Game: Balatro
Developer: LocalThunk
Platform: PC
Balatro is unique relative to other card games that use chance because its enthralling randomness comes less from the cards drawn from your deck than from the powerups given to you over the course of the run. In games like Poker or Blackjack, each hand is independent, and you see less than 10 cards over the course of the hand. By contrast, Balatro’s multiple (not independent, because the cards are not picked with replacement) hands and discards allow the player to see more cards and therefore have more control over what they get to play. Under the assumption that cards in your deck are drawn uniformly at random, this is real control.
This control, however, is most effective when the player has the right Jokers to maximize their hand score. Jokers are shown randomly, and the player must decide to buy or pass on them before seeing others, which is a use of randomness outside their control. Combined with the rogue-lite run structure, this makes the game into a sort of meta-slot machine, where the jackpot is the player’s ability to optimize their score (which the player may hit at any time, if they get the right Joker). This might put players at risk for addiction for two reasons. First, like slot machines, players are chasing wins without knowing the probabilities of getting certain Jokers. Second, there’s a strong “near-miss” effect because, assuming a player hasn’t been skipping too many blinds, the blind they lose will likely be a close loss. This feels like a near miss because the score was close to a winning score, but players actually don’t know how optimal their build was relative to the optimal build for that seed.
The game’s music, sound design, appearance, and pure focus on cardplay make it even more addictive. The catchy theme song, tactile card sound effects, and low-res CRT tv appearance make Balatro feel like an arcade game. This feeling is strengthened by the simple mechanics and absence of story—the only thing going on is playing cards. And, as with arcade games, these attributes combined lead to heightened sense pleasure that can be addictive. Despite the addiction potential, though, the arcade-game like simplicity could have limited appeal for some players. For this reason, the target audience for Balatro seems to be players who already enjoy random deck building games (as opposed to games like Dominion, in which everything you can buy is known and on offer), and are willing to play one with no additional set dressing.
Balatro’s strong arcade aesthetic, combined with the fact that playing it does not involve real money (or live-service game fake money), makes its use of randomness permissible despite the slot machine tactics described in the second paragraph. The arcade aesthetic and lack of narrative set dressing show that, unlike free-service games with non-fungible currency and pay-to-win/participate gameplay, Balatro is honest about what it is: deck building to maximize a score. Further, its near-miss effect is tempered by the fact that, by saving the random seed of a run, players can actually test whether or not their hypothesis that they were close to winning with a certain build was correct. Finally, the game is a one-time purchase, meaning that the only thing you are spending when playing it is your time.
Both the slot machines analyzed in the article and Balatro are offering the experience, the magician’s trick, of challenge fun and sense pleasure by optimizing a landscape governed by chance. Though the challenge and the player’s ability to solve it may be an illusion, the fun is not. I think the extent to which it is morally permissible to use randomness to achieve this kind of fun is inversely proportional to two quantities: the amount of money you require from the player in order to participate in the fun, and the amount that your game obfuscates the kind of fun that it is primarily offering. For Balatro, both of these quantities are near zero.
