Online games have long been known to increase the risk of pathological gambling. But for some years now, a worrying new phenomenon has appeared: video games are incorporating gambling strategies, while gambling games are creating video-game environments similar to those of children’s games. Gaming incorporates gambling and gambling is becoming gamified.
Let us start with gaming. Until 2018, players bought for a fixed sum a game that was supposed to give them pleasure, rather as a reader buys a book from which they also expect the pleasure of reading. The so-called “Free to Play” game, that is, playable free of charge online, has upset this economic model by organising five user “retention” strategies that have proved their worth in gambling.
- FoMO (for Fear of Missing Out), or the fear of missing exceptional events;
- the scarcity effect (items intended to change the look of one’s avatar (known as cosmetic purchases), but also emoticons or the possibility of unlocking new actions in the game);
- motivation through uncertainty (Motivating Uncertainty Effect), including the famous lootboxes, boxes bought by the player that may or may not contain items regarded as valuable, raising ethical and legislative issues resolved differently from one country to another;
- loss aversion, based on the fact that it is more motivating to discover that one risks losing, for example, €30 than the possibility of winning the same sum;
- the sunk cost bias (“Sunk cost fallacy ”), based on the fact that the more a player spends small sums in a “Free To Play” game, the more they tend to stay in it for a long time and spend more in it.
Finally, this new model of games gives a central place to the visibility of the player, notably through platforms such as Twitch, thus exploiting the habits of social media users to its own advantage.
However, while gambling strategies make up most of the motivations of players of these games, they are most often marginal for video game players, who are driven by other motivations. But the game dynamics are increasingly designed to retain users with purchasing systems that lack basic safeguards and protections.
Alongside this evolution of gaming, gambling manufacturers are broadening their offering to games, obviously reserved for over-eighteens, that will look exactly the same, with the same graphics and interfaces, as those currently rated “12” (and therefore playable from the age of twelve), so that teenagers who have been familiar with these games since childhood will switch spontaneously to these gambling games at 18.
Cerulli-Harms, A. et al. (2020, July). Loot boxes in online games and their effect on consumers, in particular young consumers. Retrieved 25 September 2020 from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/652727/IPOL_STU(2020)652727_EN.pdf
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, doctor of psychology qualified to supervise research, member of the Academy of Technologies, and associate researcher at the University of Paris (CRPMS).
