Can casual games industry draft behind poker?

Last month, I blogged about the Poker Players Alliance group that was trying to lobby for changes to gambling law to recognize games of skill as being just that, skill based, and therefore not under the umbrella of 'gambling'.

Today Kotaku points out that a resolution has been introduced into congress to tackle the subject.

The resolution can be found in full here.

Kotaku reads this as being relevant to MMO's, but it's clearly relevant to ALL games. The opening paragraphs of the bill reference Bridge and Mahjong, for example. Skill-gaming business models are currently a viable business model for casual games as well as core games like FPS games and the like. One of the reasons the model has been limited is that it's currently an 'arms length' business model, since many still see it as gambling.

Think about it. When you tell mom you are bringing home your new fiancee, and he/she is a professional poker player, what's mom's reaction? Now change that to professional chess player. You imagined a different reaction, no? Poker has come a long way in terms of public perception, though it still has some air of vice around it.

A societies laws reflect it's values, and vice versa, though generally the laws lag when the values change. If something like this were to become law, it merely reflects the fact that people are open to the idea of games of skill being something that can be an arena for fair competition.

I for one, look forward to watching ESPN's Celebrity Zuma Championship.

Skill vs Chance and the law

The Freakonomics blog has an interesting post about the current debate about poker, and whether it is a game of chance or a game of skill.

The reason it matters at all is because games of chance are covered by a whole other set of laws, namely those covering gambling. The online version of which has recently been outlawed.

Recently a group called the Poker Players Alliance has been trying to lobby for the legitimization of poker, esp online. Annie Duke (of TV poker fame) has a good post on it on her blog. Her post discusses how games of skill can be identified by a "can I throw the game?" test. It's a compelling argument but I suspect it's flawed. As an aside, I predict that mathematician blogs will go through a veritable meme-circle-jerk on this topic over the coming week or two :-)

Does this matter to those of us in video games if we aren't involved in making a poker variant? It does.

The game of skill vs game of chance debate is relevant to any online multiplayer games, especially if any kind of 'play-for-cash' or 'pro tournament for cash prizes' is going to be explored as a possible business model.

Currently, play-for-cash services (e.g. we offer one on MSN Games, in affiliation with a partner) go to great lengths to ensure that there are no random numbers generated differently, or other factors that could result in a randomization of the problem set thrown at the two players in such a way that could affect outcome. As a result, there's a fairly limited set of games they can work with, as each has to be customized for the service.

It's possible that precendent set with poker could affect whether the play-for-cash model thrives or withers.