Gaming

Hope springs eternal for sports bettors, as they typically expect to break even on future wagers even when they have consistently lost money in the past.

Now we know roughly how overconfident many gamblers are. A study by Stanford University researchers finds that the average online sportsbook customer expects a gain of 0.3 cent for every dollar wagered. In reality, sports bettors lose an average of 7.5 cents per dollar wagered, reflecting “widespread overoptimism about financial returns,” according to Matthew Brown lead author of the study.

The study also found that 20% of participants reported betting too much. To promote responsible gambling, online sportsbooks have rolled out features making it easy for users to track their results over time. But since most sports bettors are overly optimistic about their future betting, those measures likely won’t do much to curb problematic gambling,

Brown says. “Even when bettors know their past losses, they remained optimistic about the future, so that particular approach to consumer protection might not be enough,” he says.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As online gambling infiltrates society (and the church), there are more opportunities for temptation, people can hide their gambling addiction by not leaving their home. How many secret addicted gamblers are there in our churches?

The cacophony of slot machines, dice rolls, and card shuffles is what usually comes to mind when people think of gambling. The more pervasive way to gamble that has become more popular over the years is with your cellphone.

The computers in our pockets provide us with 24/7 access to sites and apps that facilitate our bets for us. People can’t even watch a sports game on their phone without being inundated with ads for fantasy sports platforms. Why not combine phone addiction with gambling? What’s the worst that could happen?

Writing in The Atlantic, Christine Emba anticipates the dreadful impact:

In a sense, Americans have been training themselves for years to become eager users of gambling tech. Smartphone-app design relies on the “variable reward” method of habit formation to get people hooked—the same mechanism that casinos use to keep people playing games and pulling levers. When Instagram sends notifications about likes or worthwhile posts, people are impelled to open the app and start scrolling; when sports-betting apps send push alerts about fantastic parlays, people are coaxed into placing one more bet.

Smartphones have thus habituated people to an expectation of stimulation—and potential reward—at every moment. Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor and a co-director of the university’s gambling-studies program, said, “You’re constantly surrounded by the ability to change your neurochemistry by a simple click. There’s this idea that we have to have excessive dopamine with every experience in our life.”

The frictionless ease of mobile sports betting takes advantage of this. It has become easy, even ordinary, to experience the excitement of gambling everywhere. It isn’t enough anymore to be anxious about the final score of the Saturday night football game—let’s up the ante and bet on the winning team!

But at what cost? Indeed, what happens when we begin to think of every scenario in our lives in terms of risk/reward and the dispassionate calculations of probability? This can turn life itself into some cosmic game, twisting relationships into scenarios we scheme and manipulate as we chase the dopamine rush of a winning bet. The easy accessibility to gambling won’t just affect us personally, for it can also change the culture around us.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As online gambling infiltrates society (and the church), there are more opportunities for temptation, people can hide their gambling addiction by not leaving their home. How many secret addicted gamblers are there in our churches?

In a remarkable twist of fate, a couple from Bowling Green, Kentucky experienced the rare joy of winning the lottery twice—first by winning the prize and then by finding their lost ticket.

In November, the Kentucky Lottery announced that Mark Perdue and his wife were the winners of $50,000. Mark Perdue recalled the moment when he realized he won, recalling the store owner's words of congratulations.

“I said, ‘For what?’ And she said, ‘You won the lottery.’ I said, ‘I wish.’ She said, ‘You did, I have you on video.’”

However, the Perdue’s rejoicing turned to despair when they couldn’t find the ticket. Despite their best efforts, the ticket remained missing for several days, leading them to believe it had been accidentally discarded. His wife said, “I’ve been beating myself up for three months thinking I threw this ticket away.”

However, the story took a fortunate turn three months later in February. Mark was inspecting a company car, and found the ticket. He rarely does such inspections, but a visitor needed transportation, which prompted it.

“I don’t know how long it might have sat out there if I hadn’t needed the car,” he mused. The discovery left him visibly shaken.

With the ticket finally in hand, the couple visited the lottery headquarters the next day, and received a check for $36,000 after taxes. Reflecting on their plans for the money, the couple expressed a desire to clear debts and perhaps celebrate their good fortune with a trip.

Possible Preaching Angle:

You should use caution in using this illustration because it is not intended to encourage anyone to play the lottery. But, this does illustrate the elation of those who find what they believe was irretrievably lost, such as woman who found the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).

The Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, quickly resulting in 38 states plus Wahsington D.C. jumping at the chance to increase tax revenue. Sports betting has since rocketed into an annual $7.5 billion industry. Men's Health surveyed 1,500 American men of whom placed bets in the last 12 months:

• 61% bet either daily or weekly
• 58% say sports betting has affected their mental health
• 44% say it's difficult to watch a game without feeling the urge to bet
• 20% say it’s destroying their life
• 20% spend 25% of their paycheck on sports betting
• Millennials bet more frequently than any other age group

According to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), the US is experiencing the largest and fastest expansion of gambling in our nation’s history. According to the NCPG, "As sports betting becomes more and more accessible, the number of people who are likely to develop a gambling addiction will continue to increase.”

