CMPO - Gam(bl)ing 🎁

The Gam(bl)ing Conference: Thinking Outsides of the Loot Box 🎁

28–29 September 2026

Proceedings: https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/issue/view/70

Registration (deadline passed): http://tinyurl.com/thegamblingregister

Call for papers (deadline passed): https://tinyurl.com/thegamblingcfp

Gam(bl)ing Conference Programme

Day 1

Session 1 – Gaming and/or Gambling?

Aaron DRUMMOND, An updated meta-analysis of loot box engagement, problem gambling, and excessive gaming: Impacts of youth and risky engagement

Loot boxes are gambling-like mechanisms widely available in video games frequently purchasable for real-world money. Concerns have been raised they may be associated with problematic gambling behaviours. Previous meta-analyses have demonstrated a reliable association between problem gambling symptomatology and loot box spending. Here we replicate and extend these analyses with an updated meta-synthesis. We find that associations between loot box engagement and problem gambling symptoms are slightly larger than previously identified. Additionally, we examine two critical issues. First, we examine whether measures of risky engagement with loot boxes (e.g., chasing losses) show stronger associations to problem gambling symptoms than measures of spending on loot boxes alone. Second, we examine whether younger players show stronger associations between loot box engagement and problem gambling symptomatology. Confirming our hypotheses, we find that problem gambling symptoms are stronger predictors of risky engagement with loot boxes than spending on loot boxes alone. Concerningly, we also find that younger players typically show much stronger associations between problem gambling symptoms and loot box spending than older players. Taken together our results suggest robust associations between loot box engagement and problem gambling symptoms, and loot box engagement and excessive gaming behaviours, and that risky engagement appears to be a more important psychological construct to consider than spending alone. Results also suggest that young players are at greater risk than older players.  

Yaewon JIN, Are We Measuring What We Think We Are? Conceptual Confusion in Gaming Disorder Measurement

Gaming disorder recently became the first formal mental disorder tied to the use of technology. Although the ICD-11 lists it as distinct from gambling disorder—the only other named diagnosis under disorders due to addictive behaviours—their diagnostic descriptions share many similarities, and researchers have identified correlations between the two related problems. This complexity has arguably not been sufficiently considered in the relevant epidemiological methods.

This talk draws on our recent study (Adamkovič et al., 2026), which examined what we call the gambling hypothesis: whether gambling-related problems might be inadvertently recorded as gaming-related problems when surveys fail to distinguish the two activities. We reviewed the 500 most-cited publications. Survey materials were obtained for 13 studies, but only one explicitly instructed participants to exclude gambling. Among a further 358 full texts, approximately one-third made this distinction. We also asked English (EN; n = 312) and Slovak (SK; n =319) speakers how they understood the relevant terms. About half of the participants (EN = 48.7%/SK= 59.1%) interpreted ‘gambling’ to be ‘gaming’ as well. Together, these findings point to a systematic measurement error rooted in conceptual confusion that is largely linguistic, though it does not affect all languages alike.

The talk then closes by briefly extending this language game into its sociocultural context through the Korean case. Drawing on the range of related terms used in Korean, it considers how the same conceptual instability extends beyond academic measurement into regulation and policy.

Beth WELLS, The Matrix of Harms: An Examination of the Socio-Mechanical Factors Influencing Gambling

Video game gambling has been a subject of rising international concern across the last decade. It remains especially live in the UK, with the government debating the inclusion of loot boxes and random-chance purchases in children’s games, particularly as they relate to “addictive-by-design” philosophies (Gambling Commission, 2021; Woodhouse, 2024). It is also of interest in academia, with researchers studying typologies of gamblification (King et al., 2012; Zendle, 2020), motivations (King et al., 2009), and impacts on mental health and childhood development (Griffiths, 2017; Király et al., 2022).

This work facilitates understandings of the root causes of video game gambling and its consequences. It also permits the development of policy proposals designed to better protect players’ health and regulate against harmful practices in games likely to be accessed by children. However, attention towards the ontological qualities of gambling mechanics themselves remain lacking. Without critically examining how these mechanics function, socially spread, and become normalised, we cannot understand their ever-increasing popularity despite a similarly rising knowledge of the tactics used and risks associated with engagement. Likewise, we remain in the dark about how gambling mechanics leverage unrelated socio-mechanical systems to embed themselves not only as necessary features in a gamer’s mind, but as mechanics central to the game.

I seek to initiate this conversation through the development of a matrix of harms. The matrix is a taxonomy containing three axes, developed to account for prior works’ analyses of players’ reasons for gambling (Culbong et al., 2026; Greer et al., 2022) and making in-app purchases (Cai et al., 2022: 11-21; Hamari et al., 2016: 539-544), which often overlap in motivations. The first axis, public-private, asks how players engage with mechanics: is it executed or rewarded among others, such as global announcements for rare loot box drops? This category encompasses motivations like keeping up with friends, accumulating social capital, and self-expression through cosmetics. The second axis, internal-external, asks whether the mechanic’s efficacy is intrinsic or relies on social networks. For example, blind bags may be opened solo, but their hype depends on word-of-mouth and perceived value. This axis consider show mechanics come to be desirable: is it personal, like fear of missing out, or purely mechanical, such as gaining a competitive advantage? Finally, the third axis, tangible-intangible, examines how gambling is rewarded. Do players receive cash (or items tradable for cash), as in esports betting? Can winnings make a material difference to the player-character, such as granting power-ups? Or is the reward more abstract, if existent? This category asks what players hope to gain from gambling: whether they seek profit, real-world skill enhancement, just a new look, or something else entirely.

