For this week’s critical play, I played Balatro, and it was not my first time playing. The game is a poker-based roguelike, developed by an anonymous solo developer LocalThunk for all platforms. The game seems to target a general audience, as do many physical games which use the 52 card deck. The game is fairly devoid of story, and involves a light amount of astrology/tarot theming. There’s nothing in the game that would constrain the appeal of the game to general audiences. Balatro presents a real risk of addiction, because of how it takes the format of roguelikes, short self-contained runs shaped heavily by chance and randomness, and distills it until it’s basically all that is left.
Balatro leans into scratching the “number go up” part of your brain, like games in the idle/clicker genre have been doing for a decade or so now. The difference is that the numbers don’t always go up enough. The blinds you must beat grow exponentially, which means you have to keep growing the scoring-potential of your deck rapidly to keep up. That said, you don’t get to build the perfect deck every time. The shop is random, and in some runs you might get the best joker in your first shop, while in others you get constant duds. Even a good deck isn’t foolproof, and a good deck can fail you a difficult blind if you get unlucky draws.
As discussed in class, rewards with a probability basically hack human brains. When I have a good round, I want to build on my success and get a new record. Whenever I lose, it’s always because I got “unlucky” and I should play again just so I can finish on a good note. Somehow, the answer is always to play more.
I’d like to compare this to the game Hades, one of my favorite games, and one that also fits within the larger “roguelike” genre. It also has self-contained rounds of play that are shaped entirely by random chance. That said, where Balatro offers no set-dressing, Hades uses the genre as a foundation on which to serve deep combat mechanics, a charming narrative, and stunning artwork. I’ve played Hades a lot, and have definitely had seasons where I have been addicted to it, in a big part due to the roguelike mechanics backing the game. When I play Hades, however, in addition to number-go-up brain scratchin, I get to enjoy some beautiful art, storytelling, and develop the skill needed to succeed in combat. Hades feels like I am being handed an amazing game, with brain-scratching on top, whereas Balatro feels like it was tailored to target the brain-scratching as directly as possible.
That said, I still hesitate on calling Balatro immoral. If the game found a way to monetize continued play time, or added the ability for in-game money to convert to real-world money in some way, I wouldn’t hesitate to label it as immoral. Balatro, however, is a one-time purchase with no in-game purchases or services (at least on PC, I did hear it was released on mobile and I don’t know if they’ve added money-making schemes to it there). Yes, Balatro leverages certain addictive game mechanics, but it doesn’t profit off them directly, it only benefits the game because people review it saying “it’s really fun, can’t put it down”. In games with in-game purchases, the designers need to keep you playing, but in Balatro the creator makes the same amount of money whether I play for 1000 hours or never even launch the game. If I look at the entire landscape of games, Balatro barely registers as problematic in a world where actual betting games (sports-related or otherwise) act as massive money-extraction engines, and blast the airways so that it’s impossible to consume any media without gambling being promoted to you.
I think there is room to criticize Balatro for its potential for addiction, but no more than any other game or piece of media. It doesn’t take a gambling-like game for someone to get addicted, plenty of people get addicted to games like Minecraft, League of Legends, WoW, and more. Also, for plenty of people, their favorite show or book is the one they “can’t put down”. Was Severance because it gave me the urge to keep watching the show? Perhaps, but also if I’m spending my time watching a show, I want it to be one that I’m excited about, not one I’m indifferent to. So, Balatro leans on the aesthetics of poker and roguelike mechanics or chance and randomness, but it seems to do so out of the desire to create a game that is satisfying to play and succeed at, not one that is fostering addictiveness in order to directly profit the creator through people’s continued playing on the game.