Addicted problem-gamblers inevitably face job and home loss, damaged relationships, suicidal thoughts, and legal issues. The average debt accrued is between $55,000 and $90,000. According to Timothy Fong, M.D., codirector of the UCLA gambling-studies program:

There’s a state of gambling withdrawal just like opiate withdrawal or alcohol withdrawal. When you’re not able to gamble or participate in gambling, your body and your brain react to it. It goes through sleeplessness, changes in appetite, sadness, depression, and anxiety.

Delusion and pride cause many gamblers to fall into the snare. Sports bettors specifically often have higher education and income levels. Many perceive the results of their gambling as being determined by their skills and knowledge rather than chance and luck, overestimating their ability to win. This is known as the delusion of expertise and can accelerate … the development of a gambling addiction.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the NCPG, notes that: “We call [gambling addiction] the hidden addiction. There are few, if any, outward physical signs, and it makes it a lot harder to track and detect.”

Is a trip to Las Vegas becoming a thing of the past? A recent survey finds 4 in 10 gamblers have never actually set foot in a casino. A spokesperson for Online Betting Guide said, “Habits are changing all the time. Online gaming sites are becoming more and more popular, and in-person equivalents are evolving to meet the new needs.”

The results also show that 43% of gamblers feel an in-person casino has too many barriers to entry. Meanwhile, 32% just feel more confident behind their screen, with just 16% having more courage in the flesh. Another 22% fear they’ll look out of place in an actual betting parlor.

London (49%), Las Vegas (31%), and Paris (12%) are among the locations where respondents would most like to gamble in person. It also emerged that 83 percent feel the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people play.

Playing the lottery (53%), betting on sports (52%), and buying scratchers (41%) are the most common ways people indulge in a bit of gambling. However, 4 in 10 prefer games that require an element of skill, such as predicting sports scores or playing poker. Another 16% like to leave it to pure chance, playing games such as roulette.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As online gambling infiltrates society (and the church), there are more opportunities for temptation, people can hide their gambling addiction by not leaving their home. How many secret addicted gamblers are there in our churches?

Writer Leah Muncy recalls one of her earliest memories is of her mother buying a lottery ticket at the supermarket. “When I was young, my mother was always talking about the ‘lotto.’ Around the kitchen table, she’d tell us what she’d do with the millions: buy a large farm with chickens, fly us to Mexico, solar-panel the roof.”

The odds of winning the multi-state Powerball jackpot are one-in-292-million. You have a greater chance of dying from a falling coconut, which is one in 250 million. Despite this, Americans spent $71.8 billion on lottery tickets in 2017. The bulk of this revenue was generated by the poorest Americans.

According to a study conducted by Cornell University, the lottery is most aggressively advertised in impoverished communities, particularly minority and rural white neighborhoods. This exploitation leads to the “desperation hypothesis”: those in the direst of financial circumstances turn to the lottery as “a hail-Mary strategy.” It is a source of hope for those in despair. A 2019 survey found that 75% of lottery players believe that they will win.

The study also found that people who made less than $30,000 a year were more likely to play the lottery for financial stability. One in three Americans with incomes below $25,000 believe that winning the lottery “represents the most practical way for them to accumulate several hundred thousand dollars.” This, in turn, only makes America’s poorest even poorer.

Muncy continues, “My mother estimates she’s spent $3,000 on lottery tickets in her lifetime. ‘You can’t win if you don’t play,’ she says. But I tell her, that you can’t win if you do play.” The lottery did not ever and will not ever provide her with a ranch, or solar panels, or vacations. This beacon of false hope can be seen at the top of every California lottery ticket, a sun shining above the chosen numbers. It is golden, radiant, looming. And it is blinding.

The numbers for the $101 billion (2024) video game industry are astonishing:

• 190 million Americans play video games.
• 61% of the US population plays a video game at least one hour a week.
• 28% play a minimum of 1-5 hours per week.
• 21% of US adults 18-29 spent 6-10 hours playing per week.
• 8% surpass 20 hours weekly.
• The revenues collected by the industry rivals that of professional sports, motion pictures, and television.

Why the obsession? Cultural critic Frank Guan examines the gaming craze and offers some possibilities for the mania and passion.

First, "games make sense." The rules are clear to all. According to Guan, "The purpose of a game, within it, unlike in society, is directly recognized and never discounted." Second, you are always the protagonist. "Unlike with film and television, where one has to watch the acts of others, in games, one is an agent within it." And, third, they are utterly convenient. The gamer never has "to leave the house to compete, explore, commune, exercise agency, or be happy, and the game possesses the potential to let one do all of these at once." Fourth, the game might be challenging, "but in another sense it is literally designed for a player to succeed."

No wonder Guan concludes by stressing the escapist nature of video games:

"[Video games] solve the question of meaning in a world where transcendent values have vanished … We turn to games when real life fails us—not merely in touristic fashion but closer to the case of emigrants, fleeing a home that has no place for them … . Life is terrifying; why not, then, live through what you already know?"

