alt Hacker NewsDo they let 16 year olds gamble in casinos in Europe? Odd to ban it for kids but only some kids.
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Age of majority is a whole mess. For example, the UK is busy reducing the voting age to 16 (from 18) for the next election, but simultaneously they are requiring online age verification to restrict much of the internet to 18+...
If you're forbidding people from doing things they could do yesterday, it's best to be a little conservative with your scope.
16-yo kids might do some amount of part time work, and should at least have enough of a concept of money to understand why pressing the "more loot boxes" button is a Bad Idea. They're also old enough that they might potentially have their own bank account and their own card, which then caps the damages to their allowance.
You can buy trading cards in lots of stores. Pokémon, soccer and so on. It's hard to draw a line without banning those as well.
You can still buy mystery boxes etc in brick and mortar stores. Most of these are targeted at <= 10 yo
I strongly believe that this is mostly performative, honestly
Pretty much all of Europe is 18-21.
What are "kids"? Age of majority is all over the place, there's no hard and fast rule for when adolescents become adults, every society on the planet has a different take on it.
For example, you can get married at 16 in the UK, but can't drive until 17 (it's not a priority as we didn't build so many car-dependent hellscapes), and you can buy alcohol at 18 or be given it with a meal by your parents at younger ages, because we didn't have puritans making motorway funding contingent on passing strict drinking laws like the USA did.
Anyway, what I remember from the UK's Gambling Commission giving committee evidence to MPs on this topic is to ask the question: what is gambling? What activities need strict regulation, audit trails, compliance inspectors, etc? Village fête tombolas? Fundraising prize draws? Radio station cash giveaways? Top trumps? Panini sticker albums?
Lootboxes are not slot machines or FOB terminals. If they can't be "cashed out", they are more like collectible card games... which are also IMHO a plague on humanity, but not the same level of destructive activity as gambling for cash. They do need regulation, given how prevalent they are in games popular with teenagers, but need different regulation from casinos.
Games like Fortnite deserve regulation too, weaponised FOMO to keep money rolling in is sketchy.