Online gaming magazine Joystiq just published this snippet about gambling in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a hotly anticipated Nintendo title where game mascots punch each other repeatedly in the face, muzzle, or pika pika.

Earlier in the week, Joystiq linked to What They Play, a site where concerned parents can learn more about video games and their content. My gut tells me that any parent savvy or interested enough to find this site is also a solid enough child-rearer to actually sit down beside young Billy and gently ask him why he’s learning to shoot cops and murder hookers with a chainsaw.

There’s been a lot of noise lately about violence in games, thanks to a recent release by a particular company who shall remain nameless, only because i’m tired of hearing about them and don’t want to reward them with any further publicity. (Perhaps if we stop talking about them, like some magical wood sprite, they’ll cease to exist? Here’s hoping.)

Sex and violence are set squarely in the sights of video game detractors. But because the worst parents are out living the life that crime games depict, and the best parents can only stand a few minutes of gameplay geared for kids, a third partner in the Axis of Video Game Evil has gone unnoticed: gambling. It’s a fact that very many video games, including the best-selling video game series of all time, give kids everything they need to incubate a gambling habit from a very young age.

One of the most wildly successful game series in existence is Pokémon. Consistently topping the game sales charts and outselling its home console competitors, the handheld game targets young children. Pokémon takes kids to a fantasy continent where they can capture and battle a zoological mishmash of creatures, from small woodland fuzzies coursing with electricity, to huge ice dragons trapped deep inside labyrinthine caverns. It’s enough to put even the most vigilant parents to sleep. And while dad dozes on the couch, junior is introduced to the seedy underbelly of the Pokémon world. About 10 or 15 hours into every handheld Pokémon game, players wander into a fully functioning virtual casino.

Slot machines crowd the room, enthralling non-player characters who sit there for hours on end and never move. When the player talks to them, these characters repeat the same phrase over and over again, robotically, their eyes glazed over by the bright lights and blinking buttons. The player can pay an abstracted fee to buy coins for use only in the casino. He then tries his luck at games of chance in the hopes of earning rare prize jackpots; in this case, the prizes are animals that the player can add to his macabre menagerie to further his cockfighting career. That is, if he manages to pry himself away from the hypnotic allure of the machines …

The Canada Saftey Council calls video lottery terminals the “crack-cocaine” of gambling. There are a few key differences between the virtual gambling machines that lead to bankruptcy and suicide in the lives of gambling addicts, and the Nintendo DS your son or daughter is clutching:

1. Video game gambling doesn’t cost “real” money.

Real-money transactions in MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) may change this trend, but for now, video game gambling is done with virtual currency, and the prizes themselves are virtual. This argument holds true for most kids’ play activities. They don’t drive real cars. They don’t play real “house” or “doctor”. Their toy lawnmowers blow bubbles, and their toy cell phones beep the Sesame Street theme.

But the purpose of play is to train kids about real-world living in a safe environment. When kids practice talking on toy phones, they’re inadvertently rehearsing phone conversations they’ll have with real people when they’re older. If a child spends his or her time pulling virtual slot machines with virtual cash, it can be a primer for a very real addiction in the future. What’s of concern is not the loss of real money, but the formation of a real habit.

There’s slim difference between virtual currency and real-world money. In the real world, time is money. Mom spends time working at her real job, and she earns money. Kids spend time playing video games, doing the same mundane and repetetive tasks like slaying identical monsters a thousand times over, and they earn money. It sure sounds like work to me, even if it’s play-work. What, then, might a practiced video game gambler do when he grows up, repeats a mundane task at work, and earns real money?

2. In-Game casinos put the house at a disadvantage.

Most games that use in-game casinos favour the player. In the Pokémon series, the point is not to pull slots until your family disowns you and you end up selling your shoes for a few more casino chips. The game designers want players to win the rare prize animals, with a little bit of slot-pulling “effort”. The cold truth of real-world gambling will hit a player hard when he strolls into his first casino expecting the same success he enjoyed while playing games like Pokémon.

3. It’s just a game.

The same argument that video game apologists use to dismiss violence in video games can be made about gambling: it’s just a game. If a person plays a video game and then mimics behaviour he learned from the game, the problem was with the person all along, and not the game. A predilection for violence is seen as a perversion. Video games only inspire smouldering sociopaths to awaken their inner demons; perfectly normal players will take it all in stride.

That excuse falls a little flat when it comes to gambling. Johhny Gamer primes his mind for hours of practice-gambling in video games, and then graduates to virtual gambling sites or brick-and-mortar casinos when he’s older. It’s tough to argue that he had a dormant gambling addiction the entire time, and that he’s now somehow acting on his base gambling urges. To say nothing of violence, gambling and money management are learned behaviours. Money is an abstract concept that must first be understood to be mishandled. Suggesting that a tiny baby is born with an innate, perverse desire to play bingo strains credibility.

Game Over Before it’s Begun

It comes as no surprise to me, a dyed-in-the-wool gamer, that gambling is the fastest growing addiction among teengagers, according to America’s National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling. Today’s teens are the Pokémon generation, having grown up on video games that make gambling attractive and available. Today’s CNET article What Kids Learn in Virtual Worlds discusses how, at the very least, video games teach kids to worship at the altar of consumerism. We may reap the spoiled harvest of rampant spending simulators and virtual gambling schools when, in a few years, today’s MMOG players grow up and get summer jobs earning real cash.

Would you like loans with that? Can i Biggie Size your credit card bill?

Have a nice debt!