Poker machines are designed to celebrate wins but stay silent on losses. A new project aims to disrupt that psychological design by introducing a simple losing sound – and to push for legislative reform.

And if you want the issue to be debated in parliament you can sign a petition linked in the article.

    • arbilp3@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      This may not be the case to petitions presented to the Senate but I could be wrong.

      • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        More likely that change.org provides information about who signed (including emails unless opted out) to the person running the petition. Information gathering from informal petitions is more likely to undermine trust and make people less likely to sign, but then you can’t build a database of people sympathetic to some cause and spam them afterwards.

        The “20,000 petition signatures” feels like straight up manipulation - there’s no magic number to force a debate at parliament, and as MisterFrog@aussie.zone points out, an official petition would be needed for it to be tabled. If an official petition with a lot of signatures is tabled, that is a signal to politicians that the public care about it, and can overcome lobbying in the other direction and apathy, so it increases the chance a bill is put up for debate.

        This comes from an ad agency; they don’t list any gambling companies as clients, but I’m sure they’d find information like a list of people who signed useful for something.

        That said, it’s still a good idea to regulate in a losing sound if there is no political will to do anything more drastic. Better yet would be to require linking play to a one-per-person card, and having hourly, daily, monthly and annual loss limits per card, after which the owner cannot allow any more losses for that card holder.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    18·
    3 days ago

    That sounds like a brilliant idea, simple, elegant, cheap to implement and effective.

    Thank you for sharing this link, the gambling industry will desperately try to kill the initiative, because they know it will be a financial disaster.

    But that just means that it absolutely needs to be implemented.

    If implemented, I see two future scenarios, both less bad than what we have now:

    1. The sound is implemented in the machine, no other change is made, this causes the desired effect and makes people less prone to gamble.
    2. The sound is implemented, but the machines are modified to play it fewer times, they set less outright losses, and increase the chance of winning back your money for another go, probably with a small win sound, to drown out the loss sound, to do this the larger payouts are reduced.

    Both of these options reduce the incentive to gamble.

  • eureka@aussie.zoneEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    A great short read, and nice video!

    Sharing some other relevant articles on pokies:

    • arbilp3@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Thank you for that. Please share the petition. Let’s get this debated in parliament.