Drugs & Gambling

Australia joins a list of around 50 countries worldwide where GTA Online gambling features are blocked.

The sudden ban has Australia join a list of over 50 countries where most Diamond Casino features are unavailable.

What is gambling? Strategic deck-builders like Luck Be A Landlord and Balatro have both been hit with high age-ratings by app stores and ratings boards, because the games are associated with gambling. Both are one-time purchases with no microtransactions, and no ties to gambling other than visuals borrwed from the casino world: slot machines and poker hands, respectively. Meanwhile, loot boxes and gacha games, which actually do have exploitative mechanics, seem to slide by ratings boards without much trouble. So what, actually, is gambling? And how do we talk about it in 2025, when gambling is