Take, for example, loot boxes. Generally, the rarer a drop, the more intricate and/or powerful it is (e.g. legendary skins in Overwatch (Blizzard, 2016) or mythic heroes in Kingshot (Century Games, 2025)). Loot boxes sit between internal and external, with highly variable implementation. Their efficacy benefits from external spread, with players sharing rare drops on social media or players witnessing another wearing a skin or using a power-up, and some games announce when players pull the rarest drops (for these reasons, loot boxes are also highly public despite normally being opened solo). However, they can be internal, especially in single-player games or where players seek rewards purely for personal satisfaction. Loot boxes are also broadly tangible, with rewards tending to be persistent (not temporary) and material (making a physical difference), though not entirely so, as rewards are (usually) not exchanged for anything of real-world value, outside of skin gambling and account sales.

Taxonomising loot boxes like this reveals their highly social, transitory nature. It is not always simply one user spending money until they pull something rare. Rather, it is a community of users, facilitated by internal and external social infrastructure, sharing their successes, near-misses, and admiration of others’ pulls in a constant cycle. This encourages others to seek the same low-probability success, perpetuating engagement with the mechanic and the normalisation of sunk cost.

While not particularly groundbreaking, this example demonstrates the matrix’s ability to highlight socio-mechanical interconnections, linking developers, gameplay environments, problematic mechanics, players, and wider (off-platform) social ecosystems together. It spotlights the interdependent relationship between variousactors which, in certain assemblages, can produce the type of harm we call gambling. The matrix therefore has significant potential to reconfigure the way that we consider and talk about the underlying infrastructure that facilitates, creates, promotes, and perpetuates gambling in video games. However, this is simply one rudimentary example of many, constrained by space and time. Future research should more thoroughly explore the specific roles played by different actors, and their effects upon both one another and the functioning of individual gambling mechanics.

Session 2 – Young People

Anne Mette THORHAUGE, Lootboxes as gateway drug: Findings from a two-wave longitudinal survey

Loot boxes are purchasable in-game items that provide randomized rewards, with players not knowing the specific value or content of the reward prior to purchase (Nielsen & Grabarczyk, 2019; Xiao et al., 2021). They have become an increasingly widespread monetization mechanism in free-to-play games, where they serve to incentivize repeated micro-transactions across mobile and PC gaming markets (Xiao & Henderson, 2024; Zendle et al., 2020). A growing body of research has raised concerns about loot boxes as a form of pseudo-gambling, particularly because they combine monetary expenditure and chance-based outcomes (Brock & Johnson, 2021; Jayemanne et al., 2021; King & Delfabbro, 2019; Macey & Hamari, 2019a; Macey & Hamari, 2019b; Xiao, 2022; Xiao & Henderson, 2024; Xiao et al., 2021; Zendle & Cairns, 2018). However, relatively few studies have been designed to examine whether loot box consumption predicts later gambling behaviour over time.

This paper addresses this gap through a two-wave longitudinal survey study of gaming, in-game spending, and gambling behaviour among Danish citizens aged 10-25 years. The study measures gameplay frequency, social configurations of play, in-game spending including loot box consumption, and participation in different forms of gambling across two timepoints: late spring 2024 and late spring 2025. Respondents were recruited through a stratified random sample from the Danish Civil Registration System, enabling statistical generalisability to the wider population. At the first timepoint, 4,771 respondents completed the full questionnaire. These respondents were contacted again one year later and asked to complete the same questionnaire, resulting in a final panel of 2,105 respondents who participated at both timepoints (Mean age = 17.2, standard deviation = 4.4, 1171/56 % females and 1034/44 % males). Survey data were further enriched with register data, allowing for a more nuanced assessment of key background variables, including socioeconomic background.

Because the majority of outcome variables were categorical, the data were analysed using ordinal logistic regression (Agresti, 2010). The analysis examined the extent to which loot box consumption at Time 1 predicted various forms of gambling at Time 2, while controlling for relevant background variables and gambling behaviour at Time 1. The findings indicate a clear and statistically significant relationship between loot box consumption and later gambling behaviour. However, the results also reveal important differences across gambling forms. Loot box consumption is most strongly associated with later online casino gambling (p = 0.001) and skin gambling (p = 0.029), whereas social media appear to be a stronger predictor of esports betting (p = 0.0002) and traditional sports betting (p = 0.0002). Moreover, the predictive power of loot box consumption overlaps substantially with key background variables, most notably age (18-21), gender (male), and prior gambling behaviour (autoregression).

The paper discusses these findings in relation to existing frameworks for understanding the relationship between digital gaming, gambling, and youth culture (Kirkeby, 2025; Thorhauge & Gregersen, 2019). In particular, the study indicates that the limited explanatory power of socioeconomic background, combined with the strong overlap between age, gender, and gaming and gambling patterns, suggests that loot box consumption and its association with later gambling should be understood less as a problem confined to socially vulnerable youth and more as a broader youth-cultural phenomenon. Whereas issues such as alcohol and drug use are often framed in terms of small groups of “youth at risk” these findings indicate that loot box-related gambling risks may constitute a more mainstream problem. Finally, the paper argues that the different patterns associated with different gambling forms can help identify the specific youth-cultural contexts in which problematic gambling practices emerge, thereby informing more targeted prevention strategies.

