Played Clover Pit
A while ago I wrote a post about Luck Be A Landlord, a deckbuilder game which uses the conceit of a "slot machine" to randomize a draw of cards - or slot machine symbols - from your deck once a turn.
This game inspired Balatro, which in turn inspired a whole subgenre of gambling-aesthetic deckbuilders. There's a fuck ton of them now, and while I can't say for sure that Balatro or LBAL really inspired all of them, it's hard to argue that this isn't a coherent scene, design movement, or subgenre of titles that all influence and inspire one another.
The challenge of managing randomness is present in pretty much every deckbuilder... but in these "gambling deckbuilders," the gambling motif applies a certain inescapable cynicism to that challenge. Getting a bad couple of hands in Magic The Gathering is something you can really only blame on fate, or on yourself as the designer of the deck. Getting a bad couple of drops in a pachinko game can make a player think: The House got you again. You rube.
While LBAL's rhetoric about gambling feels very focused and restrained - it's mostly interested in using gambling as a mild metaphor for the rat race of life and landlord exploitation. LBAL also feels much more like a traditional deckbuilder, since it requires you to build the spread of slot machine symbols yourself.
Clover Pit, on the other hand, heaps an extraordinary amount of negative gambling imagery on the player. Every time you start a new "run" on the slot machine, it chirps "Let's go gambling!" at you. It has an actual stat called "luck" which substantially affects the outcome of your pulls. When you fail to beat the house, the game kills you. Instead of using gambling as a transparent metaphor for making money to pay your rent, Clover Pit is mostly just about how bad it feels to lose at gambling.
I know on some level: as long as interactive entertainment continues to exist, we'll always have games which ask you to do something, and then insult or torment you for doing the thing the game asked you to do. Games, as a medium, will never escape the teenaged rhetorical appeal of putting a gun in the player's hands, making them shoot it, and then screaming, "You murdered someone, you fuck!!" So long as people continue to work in games and grow in mastery in their craft, we'll always have people moving through the stage in their artistic journey where this kind of thing is interesting to them.
Clover Pit is less accusatory - it's saying something along the lines of "It's fuuuuuucked up that you feel good playing this game, isn't it?? ;)" every time you pull the lever. "It's crazy that you're gambling!"
Damn, dude! Thanks for the observation!
I think I'm at the point where I can play this stuff completely neutrally, accepting that this is a kind of thing people like to make when they're learning to use systems and interactivity rhetorically. Part of the reason I don't roll my eyes at this stuff more aggressively is that I never know whether the people making these games are inspired by something more personal - something that they haven't quite managed to say perfectly yet.
I know that a lot of kids younger than me in PC gaming grew up absolutely marinated in a gambling culture that didn't exist when I was young. I was precisely old enough to avoid Counterstrike skins gambling and sports betting apps... and besides, that stuff is marketed heavily to men instead of women. But it's easy to see from the outside what an acidic impact it's having on the United States. When I was in college, I was mostly worried about my friends becoming alcoholics. If I were graduating college today, I'd have to worry about them becoming gambling addicts, too.
So I've always wondered whether the people making these games - and in particular, the people making Clover Pit - have anything more personal they might have said about gambling if they hadn't been making a deckbuilder you can play endlessly.
I think my takeaway from games like this is to encourage developers who feel like they have something personal to say about gambling to, like, actually say something personal. Because this isn't personal.
I haven't finished the game yet, but I've unlocked the card modifier system, gotten four keys, and unlocked four drawers. I routinely end games earning 20+ million coins per set of 7 pulls. But as I've plateaued there, I've started to lose a lot of steam. Sure, it's an undeniably fun game - it does, in fact, tap some kind of rich enjoyment vein in my brain, whether I find that interesting or not. I can sort of observe myself enjoying it from the outside. There is craft skill to admire here, even if it isn't in service of a message I find compelling. We'll see what happens... but I think that at this point, I've extracted all the Deep Thoughts from this game that it's likely to give me.