give a few examples, games often involve start with a random set of conditions (e.g., being dealt a random hand), a player can choose to play a game differently the second time they play it, the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of games are often not predetermined at the start of the game, the emotions one experienced during a game can be anything in spite of the often stated initial intention of ‘making one happy’.

As such, a core part of gaming can be said to involve gambling. Some would argue that gaming and gambling are different things. When I was of this opinion, I used to think that there are two key distinctions between gaming and gambling. One, gambling necessarily involves real life money while gaming does not. Two, the outcome of gambling is far more up to random chance than gaming.

However, I felt that the distinctions became moot and void after I got into very specific types of games which I use the umbrella term ‘gambling games’ to refer to. There are two names known to the gaming community used to describe such ‘gambling games’. The first is the gacha game. This is the original Japanese term and as far as I know, the word gacha is derived from gachapon, Japanese vending machines where you insert a coin into a slot, twist the handle, and randomly receive one gift from a set of typically different gifts. The second is the lootbox game, games where one can pay farmable virtual or earnable real money to buy a box of playable characters and/or items randomly drawn from a pool.

Two forms of gambling games dominated my growing up. I mean dominate because many of my closest family and friends my age would play these games and we would talk about these games all the time.
First are Booster Packs of trading card games - packs of a set number of cards randomly drawn from a larger defined card pool. The names comes from the ability of the cards from these packs to boost the roster available in already fully-playable decks, typically sold separately from the Booster packs. The second are telephone gatcha games which revolve around a virtual lottery to receive a playable or set of playable characters or utilities. While often free-to-play, the lotteries of all the games I played could be rigged towards certain outcomes by paying money.

While different in many ways, in the next pieces, I will highlight the core similarities between them.