Games

“Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further”. I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there’s a reason why there’s such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics.

The psychological term at the core of the mechanic is a variable reward schedule:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcement_schedules

In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increase the likelihood of an organism's future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus

Variable ratio schedule (VR) – reinforced on average every nth response, but not always on the nth response.[14]: 88 

Variable ratio: rapid, steady rate of responding; most resistant to extinction.

Applications

Reinforcement and punishment are ubiquitous in human social interactions, and a great many applications of operant principles have been suggested and implemented. Following are a few examples.

Addiction and dependence

Positive and negative reinforcement play central roles in the development and maintenance of addiction and drug dependence. An addictive drug is intrinsically rewarding; that is, it functions as a primary positive reinforcer of drug use. The brain's reward system assigns it incentive salience (i.e., it is "wanted" or "desired"),[31][32][33] so as an addiction develops, deprivation of the drug leads to craving. In addition, stimuli associated with drug use – e.g., the sight of a syringe, and the location of use – become associated with the intense reinforcement induced by the drug.[31][32][33] These previously neutral stimuli acquire several properties: their appearance can induce craving, and they can become conditioned positive reinforcers of continued use.

The thing is that many games use an aspect of random reward, which leverages the conditioning effect of a variable ratio schedule to get people to want to play. Rogue had random drops in 1980, for something early that I can name off-the-cuff. Like, having random rewards are all over video games, were around long before F2P or pay-to-win lootboxes. Like, banning games for leveraging that mechanic would ban a huge range of video games, card games, board games, etc.

I think that the reason that people worry about it with gambling is that a runaway impact on someone directly results in draining money from them, especially since someone can hope to "make money back". "This will help encourage someone to buy an expansion or sequel" is acceptable, but "money is spent on a per-roll basis in the hopes of getting money" is not.

Balatro definitely makes use of random rewards...but many, many games do that.

Balatro looks a little like a gambling game. You can go and play video poker with actual money, and the first round or so of Balatro is simply video poker, with virtual money, before Balatro's mechanics enter. But...I'm not sure that that makes Balatro particularly problematic. Maybe, I guess, someone could play Balatro, then think that "video poker is cool" and then go play video poker for money. I guess maybe that's what the PEGI people were upset about.

I don't know how much any special Balatro convertability into an actual gambling game is a factor. I mean, I am pretty confident that you could take virtually any video game and turn it into a gambling game. Hell, a number of free-to-play games spanning many genres do have some degree of winning at least in-game stuff when you insert money.