Yekun SUN, Gerda REITH & Heather WARDLE, Is It Gambling? Young Players’ Perceptions of Loot Boxes, Skin Gambling, and Risk in Mainland China (awarded the Best Student Paper Prize)

As some digital games increasingly combine play, payment, chance, and tradable virtual items, researchers have raised questions about where gaming ends and gambling begins. Loot boxes are in-game mechanisms that provide players with randomised virtual rewards, which may be obtained through gameplay, in-game currency, or real-money purchase (Xiao et al. 2022; Zendle and Cairns 2018). They have been described as gambling-like because some forms combine payment, chance, and uncertain rewards, although not all loot boxes are purchased directly with real-world money (Drummond and Sauer 2018; Zendle and Cairns 2018). Skin gambling refers to gambling or gambling-like practices in which cosmetic game items, or “skins”, are used as stakes, prizes, or objects of exchange through betting, case-opening, trading, or cash-out systems, often on third-party platforms (Macey and Hamari 2019; Wardle 2019). Existing studies have examined these practices in relation to gambling risk, digital item economies, and regulatory debate. Less attention has been paid to how young players themselves understand and compare these mechanisms, especially in non-Western gaming contexts.

The analysis focuses on how young players in mainland China perceive the gambling-like nature and possible risks of loot boxes and skin gambling, and how they draw boundaries between play, spending, gambling, and harm. It draws on selected findings from an ongoing doctoral project on gambling-like features in digital games in China. The wider study uses mixed methods, including a survey of 2,044 university students aged 18–24 in mainland China and semi-structured qualitative interviews with young people who had experience of loot boxes or skin gambling. Data were collected between September and December 2024. Interview data were analysed using thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke (2006). Survey data were analysed descriptively for the findings presented here. In this presentation, survey findings are used to situate the scale and patterning of engagement, while qualitative interviews provide the main basis for interpreting how players make sense of these practices.

Nearly all interview participants recognised gambling-like qualities in loot boxes and compared them with other chance-based gambling activities, such as lotteries and prize draws. They identified several features that made loot boxes feel gambling-like, including uncertainty over outcomes, repeated spending, and the pursuit of rare rewards. However, recognising these gambling-like features did not necessarily mean that participants viewed loot boxes as equivalent to conventional gambling. Some participants acknowledged their gambling-like nature but considered them less risky because the stakes were lower, the rewards remained within the game, or the activity was perceived as legal and familiar. Others went further by framing loot boxes as a form of legalised or contained gambling that might substitute for, or reduce interest in, more harmful forms of gambling. These accounts resonate with qualitative work showing that players can recognise parallels between loot boxes and gambling while still distinguishing them from conventional gambling through references to game design, perceived harm, institutional definitions, and everyday player experience (Hodge et al. 2022; Rolando and Wardle 2024).

Skin gambling was more often viewed as closer to gambling because it involved tradable skins, third-party platforms, case-opening sites, and the possibility of profit or loss. Interview participants described skins not only as cosmetic items, but also as objects with exchange value, status value, and speculative potential. Participants’ understanding of third-party case-opening sites varied: some described them as gambling-like and legally problematic in mainland China, while others saw them as credible because the promised skins were delivered. This suggests that successful item delivery could make gambling-like platforms appear trustworthy. Skin gambling was therefore connected with risk-taking, investment-like thinking, peer influence, and attempts to “win back” previous losses. These accounts echo Wardle’s (2019) discussion of skin gambling as part of the convergence between gaming and gambling.

Risk was understood in broader terms than formal gambling classification. Interview participants raised concerns about overspending, repeated draws or case openings, chasing rare rewards, attempts to recover previous losses, regret after spending, and doubts about whether probability systems were transparent or fair. Loot box risks were often softened by their connection to ordinary game progression, collection, character improvement, and social display. Skin gambling risks were more directly linked to tradable item value, third-party platforms, speculation, and the possibility of profit or loss. These perceptions were shaped by the Chinese gaming context, including youth protection policies, probability disclosure rules, payment practices, and local meanings attached to digital items and in-game spending.

By focusing on perception, this paper contributes to games research by showing how gambling-like mechanics are interpreted through everyday play, consumption, social experience, and regulatory context. It argues that the key question is not only whether loot boxes or skin gambling should be defined as gambling, but how young players learn to recognise, minimise, justify, or question their risks within specific cultural and platform environments.

Amy LINKLATER, Digital Gaming/Gambling Harms and Students: Financial Literacy and the Transition to Adulthood

Digital games are now deeply embedded in the everyday lives of young people. Increasingly, however, these environments incorporate ‘gambling-style’ features including loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and other random reward mechanisms (RRMs) that blur the boundaries between digital gaming and gambling (Czakó et al. 2025; Harris et al. 2025; Rolando and Wardle 2024; Sanmartín et al. 2025; Thavamuni 2025; Wieczorek et al. 2023; Yin and Xiao 2022). RRMs refer to any in-game system in which a player meets an eligibility condition, such as completing gameplay tasks, spending in-game currency, or making a monetary payment, and receives a reward determined by a randomised process (Nielsen and rabarczyk 2019; Xiao 2022). This convergence has attracted growing concern from policymakers, educators, and researchers because, while RRMs are often argued to resemble conventional gambling in both design and experience, they largely fall outside existing gambling regulation across most jurisdictions and therefore remain widely accessible to young people with fewer formal safeguards (Xiao 2022).

