User:Cat the Colourful/Lootboxes
In the context of furiously overthinking about the surreal modern reality of the human condition and its many components, the act of gambling is a source of infinite cosmic terror and mystery. For why would the modern man, time and time again, voluntarily exchange their invaluable pocket change for a lottery ticket that has a 1-in-95,344,200 chance of even potentially winning back their investment? What inexplicable primal urge drives the modern man to pull the trigger on a fully-loaded Nagant M1895 pressed against their skull? How is it that the modern man keeps on clicking Special:Randompage, somehow not anticipating the absolute literal filth that will soon haunt their screen and drive the modern man into seeking the help of modern medicine?
The modern man may find themselves curled up in the corner of their dark room, unable to sleep, absolutely sick to their guts at the idea that someone, somewhere is making actual money out of consciously driving the modern man into these paths of self-destruction - but what the modern man doesn't know is that those people, those very same people responsible for the plight of the modern man, are neither getting any sleep on this horrible, cursed night. The casino owners and the Russian arms dealers and the Uncyclopedia moderators are just as fixated on these same questions that trouble the modern mind - but not out of any inner moral panic of the conscience really. For, indeed, why would the modern man use their services when one could just as well invest their time and money in something concrete and definite, like Bitcoin or Wikipedia donations? Why have the casinos and con-men began filing for bankruptcy? Where did the gullible fools go? How did the modern man grown so... wary? The modern man, after spending the last five millennia hooked up on the cheap thrills of gambling's empty promises, has grown bored and no longer has the need for something so familiarly unsure and artificially random. So how to convince the modern man to pawn his house and wife for a good old game of poker? After some introspective thinking, the devils and men of vice come to the conclusion that in order to restore the tempting mystique of gambling - to return the odd to laying odds - gambling as a business must adapt to the modern standards of chaotic aimlessness. The answer is not to further complicate the game, but to obscure the actual prize. To blur the roles of winners and losers. To add a layer of Zen into the conclusion. And the logical end result to all this is the lootbox.
The lacquer coating of the lootbox[edit | edit source]
The lootbox is the act of making the modern man pay the full price of a game but to not actually promise anything on the occasion of winning it, yet simultaneously also promising everything. It operates on the age-old principle that "men prefer their things in boxes": give man a fish and he will feed for a day, grow bored and move on to hard drugs; give man a cardboard box wrapped in paper and bubble wrap, with a flimsy ribbon and glitter on top, and he will feed on the dopamine rush of opening the box to see if any fish reside inside it for a lifetime.
The philosophy behind the lootbox is to reinforce the idea that there is no logical dualism to be applied to gambling; there are no winners or losers in life, nor are there any good or bad articles on Uncyclopedia. There is only the chaos, and to embrace this chaos is the proper path to enlightenment. Life in its purest essence is the very epitome of gambling. Invest in casinos and help dying comedy sites to pay for their server costs - what happens in return is irrelevant, just do it. In this sense the lootboxes can be likened to Buddhist sutras, since as long as the actual end result of an action is hidden behind smoke and mirrors and metaphoric mumblejumble, the modern man will repeat the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
The hinges of the lootbox[edit | edit source]
As a concept, the lootbox is indeed a mere abstraction, but the modern man also demands some solid ground to stand on. But exactly this is where one fails to grasp the meaning of the lootbox - while the end result of a bet may be a randomly generated sum of money or various random objects, it is the audiovisual parade and anticipation leading to the removal of the lid concealing the result that is the point. The box may have been empty, but did you see those explosive flashes of light and the fireworks in the sky that came along the announcement that your life savings are now gone forever? The tingly electronic sounds and cacophonous trumpets? The physical sensation of the ever-increasing butterflies in your stomach as the moment of truth was approaching, and the violent vomiting of upon the news? How fucking cool is the human body, man? Now go get another loan or go rob a bank or whatever - you do want to experience that all over again.
One may think that lootboxes are mere scams hidden beneath a layer of false abstraction, but even that misses the mark. The point really is the spiritual journey into the unknown. Well, maybe it really is just too difficult for the stupid modern mind to understand.
The folding of the lootbox[edit | edit source]
While lootboxes are a somewhat new fad in game development, the concept is actually deeply rooted so far back as the 16th Century and the Reformation of Christianity. When Martin Luther, a notorious trouble-making punk who could barely keep up with his theology studies at the University of Erfurt, heard of the local church's habit of selling plenary indulgences to free people of their supposed sins, he knew he also wanted to get into the action. But simply siding with the morally questionable religious authorities wasn't enough - Luther wanted absolute power. With his heart full of greed and arrogance, Luther began preaching in the streets that, logically thinking, there may actually not even be any afterlife, and that in this context the church could actually be ripping everyone off. If the church cannot guarantee that sinful or sinless life leads to any practical end result, the Catholics could just as well give Luther their monetary income as a thought experiment. "You know, just to see what happens".
And so Luther single-handedly robbed the city of Erfurt. With his pockets full of Catholic cash, he began traversing around Europe to make some mad bank and to further spread his philosophy of the Lutherbox - the idea that religious life is a life of uncertainty, so why not make it a little bit more difficult on oneself by giving their savings to the travelling preacher and his donation box? The modern lootbox system is, similarly to Luther's teachings, a reformation of sorts compared to the more traditional ways of gambling. The risks of gambling are well known, but when the shrewd lady selling lottery tickets at the service desk proposes that there may have never ever been any reward to be sought in the first place, the interest of the modern man capable of abstract thinking piques.
The girls of the lootbox[edit | edit source]
One may be surprised to hear that the lootbox system was, as described before, actually the work of Christian reformist, and that it indeed didn't originate from Japan, the root of all things degenerative. The reason for this is that the gambling systems in Asian countries already abide by the rules of a different doctrine, the doctrine of gacha. Gacha as a philosophy shares many of the key principles of the lootbox system, in that both mystify the end result of a successful gamble as something inconceivable and unpredictable. However, the Japanese government doesn't officially acknowledge rectangular objects as "nothing more than western capitalist propaganda". Something as vulgar as lootboxes would be publicly frowned upon and considered to be disgraceful, which is why Japanese game developers and pachinko parlors focus on circular shapes in their game design according to the philosophy of the aforementioned gacha - roughly translated as lootspheres.
Another defining feature of the gacha system is that the concept of monetary loss doesn't even exist in the Japanese society. This is due to the economic collapse of Japan in the '90s which rendered money as a currency worthless, forcing the starving families to sell their daughters as service girls and concubines in exchange for products. It didn't take long before Japanese girls became an officially accepted currency in Japan and a widely acknowledged commodity in the trade market. This is why the so-called gacha games primarily deal with randomly generated girls stuffed inside circular objects as prizes - just with layers and layers of mystique and the extra layer of Eastern mystique on top.