Years ago, when I was about 12 years old, I was addicted to RuneScape. Every evening after school, you'd find me cutting down trees, cooking, or venturing into the PvP zone for some awesome gear. One day, someone retired from the game by killing their character, which resulted in all of their items being dropped. I lucked out and snagged more gold than I could have ever imaged. I remember running around the house in joy.
In RuneScape at the time, there was another PvP zone where you could fight another player and bet gold on whether you would win. Now having "expendable gold" and false confidence, I dropped some big money on this PvP zone, and over the course of a day, I lost it all. I was devastated. I've never lost a ton of money in real life, but this left a really sick feeling in my stomach even in the digital world.
Reflecting on this experience, I feel it has actually benefited me. I've experienced the pain and risk that gambling can bring, and have never felt a need to do this with my actual money. To me, games can be a sandbox to learn life lessons without major consequences.
I know right? Runescape back in the day was the perfect sandbox to learn these lessons. I remember lending out my expensive sword to an online "friend" who promptly logged off and blocked me. Lesson learned.
Nowadays all these sorts of transactions have been shifted into auction house-like marketplaces to prevent abuse. I think taking out this human interaction component does more harm than good, especially bundled with the new ability to (legitimately) buy game money for real cash. The adversary moved from other players taking your ingame stuff, to the game's maintainer itself taking real world money.
I used to play a game Puzzle Pirates as a 12 year old, which had an in game currency that could be used to play poker. I easily put 200 hours into that.
And I would say I had a similar experience, you win some, you lose some, but it helps show that it's not just up and up. I haven't spent more than $50 in a casino in my entire life, and the gacha games I have played I haven't spent money outside of the starter packs.
Some people are gonna lose money gambling, with or without games with similar mechanics. I've never seen a study show that the two are in any way correlated. Just that kids are playing these games (with money they get from their parents, if they do spend money).
In RuneScape at the time, there was another PvP zone where you could fight another player and bet gold on whether you would win. Now having "expendable gold" and false confidence, I dropped some big money on this PvP zone, and over the course of a day, I lost it all. I was devastated. I've never lost a ton of money in real life, but this left a really sick feeling in my stomach even in the digital world.
Reflecting on this experience, I feel it has actually benefited me. I've experienced the pain and risk that gambling can bring, and have never felt a need to do this with my actual money. To me, games can be a sandbox to learn life lessons without major consequences.