- There is a debate over whether loot boxes in the game encourage children to play.
- In the UK, the House of Lords this week recommended the legal reclassification of loot in video games as gambling.
- Loot boxes are a mechanic in which a player pays in-game currency or real money for a random in-game item. Sometimes these items can also be exchanged between players for real money.
- Experts are divided on whether paying loot boxes has a causal link to gambling, and one told Business Insider that it could be “apocalyptically stupid” to regulate loot boxes like gambling without further investigation.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
The video game industry may have a fight on its hands as the UK appears to be poised to reclassify a popular game mechanic like gaming.
On Thursday, the House of Lords released a report on the damage of the game, which found that in the UK there are 55,000 players with problems aged between 11 and 15 years.
The report’s findings on gambling problems included a recommendation that the government immediately reclassify so-called “loot boxes” in video games to be under the mandate of the 2005 Gambling Act.
Loot boxes have become a common feature in games, although they are far from being loved by many players.
The exact way they work varies from game to game, but generally they work like this: You buy a loot box using in-game currency or real money, and it generates a random reward. These rewards typically give players something superficial, a new item of clothing that they can give to their game character, for example, and don’t give them any real advantage over other players in the game.
Loot boxes can be found in mainstream games like “Fortnite”, “Overwatch” and the “FIFA” franchise.
York University research found in 2019 that 71% of the best games on Steam, a popular platform where people download games, contained loot boxes.
In some games, players can exchange the rewards they earn from loot boxes with each other for real money. Loot boxes and this accompanying practice of exchanging items are collectively known as “microtransactions.” In 2018, a Juniper Research analyst report found that microtransactions generated $ 30 billion in sales for gaming companies or apps, and projected that the industry could be worth $ 50 billion by 2022.
The UK committee that published this week’s report took evidence from Dr. David Zendle, a professor of computer science at York University.
Dr. Zendle’s research has shown there it is a correlation between spending money on loot boxes and gambling problems.
In written evidence presented to the committee, Dr. Zendle said that spending money on loot could be a “gateway” to the game.
Correlation versus causality
In his evidence before the committee, Zendle said that it may not be that loot boxes are one of the main people in the game, but that people who enjoy the game are already more likely to be attracted to loot boxes.
“Problem gambling is characterized by uncontrolled overspending on gambling. Loot boxes share many similarities to gambling. Therefore, it makes sense that this uncontrolled spending would also carry over to loot boxes,” he wrote.
For some researchers, the data is simply not there to justify new laws.
“We are really only in the early stages of collecting scientific research evidence on the nature of the effects of loot,” Professor Pete Etchells, a video game psychologist at the University of Bath Spa, told Business Insider. “What we really need is a clearer and stronger evidence base before changing the legislation.”
“Trying to break a nut with this deck”
Professor Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute agreed that more research would need to be done to properly regulate loot boxes, and warned that jumping to regulate loot boxes, like gambling, is putting the cart in front of the horse.
“If loot boxes are bad, I want to know why they are bad,” Przybylski told Business Insider, adding that jumping to regulate loot boxes could be distracting from meaningful legislation to counter gambling problems.
“I want harmful things to be identified and eliminated in games. But I have a feeling that people are going to pat each other on the back, they say ‘work done’, and within a decade there will be more than 55,000 players with problems between them, the ages of 11 and 16 years. “
Przybylski also said that general regulation of video games with loot mechanics like gambling would be “apocalyptically stupid”, as this would essentially mean putting an 18+ tag on a wide range of games intended for kids, such as “Fortnite” and “FIFA”.
He compared the call for immediate regulation to the UK’s unfortunate age verification pornography blocking law, which was proposed in 2017 and finally removed in 2019 after concerns about whether it could be enforced eventually crumbled the project.
“Trying to break a nut with this mallet […] five years from now we will see how stupid he is, “he said.
Although the evidence on whether there is a causal link between loot boxes and gambling is equivocal, Dr. Zendle told Business Insider that the video game industry brought this up itself.
“Loot boxes have prevailed for more than half a decade,” he said. “Rather than helping to discover if there are possible negative consequences of this widespread feature in the game, industry representatives have engaged in what I perceive as a system of obfuscation and lack of cooperation.”
“Industry actions have muddied the waters to the extent that specific damage arising from loot boxes is unlikely to be known for many years. This leaves regulators and policymakers little choice in protecting the people for whom they are responsible, “he added.