2024 video game stats can be found here and here

In his book Brandwashed, marketing guru turned consumer advocate Martin Lindstrom argues that online or video-based games can be "extraordinarily addictive." He writes:

Whether we're playing against our friends, a stranger in Tokyo, or even ourselves, and whether the objective is to beat the high score, unlock the most "badges," or build the biggest virtual farm, games are deliberately designed to be hard to quit; according to [a gaming trade publication], "extreme gamers" spend roughly two full days a week playing video games, and according to a recent Harris Interactive survey, the average eight- to twelve-year-old [gamer] plays fourteen hours of video games per week, while 8.5 percent of gamers between the ages of eight and eighteen can be classified as "pathological, or clinically 'addicted' to video games."

A true addiction is physiological, rewiring our brain in such a way that we need more and more of the substance to satisfy our craving or deliver that "high." Does playing a video or online game really qualify? According to a 1999 study, our brains do respond to game playing much the same way they do to drugs, alcohol, and fatty foods—by releasing more pleasure-inducing dopamine. In fact, the study found that any kind of repetitive activity that becomes increasingly more difficult to carry out—which is, as any gamer knows, the key to a successful game—increases the amount of dopamine in our brains. A new study [from 2010] in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that we actually get a surge of dopamine from playing games that we feel we've almost won but have lost by a small margin. When we play games … the authors of the study explain, near-miss outcomes stimulate the brain's reward system … the same thing that happens when we gamble …. And according to another study, [some games] "are designed to be filled with challenges that deliver powerfully articulated rewards, and seem engineered specifically to get a player's [dopamine] pathways (pathways that mediate interest, focus, and reward) activated and resonating" …. The thrill of the hunt! The joy of discovery! The satisfaction of scoring a deal! How could that not be addicting?

According to Lindstrom one fifteen-year-old video game addict was described this way:

He displays all the characteristics of a heroin addict. You haven't got someone putting a needle in their arm and having a high, but you've got all the telltale collateral damage of a heroin addict: withdrawal from his family, withdrawal from his friends, lies to cover his addiction. He'll do anything.

Many use Facebook as a way to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances, but others use it to play games that involve virtual farms, virtual pets, and virtual mob wars. What's fascinating is that in some of these games, a person can buy virtual goods—fertilizer or additional pets or guns. But these items don't actually exist, of course. They are just little computer pictures from little pixilated stores. Nonetheless, if a person wants to have these virtual guns or virtual tools for their virtual farms or virtual pets, they actually pay real money!

Newsweek magazine's Daniel Lyons wrote about this bizarre phenomenon in a column titled, "Money for Nothing." When researching virtual games, he discovered that the total U.S. market for virtual goods was:

500 million in 2008

$1 billion in 2009

[Following updated as of 2/2024]

$19.61 billion as of 2022

$20 billion as of 2023

Kristian Segerstrale, a Finnish economist who has studied this phenomenon, says, “You can learn a lot about human behavior and how people inter-operate in an economic environment. There are a lot of valuable lessons.” One of those lessons, of course, is that people will spend real money for something that isn't really there at all.

Is it possible to play yourself to death? Officials at a Chinese Internet cafe think so ever since a 30-year-old man died after playing a game online for three days. The man collapsed, and paramedics failed to revive him on the scene. About 100 other people using the cafe for Internet purposes left in fear.

China is second only to the U.S. in number of Internet users and is home to millions of online gamers who play for hours in public Internet cafes. Internet addiction has spawned a counseling industry to treat people who cannot stop playing online games or surfing the web for days at a time.

Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World was written in 1932, but Huxley correctly forecast some of the issues of the 21st century. Huxley's premise was that people would come to love the things that enslaved them, and that they would worship the technology that would undo their capacities to think. He believed that by inflicting pleasure upon people, they could be controlled, and ultimately ruined, by the trivia they pursued.

The lottery promotes the interesting moral notion that if people are inclined to waste their money, the government should make it fun for them. And take a profit.

On February 26, 1995, Barings, the oldest bank in Britain, announced it was seeking bankruptcy protection after losing nearly one billion dollars in a stock gamble, according to Time magazine.

In late 1994, the chief trader at Barings's Singapore office began betting big on Japan's Nikkei market. Then disaster struck. An earthquake hit Kobe, Japan, and on January 23, 1995, the Nikkei plunged more than one thousand points.

Barings Bank lost big money. But instead of cutting his losses, Barings's Singapore trader doubled his investment, apparently hoping that the Nikkei would rebound. It didn't. Barings's London office put up nearly $900 million to support its falling position on the Singapore investments. Finally, Barings ran out of capital and declared bankruptcy.

How could one 28-year-old trader in Singapore lose nearly a billion dollars and ruin a 233-year-old British bank? According to Time, the problem was lack of supervision.

"London allowed [the Singapore trader] to take control of both the trading desk and the backroom settlement operation in Singapore. It is a mix that can be--and in this case was--toxic. ... A trader keeping his own books is like a schoolboy grading his own tests; the temptation to cheat can be overwhelming, particularly if the stakes are high enough."