[SkeuomorphicBee]

It is like chocolate cigarettes, they are not real cigarettes, they don't have nicotine nor smoke, and yet they serve to present and normalize real cigarettes to kids, so there is an argument for banning them. Where you draw the line is a difficult ask (a chocolate with packaging and wrapping copying exactly a cigarette pack seems like a clear case, but what about cylindrical chocolates that vaguely resemble? Probably not).

I think it is fair to argue where to draw the line, but I think some "looks like gambling but without gambling" do in fact deserve more scrutiny just because of the resemblance.

(On the other end of the spectrum we as a society should really crack down on the "doesn't look like gambling but is gambling" epidemic.)

[skyyler]

To extend your analogy, banning Luck Be a Landlord while allowing lootboxes and the like is kind of like banning chocolate cigarettes while allowing kids to have nicorette gum.

One of them has the aesthetic, one of them has the actual negative thing.

The aesthetic being banned is supposed to be in support of reducing the impact of the actual negative thing, but the actual negative thing is being PROMOTED instead of banned.

It all feels very pants-on-head kind of up-is-down logic.

[jhbadger]

This is the sort of hysteria that got comic books censored in the the 1950s and "violent" video games in the 1990s. The argument that fictional depictions of undesired behavior cause real cases of it just isn't supported by evidence, but only assumed.