This week I played Balatro, a rogue-like deck builder game in which players play the most powerful poker hands they can to create big combos that earn as many points as possible. The game was created by indie developer LocalThunk. I played it on my Switch, but the game is available for all major consoles and computer platforms. The game is mechanically dense and, as I discuss below, tries to evoke the experience of gambling. Therefore, I think it’s best suited for adult players with at least passing familiarity with casino games. I’m interested in examining how Balatro compares to casino games and other games of chance, specifically through the lens of addiction. Doing so shows that addiction to a game depends heavily per player on what kind of experience most allows them to shut off their critical thinking.
The main mechanism by which games of chance, like slot machines, create addiction is by producing an experience that puts players in “the zone” – a state of play in which players seek continued play above winning[1]. The zone is achieved in slot machines by “enchanting” them with mysterious properties that the player cannot know. On the other hand, programmers “disenchant” slots using statistical calculations to tabulate precise expected earnings. Enhancement is addictive, but disenchantment is predictive.
Balatro clearly tries to replicate the enchanting experience of casino games. For one, it co-opts the rules, language, and visual design of poker. It even affects the scanline pattern of CRT displays. Playing it made me feel like I was at a bar top gambling machine. Furthermore, the game presents a gameplay experience reminiscent of gambling by hiding information from the player. LocalThunk has argued that the fun of Balatro comes from having players set up an intricate combo, set it off, and hope that it’ll be enough to win the round[2]. However, the point value of hands are hidden before you play them so that Balatro feels more like a slot machine than a strategy game. The game even asks you to gamble with your winnings. Between rounds, players can shop for powerful cards to add to their deck. At one point, I was presented with the opportunity to buy a “Wheel of Fortune” card, which had a 1 in 4 chance of powering up my other cards. I rolled the dice on it and lost. It felt exactly like my first time in Vegas (I went up to the blackjack tables and immediately lost all my money when the dealer got blackjack on the first hand).
However, a small section of Balatro’s player base has seemingly fought to disenchant it. The essential conflict comes from LocalThunk’s decision to hide point values before a hand is played. Now, the point value of a hand is actually calculable if a player is willing to put in the tedious work of tabulating it using spreadsheets or a calculator app. LocalThunk has expressed regret that the optimal strategy for the game requires breaking what he feels is the most fun part – seemingly disenchanting it.
I find my own experience complicates LocalThunk’s view. He seems to argue from a dichotomy between randomness and strategy. He believes that Balatro is enchanted by its reliance on randomness and that strategy gives the player enough information to disenchant the experience. For me, The most enjoyable part of Balatro, the part that got me most in the zone, was the strategy. However, the randomness in Balatro felt like a means to test my strategic skills. When faced with randomly-drawn hands, I had to come up with creative strategies to maximize my point output. Without randomness, the optimal outcome of the game would be fixed and the game would cease to demand any creative thinking of me.
Viewing chance as a vehicle for skill, we can view optimizers as deskilling Balatro. If the player has a means to quickly make the optimal decision, they are no longer asked to think creatively. Optimizing the skill out of Balatro turns it entirely into a game of chance. The optimizers lay control of the game entirely in the hands of the RNG. Optimization is thus a means to the zone for optimizers. The zone allows you to turn off your brain, and optimization tools allow optimizers, players who usually seek to calculate and strategize, to offload that labor onto a machine. Optimizing players do not disenchant Balatro, but rather cast an enchanting spell for themselves.
Balatro thus reveals the subjective nature of enchantment and disenchantment. What gets me in the zone fails to get optimizers in the zone. We therefore must understand addiction in these subjective terms, not resulting from a unified set of design choices but as resulting from a range of design choices that create different experiences of enchantment for different users.
[1] “Programming Chance: The Calculation of Enchantment.” 2014. In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, 76 – 101. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[2] Game Maker’s Toolkit. 2024. “Balatro’s ‘Cursed’ Design Problem,” Online video. YouTube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk3S3o1qOHo.