While existing research has largely focused on the psychological and regulatory dimensions of RRMs, comparatively less attention has been paid to players' own perspectives and experiences, or to the everyday social and spatial contexts through which these mechanisms are encountered. Although emerging work has begun to address this in relation to children and families (Ash et al. 2022; Mills et al. 2024a, 2024b), older teenagers and Higher Education (HE) students remain a significantly under-researched population. This gap is particularly significant as the transition into HE is often a pivotal life stage marked by new legal and social freedoms, increasing financial independence, and reduced parental oversight. For many HE students, engagement with RRMs may uniquely coincide with navigating independent living, budgeting, and wider cost-of-living pressures for the first time, conditions under which such engagement may be especially consequential.

This paper presents early-stage doctoral research, conducted as part of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project in collaboration with the Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust (Ygam), that seeks to address these gaps. Situating the project within Student Geographies and Digital Geographies, the research will draw on qualitative semi-structured interviews with UK HE students and university professional services staff to explore how HE students understand, experience, and engage with random reward mechanisms (RRMs), within the specific everyday spaces, routines, and transitions of student life. It also examines how young people develop, or in some cases lack, the financial and digital literacy needed to navigate these systems, alongside the social and economic implications these practices may have in their everyday lives.

As early-stage doctoral research, this paper does not report empirical findings. Instead, it presents an emerging review and mapping of scholarship on the convergence between digital gaming and gambling, alongside the conceptual and methodological approach currently being developed for this project. I will highlight the ways in which geographical approaches offer a productive yet underutilised lens for understanding RRMs, drawing attention to the everyday social and spatial contexts through which people encounter and experience them. In doing so, the project aims to generate insights relevant to digital and financial literacy, harm prevention, and student support, informing Ygam's University and Student Engagement Programme through evidence-based recommendations that support healthy digital engagement and student wellbeing.

Cassandra E. GRINSTEAD, David C. R. KERR, Connor PUNSALAN & Jaedyn ANTLE, Risk Factors For Loot Box Engagement in U.S. College Students

Loot boxes are a form of monetization in video games that are frequently associated with problem gambling and problem gaming (Garea et al. 2021; Yokomitsu et al. 2021). Therefore, identifying both unique risk factors for loot box purchasing, and shared risk factors with gambling and gaming will be beneficial to prevention efforts. However, there is limited research on risk factors for loot box purchasing in the U.S. among college students, with studies focusing on non-student adults or adolescents (King et al. 2020; Zendle et al. 2019). Throughout the literature several risk factors have been identified across different populations. Psychological distress, loneliness, risk taking, and impulsivity have positive associations with loot box purchasing (Drummond et al. 2022a; Sirola et al. 2023, Garrett et al. 2023; Wardle & Zendle, 2021). A single study examined resilience as it relates to loot box purchasing (Sirola et al. 2023). These demonstrate the need for further research examining risk and protective factors further.

Objectives. This study measured five unique risk and protective factors for risky loot box purchasing for college students: impulsivity, risk-taking, depressive symptoms, loneliness, and resilience. These five risk factors were tested after accounting for other risky behaviors including problem gaming, problem gambling, and alcohol use disorder symptoms. This study also conducted exploratory analyses on whether the effect of these risk factors on risky loot box purchasing was moderated by gender.

Methods. College students (n = 251) in the United States completed an in-person survey and laboratory risk-taking task. The risk and protective factors were measured using the Participant Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8; Kroenke et al., 2001), UCLA Three Item Loneliness Scale (TILS: Hughes et al. 2004), Short UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale (UPPS-P; Cyders et al. 2014), Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC; Connor and Davidson 2003), and the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al. 2002). The primary outcome variable was risky loot box engagement, as measured by the Risky Loot Box Index (RLI; Brooks and Clark 2019). Three other scales measured risky behavior: the Internet Gaming Disorder Short Form (IGD; Pontes and Griffiths 2015), Problem Gaming Severity Index (PGSI; Holtgraves 2009), and Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT; Saunders et al. 1993). Participants also answered questions related to demographics, finances, and gaming habits. Finally, to inform future studies, descriptive data were collected on when, where, and how much participants spent on loot boxes.

Analytic plan. Linear regressions were conducted to test the effect of each risk factor after adjusting for age and gender. If a risk factor was a significant predictor, it was then tested again after accounting for other risky behaviors including problem alcohol use, problem gambling, and internet gaming disorder symptoms. Exploratory analyses were conducted to examine gender as a moderator for significant predictors.

Participant Characteristics and Gaming History. Most of the sample was white (65.3%, n = 164) and cis-gender male (58.9%, n = 148). The sample was primarily made up of first-year college students (M = 19.4 years-old, SD = 1.43). They either received psychology course research credit (80%, n = 201) or were paid $20 (20%, n = 48). The majority of participants reported spending $0/month (36.6%, n = 92), or less than $10/month (31.8%, n = 80) on loot boxes. Participants also reported which games they had purchased the most loot boxes from, common answers included Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017), Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment, 2016), Roblox (Roblox Corporation, 2006), and Apex Legends (Respawn Entertainment, 2019). Most participants stated that the first time they purchased a loot box was before (55.7%, n = 140) or during high school (33.4%, n = 84) whereas few (3.5%, n = 9) did so after high school. The most frequently played genre of the last 12-months was “Action” (n = 155, 61.2% reported they play “Often”).

