Nothing against kids’ games, but I wonder… Why lawmakers do not see these games of chance as a form of gambling? You may say tokens are used in place of money, but money purchases the tokens. (It’s a kiddie form of money laundering!) Is it because the stakes are small? And yet, they saw pinball as a form of gambling (in some States) WITHOUT any prizes or monetary gain! So, I am confused. Is there any logic to all this?
I used to take my kids there all the time, and I definitely thought that the games that had no entertainment value besides collecting tickets were basically that. But abolishing these would be a huge deal in NJ, considering that there are scores of these types of “arcades” up and down the Jersey shore.
In general, the primary harm from gambling comes from when losses are uncapped. Once a person becomes addicted, they gamble with increasing amounts of money until their life is ruined. With Chuck E Cheese, the amount it’s possible to lose is naturally constrained by the machine so it’s impossible to lose more than a fixed, generally small sum per day. Furthermore, the “winnings” from Chuck E Cheese can’t be fed directly back into more games of Chuck E Cheese like they can with slot machines for example.
Additionally, the law is never perfectly consistent and generally tends to favor grandfather in existing harms even as it acts to prevent potential future harms. Unless there’s a big lobbying contingent suddenly intent on banning Chuck E Cheese, the world is likely to continue with the status quo.
I’m not a Chuck E Cheese expert but when I was a kid, you earned tickets in an arcade based on your skill rather than random chance. When skill determines the outcome, it’s not gambling. The other way to get tickets from a machine is basically put money in, get tickets out. That’s just an overpriced vending machine. My gamble when I get a Snicker’s bar is only that Mrs. Charming and Rested will find out and get mad a me.
Yeah, I assume the difference is that the arcade games are non-competitive games of skill and you could theoretically replicate success with them. As opposed to games of simple chance or games with random elements that have you playing against other people. Out of the CEC games that spring to mind, they’re all stuff like skeeball, throwing basketballs, running in place, timing a moving light, video game stuff like zapping fish, etc. The only one that I can think of that’s really straight up chance is the Plinko style game where you drop in a coin and hope to knock other coins into a bin. But, with the change from tokens to swipe cards, I don’t know how common those are any longer.
There are a variety of reasons I don’t want to find myself in Chuck E. Cheese (with two kids, one nine years old, it’s a minor miracle I’ve not done so already). The gambling aspect is one reason: I’m not super crazy about how close this sort of game is to gambling.
But it’s a minor reason, and I certainly don’t think they should be banned or anything.
I’ve seen people (even younger people) dropping a hundred bucks or more on a regular basis in an amusement park arcade on games that are basically gambling devices. So my take is yes it is a form of gambling and yes someone can become addicted. It may be rare (betting to win money vs betting to win a stuffed animal or toaster oven) but it happens.
The reasons the lawmakers don’t lump ticket games with gambling is because a lot of their voters like them and there isn’t a significant social cost to playing them. There would be a lot of backlash from parents who see it as harmless fun for their kids. Although there is some overlap with gambling, most people see it as a bit of (costly) fun without a lot of downsides.
While I believe they may be using a loophole where you don’t play with actual money and you don’t win actual money (or anything that can be redeemed for money), it’s probably to help make the line even clearer. The real difference is that they’re games are mostly, or totally, based on skill and less so (or not at all) based on luck.
I also believe that not being able to get back as much as you spend plays into it as well. That is, no one is going in with the expectation that they’ll leave with more, be it money or prizes.
They may be similar to gambling but since it’s not that’s why kids can do it.
Also, keep in mind that in order to not be gambling they have to be mostly skill based, that doesn’t mean that you can’t gamble on mostly skill based games. IOW, be careful not to say ‘such and such a game is identical to one in Vegas’, that would be a fallacy.
One last thought, I wonder if they have some way, even if it’s complicated and a PITA, to get some free tokens. McDonalds does this when they have peel off stuff on their cups. It’s one more thing to show you’re not gambling.
Joke answer: You are gambling whether or not you will get common cold, flu, or E coli.
My personal answer: Whether or not this really counts as gambling, I see this activity as the training grounds for future addicted gamblers. I would be none surprised if casinos are not heavily invested in this.
