When looking at options for this critical play, this one jumped out at me because of how different it was from other games that I could see. Was this just someone making a Mario-themed gambling game? I chose this one out of curiosity, wondering what exactly it could be about.
When the screen loaded, however, to my surprise, I found that I had played this before! More specifically, this version of 5-draw poker, created by Nintendo for DS, was one of the minigames in Super Mario 64 DS, a game that I’d had when I was younger. Seeing the layout, the odds, and the drawing gave me distinct flashbacks to when I played this minigame as a young child. I distinctly remember this game because it was one of the ones where I could never really understand the appeal. For one, the setup was similar to poker in terms of ranks of cards, etc, and I had had no experience of poker so it didn’t really make sense. The other thing was that there was no real way of winning as I remember it, only losing, so I couldn’t really figure out the point.
Looking back on it, I think theoretically you could leave at any time with the stars you gained, but I don’t think I remembered it that way, and that was what was really interesting about this game. I always felt like I had a chance of winning, and that continuously kept me getting sucked back into the next round. This led to immense frustration as Luigi continuously drew full houses and threes of a kind while I barely got any, especially as the game progressed, but also a sense of – “This can’t keep happening!” that fueled future plays of the game. Which, in hindsight, is exactly how an addiction might work.
A typical cracked Luigi hand 🙁
Another, related thing that I noticed, especially related to our readings, is that there was no way for me to know the odds of you winning on a given hand. To my best understanding today, it’s a little more inscrutable than regular five-draw poker because of the increase in suits, but you could calculate it. But for my little brain, it felt almost like a magic system. It’s an interesting idea because in many senses it matches with what was mentioned in the reading regarding slot machines. A lot of the appeal of slots is that since people can’t figure out the odds, that it feels like your choices make a difference in the chances of winning big, even if it’s not the case. Similarly, when dealing with this black box of a game, there’s no way to know odds, which makes the game way more appealing versus if a kid could figure it out themselves.
How is a kid to know odds in this scenario?
After playing this again, the biggest takeaway that I got from this is that it is ridiculous to have this in a video game marketed for kids. Even if it is fake money and there’s no real stakes, including a gambling game of poker in a Super Mario game where kids whose minds are pretty malleable can be influenced to become addicted to the game is, at best, a massive oversight. At worse, it’s a questionable moral decision – allowing kids to play poker is not what people who try to keep their kids safe, like my parents did, expect of Nintendo games. I’m sure if my parents knew that a game that they allowed their kids to play exposed them to gambling, they would have been absolutely apoplectic. It’s definitely something that should be monitored more closely by people across the industry, including companies, media, and government.
One of my very few wins…
