The crack cocaine of amusement arcades

You probably know them as amusement arcades but the Gambling Commission knows them as Adult Gaming Centres. The pressure group Gambling With Lives claims that they offer “the most addictive gambling products out there”. The Association of Directors of Public Health has complained about their “proliferation”. The Local Government Association wants more powers to “curb their “spread”. GB News found a “gambling survivor” who dubbed them the “crack cocaine of gambling”. And, inevitably, the Guardian has been writing a series of pearl-clutching articles about them, bemoaning the fact that they are “disproportionately concentrated in Britain’s most-deprived areas” (i.e. seaside towns and city centres). 

If this all sounds familiar it is because it is a carbon copy of the campaign against betting shops and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) a decade ago. The anti-gambling lobby are mostly focused on suppressing online gambling these days, but they have found time to relive past glories and go after slot machines again. FOBTs were de facto banned in 2019 when the stake limit was lowered to an unplayable £2. The number of FOBTs in Britain fell from a peak of 34,949 in 2015 to zero in 2021. As anyone could have predicted, players switched to low-stake machines in betting shops and amusement arcades or went online. 

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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