Results. All five risk factors were tested using separate linear models. In the primary models, depression symptoms (β = .193, p = 0.003) and impulsivity (β = .163, p = .02) were significant predictors of risky loot box engagement. However, neither was significant after accounting for other risky behaviors. Loneliness, risk-taking, and resilience were not significant predictors. Additional Pearson’s correlations showed that risky loot box purchasing was associated with problem gaming (r = .40, p < .001) and problem gambling (r = .24, p < .001). Exploratory analyses did not support interactions between gender and either depressive symptoms or impulsivity on risky loot box engagement.

Conclusion. This study found evidence of two risk factors for risky loot box engagement: depression symptoms and impulsivity. Neither uniquely predicted loot box engagement beyond associations shared with related problem outcomes, such as problem gaming. Future research should investigate potential social risk and protective factors such as specific game genres and social reasons for loot box purchasing.

Session 3 – European Perspectives

Aphra KERR, Paul KITCHIN, Tugce BIDAV, Eamonn SULLIVAN & Erin MCEVOY, Gamblification, Professional Complicity and Regulatory Failures in Mediated Live Sport on the island of Ireland.

The boundaries between digital games, gambling and sport are increasingly blurred, especially as digital games have adopted some of the monetisation strategies of gambling, and gambling has become more prominent in Western markets as a sponsor of some live sports, especially those with large television audiences.

The term ‘gamblification’ emerged from gambling studies (McMullen and Miller, 2008; Hing, 2023) to capture the ‘colonisalisation of sport’ by gambling advertising, promotion and marketing, and the industry has proved adept at adjusting its strategies to take advantage of emerging media platforms and practices. Macey and Hamari (2024) distinguish between affective and effective gamblification, with the former focusing on cultural values and signifiers of gambling, and the latter on gambling mechanics, activities, and games.

Exposure to gambling marketing is listed as one of the key factors in the increased normalisation and rise in gambling-related harms in some societies (Hilbrecht et al., 2020). However, we need to move beyond exposure to understand contemporary gamblification. Formal explicit advertising is only one small part of contemporary marketing. In a multi-screen networked media culture, exposure must be understood in the context of platform infrastructures designed to track user attention and drive reach and engagement.

The gamblification of sport is most obvious in transnational mediatised sports, where specific sports, such as men’s association football (i.e. soccer), have seen increasing levels of explicit and implicit marketing of gambling services across television and online platforms (Columb et al., 2023; Crawford et al., 2024). With the increasing platformisation of television and the entry of over-the-top television streaming services, competition for live sports rights has intensified, bringing new production logics, datafication, and policy implications (Hutchins et al., 2019). Recent studies have found that gambling marketing pursues a cross/multi-media strategy with emerging social media strategies including the use of celebrities and user targeting by gender (Lyons et al., 2023; Pitt et al., 2024; Petrovskaya et al., 2026).

This paper reports on part of a two-year project on gambling marketing, sport and young people (YouGaMSI). We examine the gamblification of a sample of live sporting events across broadcast, streaming and social media channels in two different countries. We focus on Ireland, both North and South of the border (Ireland and Northern Ireland from here on). These jurisdictions provide distinct media and gambling regulatory domains but have a shared sporting and media culture. They also share a history of legalised sports betting.

Our selection of sports was informed by findings from focus groups with young people which explored their media sports consumption (Kitchin et al., 2024). We then sampled programmes from several relevant sporting competitions, and we conducted a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of gambling marketing strategies in 22.5 hours of live sports programmes across 4 public service and 4 commercial broadcast and streaming television services in both jurisdictions. We also examined 114 posts and 79 reels on the Instagram accounts of seven major gambling brands during these sporting events. The content was gathered in 2023/24.

Gambling marketing was most prevalent in international men's darts, football and horse racing programmes suggesting a gendered strategy and that some media and sporting organisations are more open to these brand relationships. We found that some broadcast and streaming sports programmes displayed a very wide range, high volume and frequency of direct gambling marketing at all times of day, across a variety of channels (see Table 1). Professional journalists and both commercial and public service media channels were complicit in the visual and textual promotion of gambling services, and the reuse of clips in other programmes. Responsible gambling messaging was either absent or difficult to read, and these messages reinforced gambling as an individual consumer choice and risk.

Industry Instagram accounts reinforced the television sports strategy by focusing on a narrow range of men's sports and circulating highlight clips from the televised programmes. Some accounts also produced significant indirect informational and entertainment content, including quizzes and interviews (see Table 2). These accounts provide a longer tail of affective and platformed engagement and use Instagram ‘native’ strategies to build brand familiarity with gamblers and non-gamblers alike (Kerr et al., 2024). Across our data sample, we identified affective strategies aimed at socialising gambling brands, normalising gambling in sport and cross-promoting gambling games.

