Video games and gambling, particularly online casino gambling, have quite a bit in common these days. Whether it’s the rise of loot boxes in gaming or the many other influences that casinos take from video games, they have a shared history. But one of the most important parts is the portrayal of casinos within video games.
Video games have always depicted or included casinos, but how accurately is the average casino rendered in video games, both in the past and now?
How are casinos portrayed in video games?
Because video games come in all shapes and sizes, so do the casinos they sometimes depict. Casinos in video games vary widely from being just large set pieces to being entirely interactive environments with actual table games to be played.
Most of the casinos you’ll see in video games are relatively true to life. From smaller places that only contain slot machines to extremely posh and luxurious mansions, casinos of all sorts are found in video games. Some of them will even go out of their way to mimic the famous Las Vegas Strip and its many iconic and themed casinos, to the best of their ability.
Not only will video games expose you to digital versions of realistic casinos, but you can also find casinos that are part of the forest, integrated into the surface of a moon, or that exist in a purely virtual environment. It’s safe to say that video games developers have quite the imagination when it comes to depicting casinos.
In the real world, this blend of interactivity and gambling continues with online casino games. For players seeking trustworthy platforms, expert review sites like Irishluck help narrow down the best options from the hundreds available. These sites also give players a clearer picture of what to expect in terms of game selection, bonuses, and overall user experience. It’s a reflection of how deeply digital culture and casino gaming have become intertwined.
Do video games only include casinos if the game is about gambling?
The great thing about using video games to check out casinos is that they can be found in all sorts of games. It might seem safe to assume that casinos are primarily found in games that are specifically and explicitly about gambling. But fortunately, this is not the case.
Most casinos found in video games will be in a variety of gaming genres, such as role-playing games, sports and racing games, action-adventure games and many more. Like anything from a library to a museum, a casino is considered a normal building or establishment that games include very often. This is true even if the casino is just for decoration and can’t be interacted with or even entered.
It’s also important to note that not all games that feature gambling feature casinos, as many games will have gamers gambling in fictitious table or card games that are completely removed from the conventional culture of casinos.
But additionally, there are many games that primarily, if not exclusively, take place in casinos and are entirely focused on gambling. In other words, most games that include casinos will offer them as a set of side activities or optional minigames, but some of them focus on the casino as the main selling point.
How video games use casinos for their gameplay
Gambling gameplay in casinos varies widely, thanks to video games themselves offering a lot of diversity with their own set of rules and mechanics. Some games will choose to go completely realistic and use the same rules that actual casino games use. Others will either add variations to the rules to make the casino game more compatible with their own main gameplay, or make up their own gambling games altogether.
With a realistic casino, such as in Fallout: New Vegas or Grand Theft Auto, you can just walk into the building, buy some chips and get to playing whatever is available. That’s one of the nice things about gambling in video games – not only do you get to use fake cash instead of your own, but paying for things and receiving your winnings is simple and instant. It’s even easier than using an e-wallet or any other real-life payment method.
But gambling and casino games within video games can also be quite fantastical, and as a result foreign to even the biggest fans of real-life casinos. Depending on the rating or intended audience of the game, the in-game casino might be toned down severely, both in terms of its mechanics and its themes, to be more suited to younger audiences.
Many Nintendo games within the Mario and Pokémon franchises offer casinos, but they use slots and card games that look quite different from the usual ones. The rules are often simpler to make them easier for kids to understand, and instead of cash, you are usually betting with some fictitious currency to make the situation more palatable for the younger audiences.
The prizes will often be modified depending on the game in question. Of course, many casinos in video games still use cash and chips as rewards, but some of them will offer in-game tokens instead, like those offered as prizes at an arcade.
Conclusion
Casinos are so common in video games that any serious gamer has definitely encountered a few of them across their table-top and gaming adventures. Whether it’s Yakuza, Final Fantasy or Fallout, casinos are an important symbol in games. They represent the fun that can be had with games of chance and risky but exciting moves.
Overall, casinos have been a part of video games for several decades, and we’re sure they’ll still be there many decades from now.
Somewhere along the way she found herself doing freelance consulting for small businesses and home users, supporting both Linux and Windows users and integrating Linux and Windows on the LAN, primarily Linux servers and Windows clients. She is the author of the Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook, and the Linux Cookbook 2nd Edition for O'Reilly, and has written hundreds of Linux howtos for various publications, .