Having played TF2 and such as a kid, the bottleneck was always asking your parents for their credit card or getting steam cards/vanilla credit cards for your birthday.
I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.
I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.