Sports and animal betting are amongst the most popular forms of gambling for men in Ireland and increasingly take place online (Ó Ceallaigh et al. 2023). At-risk and disordered gambling prevalence rates in Ireland reflect levels across Great Britain, but levels are higher in Northern Ireland (Department for Communities, 2025). Both Ireland and Northern Ireland have low betting duties, and neither, at the time of the research, had a public health policy for treating gambling-related harms. Ireland established a gambling regulator in March 2025, and gambling advertising restrictions are being introduced for licensees, but ‘incidental’ advertising is not restricted (GRAI, 2026). Professional journalism practices are not discussed. Gambling regulation in Northern Ireland is a devolved matter for the Stormont Executive but regulation remains outdated. Current regulations will not reduce exposure to incidental gambling marketing in international football or darts programmes received by consumers on the island, or indirect and affective/emotive forms of gamblification across social media platforms.

The gamblification of mediated live sport provides insights into gamblification strategies in digital games. Regulatory changes in Europe have focused on effective gamblification mechanisms, mandatory disclosures and increasing the age rating of games with random rewards to 16 years. These are important since random rewards are a core monetisation strategy in digital sports games played by many young people, especially boys. However, digital games are also cultural practices, and affective gamblification strategies are equally important to understand. Affective gamblification strategies are often indirect, produced by a range of companies and influencers, and they circulate both within and around games. National and regional gambling and digital games regulations need to better understand these affective tactics and the international network of producers who are complicit in their production.

Abel NOGUEIRA LÓPEZ, Joaquín GONZÁLEZ-CABRERA, Aránzazu BASTERRA-GONZÁLEZ, Susana JIMÉNEZ-MURCIA, Antonio RIAL-BOUBETA & Juan Manuel MACHIMBARRENA, Loot Box Purchasing in Adolescents: Three-Wave Trajectories, Transitions, and Prospective Associations with Online Gambling Behavior

INTRODUCTION: Loot boxes (LBs) are chance-based microtransactions embedded in videogames and have attracted sustained attention because they share several structural features with gambling, including monetary expenditure, uncertainty of outcome, and rewards with perceived or real value (Drummond et al., 2020; Spicer et al., 2022). Their presence in games used by minors raises specific public-health and regulatory concerns, since adolescents may be exposed to gambling-like reinforcement mechanisms before legal access to traditional gambling. Prior evidence has consistently linked LB purchasing with problem gambling, online gambling and problematic gaming, but most studies remain cross-sectional, and longitudinal research with minors is still scarce (González-Cabrera et al., 2022, 2023; Montiel et al., 2022). Two-wave studies suggest that LB purchasing can be persistent and prospectively associated with online gambling; however, evidence based on three or more waves is limited. This study therefore examines LB purchasing in Spanish adolescents across three assessment waves, focusing on prevalence, longitudinal trajectories, transitions, temporal dependence and prospective associations with online gambling behaviour, Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), and Online Gambling Disorder (OGD). METHODS: A prospective longitudinal school-based study was conducted in Valencia, Spain, using a non-probabilistic incidental sample. The final analytical sample consisted of 667 adolescents with complete LB purchasing data across three waves, assessed approximately six months apart (55.6% boys; age range: 11–17 years; mean age at T3 = 14.35, SD = 1.25). LB purchasing was assessed for the previous 12 months at T1 and for the previous 6 months at T2 and T3, matching the inter-wave interval. Online gambling behaviour was assessed with a dichotomous screening item; OGD symptoms were assessed with the Online Gambling Disorder Questionnaire among respondents reporting online gambling, and IGD was assessed using the Spanish version of the IGD9-SF. Analyses included point prevalence estimates, three-wave trajectory classification, transition matrices, incidence, remission and persistence rates, McNemar tests, Cohen’s kappa, a first-order Markov GEE model, and relative risks (RR) for prospective associations with subsequent outcomes. RESULTS: LB purchasing was common and relatively stable across follow-up. Point prevalence was 27.7% at T1, 32.2% at T2 and 29.4% at T3. Marked sex differences were observed at all waves: among boys, prevalence ranged from 44.7% to 49.1%, whereas among girls it ranged from 6.4% to 11.1%. Trajectory analyses showed substantial heterogeneity. Sustained non-purchasing was the most frequent pattern (56.2%), while 16.6% of participants reported persistent purchasing across all three waves. Persistent purchasing was much more frequent among boys than girls (27.0% vs. 3.7%), whereas sustained non-purchasing was more frequent among girls (82.8% vs. 35.0%). Transition analyses indicated moderate temporal stability. From T1 to T2, incidence among non-purchasers was 14.3%, remission among purchasers was 21.1%, and persistence reached 78.9%. From T2 to T3, incidence was 12.4%, remission increased to 34.9%, and persistence declined to 65.1%, suggesting that the behaviour is stable but not immutable. Cohen’s kappa values were moderate (0.62 for T1–T2; 0.54 for T2–T3; 0.55 for T1–T3). In the first-order Markov GEE model, prior purchasing was the strongest predictor of subsequent purchasing (OR = 11.34; 95% CI [7.93, 16.20]), and girls had substantially lower odds of purchasing than boys (OR = 0.27; 95% CI [0.20, 0.38]). LB purchasing was also prospectively associated with subsequent online gambling. In the total sample, T1 purchasing predicted higher risk of online gambling at T2 (RR = 2.38; 95% CI [1.51, 3.75]), and T2 purchasing predicted higher risk at T3 (RR = 1.80; 95% CI [1.07, 3.03]). The T1–T3 estimate also indicated increased risk, although with weaker evidence. Sex-stratified analyses showed increased risk among both boys and girls in the T1–T2 transition, while the T2–T3 association remained clearer among boys. For clinical indicators of IGD and OGD, point estimates were generally positive but confidence intervals were wide and often included the null value, indicating limited precision and insufficient evidence for firm conclusions. CONCLUSIONS: LB purchasing in adolescence appears to be prevalent, sex-differentiated, and temporally dependent. The findings support the interpretation of LB purchasing as a stable behavioural risk marker and show a prospective association with later online gambling involvement. However, the results do not establish a causal gateway mechanism, and evidence regarding clinical IGD/OGD indicators remains inconclusive because of low case frequency and limited precision. These findings reinforce the need for prevention, systematic monitoring of digital spending practices among minors, and regulatory safeguards for chance-based monetisation mechanics in videogames.

