It's hard as in "it's hard to trick or manipulate the centralized database".

Similarly making USD in a bank account isn't technically hard, but it's fucking hard to get a bank to tweak some numbers in your favour.

This should be a top level comment, it is the "ah hah" that suddenly makes everything clear.

With the second best way being gambling. Doesn't really change anything.

Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.

Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.

If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.

I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.

I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.

>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)

That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.

Being virtual or not doesn’t matter here, ban it all.

I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?

Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.

They can do whatever they want with their time. Except operate and profit off of make shift casinos and unregulated games of chance.

Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!

For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.

24mil a year, 20k would be 1 hundredth of your monthly salary.