Michiel Kamp
Asynchronous Ludo2025 paper.
Video coming soon!
2024’s hit roguelike deck-builder Balatro has gone through a tumultuous relationship with the PEGI ratings board. First, in March 2024, it had its 3+ age rating changed to 18+ on the account of ‘prominent gambling imagery and material that instructs about gambling.’ Then, after a successful appeal, in February 2025 this was changed back to 12+ because of ‘mitigating fantastical elements.’ Developer Playstack has always maintained that ‘painstaking care has been taken to ensure that the game does not feature gambling mechanics of any kind.’ At the heart of this dispute is not gambling-based gameplay or monetization, but the audiovisual representation of gambling: the game’s use of poker hands, but also its lo-fi graphics and Luis Clemente’s mesmerizing 7/4 musical score.
This paper asks whether Balatro’s score is part of the ‘prominent gambling imagery’ or the ‘mitigating fantastical elements’, connecting it to the history of music in gambling. While much of this is concerned with the ‘interactive’ sounds of slot machines that directly respond to player success, there are also examples of continuous background music in both machines and casino environments. In the case of the former, music box-like movements were added to circumvent gambling laws (Mancey 2024, p. 9; Collins 2016); for the latter, music serves to immerse players (Collins 2011, Bramley et al. 2016). I argue that Balatro’s score and its surrounding discourse can be contextualized in this history. Particularly its continuous, uninterrupted form and ambient and easy-listening qualities can be seen as commenting on the two roles that background music has played in the history of gambling.
Bibliography
Bramley, Stephanie, Nicola Dibben, and Richard Rowe. ‘The Utilisation of Music by Casino Managers: An Interview Study’. Journal of Gambling Studies 32, no. 4 (1 December 2016): 1127–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-016-9604-z.
Collins, Karen, Holly Tessler, K. Harrigan, M. Dixon, and J. Fugelsang. ‘Sound in Electronic Gambling Machines: A Review of the Literature and Its Relevance to Game Sound’, 2011. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61692-828-5.CH001.
Collins, Karen. ‘Game Sound in the Mechanical Arcades: An Audio Archaeology’. Game Studies 16, no. 1 (October 2016). http://gamestudies.org/1601/articles/collins.
Mancey, Katherine. ‘The Technophonic Everyday’. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2024.
‘PEGI Complaints Board Amends Classifications of “Balatro” and “Luck Be A Landlord” to PEGI 12 | Pegi Public Site’. Accessed 27 February 2025. https://pegi.info/news/pegi-complaints-board-amends-classifications-balatro-and-luck-be-landlord-pegi-12.
Playstack [@PlaystackGames]. ‘Https://T.Co/MroeavYY9U’. Tweet. Twitter, 1 March 2024. https://x.com/PlaystackGames/status/1763614758043795909.