Jani KINNUNEN, From Gambling to Gam(bl)ing: Population-Level Evidence of Changing Play Cultures in Finland

Research on the convergence of gambling and digital gaming has largely focused on specific gambling-like products, such as loot boxes (Zendle & Bowden-Jones 2019), skin gambling (Macey & Hamari 2019), and social casino games (Gainsbury et al. 2016), and on their associations with gambling-related harm and problematic gaming (Derevensky & Griffiths 2019; King et al. 2015; Siste et al. 2025). Recent reviews have also emphasized the need for more longitudinal evidence and broader conceptual approaches to understand how gambling and gaming are becoming intertwined (Kim & King 2020; Siste et al. 2025; Hing et al. 2025). However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to whether the convergence between gambling and gaming is accompanied by wider changes in population-level participation patterns and gaming cultures.

This paper argues that the Finnish case suggests a broader transformation than merely the emergence of gambling-like mechanics in digital games. Over the last decade, Finland has witnessed a significant shift in the centre of gravity of monetized play. Traditional gambling participation has declined, digital gaming has become increasingly widespread, and new forms of gambling-like digital play have simultaneously become normalized (Kinnunen et al. 2018; Kinnunen et al. 2024). Rather than examining gambling and gaming as separate activities with increasingly blurred boundaries, we suggest that they should be understood as interconnected forms of monetized play characterized by fluid boundaries between currencies, risks, rewards, and meanings.

The analysis draws on the Finnish Player Barometer studies; nationally representative surveys conducted regularly between 2009 and 2024 (see Kinnunen et al.2024). The surveys cover participation in digital games, gambling, esports, social casino games, loot box purchasing, and monetary spending on digital gaming among other things. The Finnish data reveal a remarkable long-term trend. Prior to 2015, gambling participation was more prevalent than digital gaming participation. In 2015, the prevalence of these activities reached near parity: 75.9% of Finns aged 10–75 had gambled at least occasionally, while 75.0% had played digital games. After this turning point, digital gaming overtook gambling and the gap has widened steadily. By 2024, 81.1% of Finns played digital games at least occasionally, whereas only 64.0% participated in gambling (Kinnunen et al. 2024).

At the same time, monetized forms of digital play have become increasingly common(Kinnunen 2020). In Finland, 8.0% of the population report spending money on loot boxes and 5.8% report playing social casino games. The prevalence of loot box spending already exceeds participation in some traditional forms of gambling, such as horse race betting (6.3%) (Kinnunen et al. 2024). Although traditional lotteries, sports betting, and casino-style gambling remain more common overall, these findings suggest that gambling-like forms of digital play are no longer marginal phenomena but have become part of mainstream gaming culture.

From the perspective of cultural game studies and interpretivist gambling studies, these developments cannot be understood solely through prevalence estimates or by asking whether particular products meet legal definitions of gambling. Games and gambling are socio-cultural practices embedded in changing technological, economic, and regulatory contexts. The meanings attached to money, currencies, rewards, and risk are also changing (Kinnunen 2026). Digital games increasingly employ multiple currencies, microtransactions, random reward mechanisms, and virtual goods that possess both symbolic and, in some cases, monetary value (Luton 2013; Wardle 2019; Kinnunen 2020). Consequently, distinctions between “real money,” “play money,” and “in-game currencies” have become increasingly difficult to maintain analytically (Kinnunen et al. 2016; Kinnunen 2026).

The Finnish evidence therefore points towards a broader reorganization of play cultures. The issue is not simply that gambling mechanics have entered digital games or that the boundaries between gambling and gaming are becoming blurred. Rather, the relative importance of different forms of monetized play appears to be changing at the population level. The centre of gravity of participation has shifted from traditional gambling towards digital gaming environments that increasingly incorporate gambling-like practices and monetization strategies.

This finding has important implications for research, regulation, and harm prevention. Existing policy frameworks often treat gambling and digital gaming as separate domains governed by different conceptual, regulatory, and institutional arrangements. However, emerging international research increasingly recognizes that gambling-like gaming and gaming-like gambling form a rapidly evolving ecosystem that may expose players to novel forms of risk and harm (Siste et al. 2025; Hing et al. 2025; Mattinen et al. 2025). The Finnish case suggests that understanding these developments requires moving beyond individual products, such as loot boxes, and towards analyses of broader cultural transformations in monetized play.

