There has been a lot of action in the online gaming sector recently. Company officers arrested, share prices decimated, its been very exciting, if a little inexplicable. Apparently it could actually bring about the end of civilisation as we know it.
Personally, I feel this whole thing is ridiculous. Lets take Partygaming. Most of games they provide are online tournaments. You pay a fixed entry fee to participate in a competitive event. So it seems that if that is immoral and dangerous then any event that accepts money into a prize pool has to be banned too.
So chess, bingo, battle of the bands, the lottery (and you don’t even have to use your brain to compete in that one)!!! Where does it stop. If online gambling goes then all offline has to go to. So no more Ascot, no more raffles, certainly no scratch cards how ridiculous do we want to get – no more guess the number of beans in the jar…..
All of this is about personal responsibility, its no one elses fault or problem. If your kid uses your credit card to gamble online, well thats your fault not the websites. How did they get the info? If you do it, well that would be your fault too then.
Its not like you can get yourself directly in debt on these sites. You can’t play with more than you have credited the account with. So the debt is card credit. Hmmm, well correct me if I’m wrong but a lot more people have issues with credit cards from buying that plasma screen, or that dress, shoes, etc than from playing poker. So lets ban online shopping too.
Or, just maybe, we could get a life and focus on something important, like oh, not melting the planet.
