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Here’s the thing about gambling in a post-scarcity society...it’s not any fun!
When money isn’t real, the stakes aren’t real, and there’s nothing interesting
about it. The creators of Gambledome have managed to subvert this about as
well as possible without completely shifting the paradigm of the economy. In
Gambledome, money kind of is real, but only here. You start out with a modest
amount of cash to spend on chips, and as you play, you win and lose those
chips. If your stack starts piling up, you can cash them out, and spend it on
things. You can get yourself a nice, luxurious room to stay in. You can spring
for the (faux) lobster at dinner. You can give it away to your friends to make
them like you. This is how it worked in other gambling communities on Earth
back in the before-fore times, like Las Vegas. Here, it’s a recreation, which
may make you think that your life can only get better, but that’s not true. If
you run into the negative, you’re in trouble. You can’t leave the dome, and go
back to the utopia that vonearthans have created since automation made
fiat-based economies obsolete. You have to stick around, and pay off your
debts. That’s right, there are real consequences. Some of the humans walking
around as staff may be there because that is the experience that they have
asked to be assigned while staying in the dome, but some are there because
they have to be. Don’t come here if you don’t genuinely want to pretend to be
an ancient human, because that’s the thing about gambling. You don’t know if
you’re gonna win, and people lose all the time. A note on cheating: while they
won’t torture you, it can land you in jail, where you’ll pay off your social
debt by being locked up in a cell, unable to leave. We still have jails in the
27th century, of course, but the percentage of incarcerated individuals has
never been lower, so this is rare. One woman lost her money on purpose, threw
a tantrum, and tried to steal it all back, specifically so they would throw
her in a cell, because it just doesn’t happen all that often anymore, and she
certainly didn’t want to break any real laws. She didn’t want to go through
the real justice system, and go to a real jail, where she might never get out.
Overall, this place is a lot of fun, but only temporarily. I wouldn’t want to
spend the rest of my life here, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a
world where people are sincerely desperate enough to gamble because they think
they have no other choice. I don’t know if Gambledome is fostering any real
addicts, but I sure would be interested to know if it’s happening, and if it
is, whether the creators have any plans to do anything about it.
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