And I say this as a dad who has brought his kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s & similar places.
It might be hard for a parent to notice that their kid is starting to like the gambling aspect more than anything else, and personally, I never even thought about it as gambling so it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to begin with, but since the majority of kids can’t even get to a CEC without their parents or they’re parents knowledge, it seems like it would be an easy behavior to curb.
However, I have a funny feeling it might not be that kids who spend too much time at CEC may over indulge in gambling when they’re older, but the other way around. Adults that spend too much money gambling may have been too interested in CEC as kids. That is, CEC didn’t turn them into gamblers, it just gave them an outlet earlier in life.
Maybe, I don’t know, I never really thought about it.
FWIW:
My daughter liked the tickets some (I think), but shows zero interest in gambling as a very young adult.
I was more worried about my son, who definitely likes video games and such. As a teen he seems most interested in vintage video games, and does not seem very interested by the darker aspects of video gaming nor inclined to gamble.
Still, I think its hard to tell when people will get bitten by the gambling bug. I think experiences with winning are helpful in creating a gambling mindset. More so if paying more gets more winning. Which for kids (who don’t spend their own money), is exactly the experience they get with these games.
The counter-argument is that experience with these games provides some kind of inoculation. Unless you mean inoculation with myriad viruses and bacteria, I’m not really seeing it.
Back in the days when pinball machines were considered gambling machines it was because they actually did pay out. I have an ancient non-working Sunshine Derby pinball machine that ran on a small car battery, has a plunger but no flippers and on the side it has a spot that swings out where your winnings would accumulate. It still had tokens in it.
http://mistymage.com/Family/pinball/pin1.jpg http://mistymage.com/Family/pinball/pin2.jpg
http://mistymage.com/Family/pinball/pin5.jpg
One problem of gambling is that it is possible to win more than you lose. Tickets in an arcade usually gets you shitty prizes worth less than what you paid to play, even when you play perfectly. You can get better prizes, but then you have to play more. You might think the biggest prizes are actually valuable, but you’re likely to get it as cheap online from China, even without the bulk discount the arcade owner gets.
That’s not to say it’s not possible to get hooked on arcade games and waste all your money, but it’s a lot rarer than becoming a gambling addict.
I don’t get how this is gambling at all. They are all skill-based games, as far as I can see. They’re no different than the games at carnivals where you pay for an opportunity to toss a ring, or shoot something, or throw a basketball, etc., and then win a prize if you succeed.
With gambling it is almost entirely luck, and people are playing odds–a few will win large amounts, but more will lose.
How is Chuckee Cheese the same? Is there something I’m missing here?
I ate at Chuck E Cheese once and afterwards, I felt as if I was gambling with my life.
I think I’d need a refresher on what games they have there. I can think of games that are skill-based, some that are really just paying to do something fun (that might give tickets anyways), but also games that would be gambling. One example I seem to remember are the coin pushers. Those are just gambling–there’s no skill involved. I remember a game at my local pizza arcade that was about rolling a coin on an exact spot. The way it played, it seemed a lot more like gambling than any skill game.
On the other hand, skeeball is entirely skill based. And then there are the arcade video games, which were mostly just fun. They either gave a fixed amount of tickets (fun only), or they gave something based on a score (arguably skill based).
I also vaguely remember a tic-tac-toe game. That was probably more like gambling, since it was just random whether the computer would let you win.
One difference is that with a slot machine, you have a chance of walking away with more than you came in with. With Chuck E Cheese games, even if you do as well as possible, you’re guaranteed that the prizes you walk away with will be worth less than what you paid for the tokens. If this can be justified at all, it’s by the games being fun enough to be worth the money, for reasons other than the fun of gambling.
It’s not just for kids. In my area, there are a bunch of seedy “skill games” establishments that are basically just running slot machines. The skill needed to play is minimal to nonexistent. They’re the counterpart to the “internet cafes” where each unit of internet time gets you a sweepstakes entry.
As it happens, the Ohio Casino Control Commission is going to start regulating skill games this year. The intent is to drive out the places I mentioned, but Chuck E Cheese and others will need to get skill games licenses to continue operating. But it sounds like everything they do (unlike the places using “skill” as a figleaf) will continue to be legal: