For this week’s critical play, I chose Blackjack because I have always wanted to learn a classic casino game. After a quick Google, its origins trace back to a 17th century game called vingt-un, meaning 21, and it does not have a single identifiable creator. It was eventually called Blackjack around 1899. Although I played digitally, the game is best known for being played at a physical card table in a casino. Its target audience is adults, specifically those who gamble or visit casinos. There are usually 2+ players, but can range from 2-7. Though it has a simple premise of getting you cards as close to 21 as you can without going over, and beat the dealer’s hand. Yet, this simplicity can quickly become a trap. The feedback loop is so brutally simple and short. Because of this simplicity and short loop, the mechanical randomness of drawing cards, usually from multiple, combined decks, leads to a large number of unavoidable losses not based on skill that tempts players to play again in an attempt to ‘outsmart’ the randomness.
The randomness in Blackjack is real, unlike slots, but it is not distributed fairly, and that gap between perceived fairness and actual fairness is where the addiction comes in. When I first started with a hand totaling 20, the outcome felt almost certain. The dealer would need a very specific draw to beat that, and I felt confident and in control. But those hands are not typical. Far more often, I found myself looking at a 15 or 16 while the dealer’s exposed card showed a lower number ranging from 7-10, and that situation reveals the game’s structural problem. Because the dealer draws last, I was essentially forced to hit in those moments, betting against the odds, knowing that the dealer would likely reach a safe total while I risked busting with any card above a 6 or 7. This randomness is intentionally designed to work against the player so that they end up losing money to the house.
I believe that this is where the design becomes ethically complicated. For example, in poker, every player at the table shares the same access to information and the same mechanical options. The dealer role exists purely to facilitate the game rather than to participate as an opponent with a built-in advantage. Blackjack’s dealer sees every player’s cards and always acts last, which means even a truly random card draw operates within an asymmetric system. From a design standpoint, that asymmetry is doing a lot of the work. I kept thinking I could beat the randomness the next hand by using some of the “skills” or “experience” I gained from each round I played. After I got a little more comfortable with the rules, I started to bet more money. These feelings are the hook, because the game gives you just enough agency, hitting or standing, adjusting your bet, reading the dealer’s exposed card, to make you feel like your decisions matter more than they actually do. The regret of busting on a forced hit or watching the dealer pull exactly the card they needed leads directly into one more round.
What makes Blackjack different from other chance-based games I play regularly is the weight of what is actually at stake. Gacha games, like Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail, also use randomness to create desire and frustration. Missing a limited character because of a lack of pulls feels disappointing, and the FOMO mechanics these games use are purposeful and manipulative. But the real-world level of frustration is still relatively low. Spending twenty extra dollars on a gacha banner is not the same category of decision as losing a hundred dollars at a Blackjack table. When I placed larger bets in Blackjack I physically noticed a change in how I felt, like my heart rate going up slightly, even though no real money was on the line. That visceral response is not something I really experience in gacha games, and it signals something important about how financial stakes change the feeling of risk in the face of different kinds of randomness.
I think chance becomes morally impermissible in games based on two conditions. The first is that the randomness carries meaningful real-world consequences. The second is that the game actively obscures the true distribution of those odds. Blackjack does both. The dealer advantage is not really advertised at the table and players learn it through repeated loss. Gacha games share the second problem, hiding or burying pull rates in menus most players never read, but they carry less of the first. Using randomness in a game is permissible when players can experience a bad outcome and still go on with their lives without it being materially worse. When the loop is as short and the losses as real as they are in Blackjack, randomness stops being a design tool and becomes close to exploitation.
