Safe in ArmsThe Scarlet Furies
࿐Winding Maze࿐@winding-maze
✩.･*:｡• Painting vibrant & fantastic art •*:｡★ she/her･ﾟ✧
Armenian women's costume with jewelry, from Ardanuch by Eugene Lanceray, 1912. Leo Tolstoy State Museum, Moscow.
Inscription on the right: "Purple silk tassel, necklace, belt, chest decoration". She is wearing two headscarfs.
Hey, Portfolio Day! Happy 2024!
Here’s some of my art from the past 2 years.
🌐 https://dona.neocities.org
💌 dona.vajgand@gmail.com
🪷 Commissions are open (illustrations, skeb style/surprise me!, livestream assets, character sheets, commercial work)
Everytime I make a post like "don't spend money on gacha" I get a bunch of angry replies to tell me "actually it's POSSIBLE to gamble responsibly" and "mh how AM i a bad person for deciding to spend MY own money that I earned MYSELF?"
and man... I really wish that people understood that when I say "Don't spend money on gacha, it might kickstart a gambling addiction" or "if you regularly spend money on gacha you might already have one" I don't mean it as a moral judgement. Addiction isn't something that solely affects "bad" or "stupid" people. Addiction isn't some punishment that is deserved. If you suffer from any kind of addiction, you deserve help. But the first step of getting that help is acknowledging there is a problem in the first place.
also: while this applies to all addictions, gacha addictions especially suck because people keep trivializing it. There are so many memes and so much enabling like "lol just spent all my savings on gacha :p" "3000$ for my waifu, a pretty cheap price!" "lol it's too late for me I already spend so much on it but you guys stay safe!" "Don't spend on gacha? No, spend MORE on gacha!" which I believe only adds fuel to the virulent hostility against any post that goes "hey, this isn't normal, please be careful."
So yeah all this talk to say: the best way to not get a gambling addiction is to not start gambling at all, so don't spend money on gacha. If you do spend money on gacha, be careful and watch out that "I'm just spending ten bucks and nothing else" doesn't morph into "I just spent 140 bucks and got nothing out of it, might as well add ten more at this point." If you have a gacha addiction and are aware of it, I wish you safety and recovery.
This is exactly the argument against microtransactions in video games. I don’t know much about gacha, but let me guess: it’s designed specifically to catch addictive personalities/people who have or have been addicted to something else, people with disorders like ADHD (impulsive!) or depression (distraction!), and squeeze them for every penny they’ve got.
James Stephanie Sterling was among the first, if not the first, games critic to start ringing the bell about microtransactions and how they’re nothing but gambling in a pretty little virtual package. Here are a couple of their videos on the subject. I expect @versegm will find the overarching discussion highly applicable to gacha.
Yep! I *highly* recommend reading Addiction By Design by Natasha Dow Schüll. It was released in 2012, just before online gambling & gachas exploded, but it’s a perfect book about the history and mechanics of gambling.
There are stories by gambling addicts, there are stories by people who design slot machines and entire casinos, who explain how everything works in sync to keep you addicted; there is an explanation of the exact mechanics of gambling. It goes over decades of history and how the machines evolved to dodge the anti-gambling laws and keep people addicted.
And guess what: all of it can be applied to modern gachas - because the underlying principles are the exact same!
Understanding what you’re doing and what you’re up against is key to breaking the cycle, even a little.
Sugar…..spice…..and everything nice. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girl. But Professor Utonium accidentally added an EXTRA INGREDIENT to the concoction…. CHEMICAL X.
The Unified Theory of Viral Song Describing Extremely Specific Social Phenomena
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