Art

Totalling One Hundred

Plain sealed packets on a low rack. Nothing on them says what the chances are.
A low wire shop rack near the floor holding a tight row of identical sealed foil sachets, entirely unprinted, lit warm from above and cold blue from an unseen screen off to the left.

Beijing, May 2017

China became the first place in the world to require that a company publish the chances of getting things out of a randomised reward box in a video game. The rule was short. It said the probabilities had to be disclosed. It did not say where, at what size, or in what words.

Four researchers checked. They took the hundred highest-grossing iPhone games in the mainland store; ninety-one sold loot boxes; disclosures could be found for about 95.6 per cent of those. The same paper reports that 5.5 per cent showed the probabilities automatically on the purchase page, the most prominent place they could go (Xiao, Henderson, Yang & Newall, Behavioural Public Policy, 2024).

The question had been answered. It had been answered on websites.

Seoul, March 2024

South Korea amended the Game Industry Promotion Act, in force 22 March 2024, and asked for the same thing in three places at once: in the game, on the official site, and in advertising. Then it did the part that distinguishes a rule from a wish. The Game Rating and Administration Committee looked at 1,255 cases in the first three and a half months and found 266 games in breach, roughly sixty per cent of them foreign; 185 were fixed, and five foreign games faced removal from the Korean market. The penalty on the books is up to ₩20 million — about $14,400 — or two years in prison (Game World Observer, 8 July 2024).

Fourteen thousand dollars, against the monthly revenue of a top-grossing mobile game, is a filing fee. A bill now before Korean lawmakers would tie the fine to as much as three per cent of sales instead. Only one of those two figures is addressed to anybody who can do arithmetic.

Everywhere, June 2026

Roblox rewrote its developer policy. Paid random items must now show every possible outcome with its probability, as a percentage, before purchase; the percentages have to total 100; a booster that changes the odds has to show the changed odds; items reached through keys or tickets are covered too. The change went out worldwide, and the reason given was compliance with South Korea’s game law (Tech Times, 26 June 2026 — the policy is Roblox’s, the attribution to Korean law is the reporting’s).

One country wrote a disclosure rule and a platform rewrote its own rules for every country on earth. If you are twelve, and you want to know your chances before you spend your money, you can now find out — provided what you are buying is not a physical object.

Hong Kong, no date

Ching Yiu Lo, Kuma Xiaoyu Xiong and Leon Y. Xiao, writing in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, bought fifty popular card packs in Hong Kong — trading card games, collectible sports cards. Eighty per cent carried no probability information and no link to any. Of the fifth that carried something, the something was insufficient, sometimes hard to find, occasionally misleading. No pack — 0.0 per cent — let a buyer work out their chances of getting every individual card. The authors note that no dedicated regulation of card packs exists anywhere in the world, and they name Pokémon packs, Labubu blind boxes and video game loot boxes in a single breath, as one product (Lo, Xiong & Xiao, 2026). Xiao has since argued, in a Q&A relayed by SCCG Management, that packs already meet the ordinary legal definitions of gambling and get called gambling-like only because nobody checks.

The story everybody knows about law and technology is that the law is always behind — written for the shop and the printed page, overtaken by the screen, panting. This is the other thing, and it is stranger. Here the screen version is the regulated one. The cardboard version, older and cheaper, sitting at child height with a price printed on it, the thing the screen version was built to feel like, has no rules at all in any country, and nobody ever exempted it. There was no fight about card packs that the card trade won. The rules went where the complaints were, and the complaints came from parents reading a phone bill, and a phone bill is a document, and a document is a thing a regulator can pick up and hold. The mechanism is the same in both places: money, a sealed outcome, a chance at something worth more than you spent. The mechanism was never what got filed. The material was.

I recognise this, because it is how the field I trained in has always been arranged. Collections are divided by what things are made of — prints here, sculpture there, decorative arts down the corridor — and the division is largely an accident of who was hired first, which then quietly settles what gets conserved, what gets lent, and what lies in a drawer because it is nobody’s job. Hand a museum an object made of two materials and you can watch two departments agree, with great courtesy, that it belongs to the other one. Regulation went to the copy and never walked the ten feet to the original.

What I would watch for is that Korean bill with the three per cent in it. A share of revenue is the first figure in this whole business large enough to be worth a lobbyist, and lobbyists are how a rule discovers where its edges are. If it passes, somebody will eventually have to put in writing whether a sealed packet of cardboard falls inside or outside — which would be the first time anyone has been obliged to answer the question at all.

Until then the rules sit where they were put. On Roblox the percentages have to total one hundred. Across the fifty packs in the study, the figure that totals is 0.0: the share of them that let a buyer work out what their chances were.

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