When does it stop being gambling and start becomming fun?
... is a question thats been on my mind ever since I started playing
PE really. OK so I'm not sure exactly what the definition of gambling is but I expect its something like
"betting money on an outcome overwhich you have no control". Under that definition
PE isn't gambling because you have both choice and influence over what you do with your PED's. You could argue that certain aspects of
PE such as crafting or hunting are gambling but even then you do have some influence on the stats and the more you do it the better you get. Hunting of course is better than crafting in that sence as theres somewhat more to hunting than "dropping the coin in the slot machine" so to speak.
Taking things to an extreme however, even trading is a form of risk but its a risk you DO have control of (or at least the power to decide how much control you want as determined by the risk of the investment) and you can't call it gambling any more than you would running a business in RL! I had some interesting discussions with my parents round about the time of the island sale about the fact that the money involved blatantly was an investment as much as one would invest in a bank or trade deal in RL. They felt otherwise though believing that at the end of the day
MA have control of Death's money and could make or break the investment as they feel fit. I explained that of course it wasn't in their interest to do that as it would be more harmfull to them in the long run but their point stood and that was that the world wasn't truely random...
Now in some ways one could say this is a good thing. IRL you could own a factory thats situated on the site of a major earthquake and you could loose everything. In
PE (at least for the moment) with
MA as the (in effect) Gamesmaster or God of Calypso not only is it impossible for them to do this in game with the current implementation but even if they could its very unlikely they would cause lets face it, appart from your competitors, no one really WANTS that kind of thing to happen so
MA would make sure it didn't. When it comes down to it the only real risk to the Calypsian economy is infact through its single tie to RL, the danger of
MA itself folding.
All that aside, theres another line regarding whether
PE is gambling or not and thats the
weight of how much money you could loose against the amount of fun it buys you or rather, what is
PE worth as an entertainment medium? For me, I compare
PE to one of those slot machines you might find in an arcade. The type where you put in coins and they form a pile at the bottom and the more coins you add the more likely they are to tip the balance and knock a load of coins into the change bucket so you can win or keep on playing. Now with these machines the point at which it becomes gambling rather than fun, for me, is entirely determined by how long the spending of a certain amount can entertain me for. For example If I'm playing a 10p* machine, it takes me a matter of minutes before I've spent a pound** and the chances are I don't win anything so in effect I've spent a pound on very very little. The difference is, that when I use a 1 or 2p coin machine I've now got 100 or 50 chances to tip the balance and win something so not only does this buy me a longer playing time but also increases my chances of winning (admittedly smaller amounts). In short, the difference between 10p and 1p machines is whether a pound buys you an hour or mores entertainment or just 5 minutes!
I treat
PE the same way. So far, when I compare the amount I've invested in
PE and the
sheer amount of entertainment that its bought me (whether I've lost the PED's or not) to what spending similar amounts on other forms of entertainment would have gotten me theres simply no comparrisson. I don't care to work it out but in my current style of play I recon I could loose many times what I have already invested in
PE and even then, I'd still be winning!
* 10p = ~2PED
**1pound = ~20PED