By combining long-term population-level evidence with perspectives from cultural game studies and gambling studies, this paper contributes to ongoing debates on gaming-gambling, or gam(bl)ing, convergence by demonstrating that changes in participation patterns themselves deserve greater theoretical and policy attention. Finland may offer an early indication of how gaming cultures evolve when traditional gambling declines while digital gaming and gambling-like forms of monetized play become increasingly central features of everyday play.

Lowie BRADT, Eva GROSEMANS, Bieke ZAMAN, Maya GEUDENS, Bart SOENENS & Rozane DE COCK (remote), Reciprocal associations between gambling-like elements in the video gaming ecosystem, problematic gaming and online gambling: a longitudinal study among adolesents

Over the past decade, video games started including elements that resemble gambling. These gambling-like elements can be situated at distinct levels of the video gaming ecosystem (see Grosemans et al. 2024): mechanics within video games (loot boxes and prize wheels offering randomised rewards), entire video game genres built around gambling simulations (social casino games), and activities around video games (watching loot box or gambling livestreams). Academics have argued, on theoretical grounds, that these elements are risky, because they may lower the threshold for underage real-money gambling (Grosemans et al. 2023) and may foster problematic engagement with video games. Cross-sectional research has consistently demonstrated an overlap between engagement with these elements, problematic gaming, and underage gambling (see, e.g., Zendle 2020; Zendle and Cairns 2018; Zendle, Meyer, and Over 2019) but provides little insight into whether one tends to precede the other. While some longitudinal studies exist (see Brooks and Clark 2023; Dussault et al. 2017; Grosemans et al. 2025b), several gaps remain.

First, longitudinal studies have typically examined a single type of gambling-like element (particularly loot boxes) in isolation, leaving open whether elements at different levels of the ecosystem have different implications over time. Second, with few exceptions (Brooks and Clark 2023, among young adults), most existing work has modelled effects in one direction, with engagement predicting later gambling or gaming problems, without testing whether problematic gaming and online gambling reciprocally predict subsequent engagement. This is critical to detect downward cycles of gambling-like engagement and online gambling. Third, prior studies have not always accounted for potential confounders.

The present study addresses these gaps by examining the longitudinal, reciprocal and concurrent associations between engagement with gambling-like elements at different levels of the video gaming ecosystem, problematic gaming and online gambling in a three-wave panel study of Flemish adolescents, while controlling for potential confounders. Engagement with gambling-like elements is disaggregated into elements situated within video games (opening free loot boxes, buying loot boxes with real money, selling loot box items, and spinning prize wheels), as entire video game genres (spending money in social casino games), and around video games (watching loot box and gambling streams). These three dimensions, together with problematic gaming and online gambling, are modelled as influencing one another over time.

Data come from three annual self-report survey waves (baseline winter 2021–2022) of a Flemish secondary school cohort recruited in 12 schools. The analytic sample comprises N = 1832 adolescents who participated in at least two waves (M age = 13.64 years, SD = 1.52, at baseline; 46% boys). Engagement with gambling-like elements was measured with frequency items for the 7 activities above; problematic gaming with the validated Dutch version of the Gaming Disorder Scale for Adolescents (GADIS-A; Grosemans et al. 2025a; Paschke, Austermann, and Thomasius 2020); and online gambling with a monetary-gambling frequency inventory. Associations were estimated in a latent change model with sociodemographic characteristics and parental mediation of gaming as time-varying controls, in line with earlier work on this cohort (see Bradt et al. 2025); non-significant cross-lagged paths were trimmed in a final model.

The various forms of gambling-like engagement, online gambling, and problematic gaming co-occurred within waves. Over and above this concurrent overlap, the model also revealed small-to-moderate directional effects across waves. The most consistent were the paths from problematic gaming to gambling-like engagement: higher problematic gaming significantly predicted subsequent increases in within-game and around-game engagement (β = .09–.13). In the gateway direction, around-game engagement predicted subsequent increases in online gambling (β = .13). Within-game engagement as a composite score had no significant prospective effect on online gambling or problematic gaming, although buying loot boxes did in supplementary item-level analyses. All paths remained significant after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and parental mediation of gaming.

Modelling reciprocal change across three waves, with controls for third variables, moves beyond the largely cross-sectional and single-direction evidence available so far. The study thereby offers novel insights relative to prior work and adds a layer to previously published findings from the same data collection (see Bradt et al. 2024, 2025; Geudens et al. 2026; Grosemans et al. 2023, 2024, 2025b). These findings suggest that engagement with gambling-like elements, online gambling and problematic gaming may reinforce one another over time and across different layers of the gaming ecosystem, rather than developing in isolation.

Session 4 – Specific Games

Francisco J. SANMARTÍN, How do players feel about the removal of Loot Boxes? The case of Brawl Stars

Loot boxes (LBs) have become a central feature of many contemporary video games, despite ongoing concerns about their similarities to gambling. In response to these concerns, some developers have removed LBs from their games, raising important questions about how such changes affect players’ experiences. This presentation examines the case of Brawl Stars (BS), where the removal of LBs generated contrasting reactions within the player community. Drawing on 662 Google Play Store reviews selected from a dataset of 9,697 comments, the presentation explores players’ perceptions using thematic analysis. The findings reveal that most players viewed the removal of LBs negatively, highlighting the loss of the excitement associated with opening rewards and the perception that game progression became slower and more expensive. Other recurring themes included the belief that the game lost part of its identity, became less accessible, and reduced players’ motivation to continue playing, with some users reporting that they had ultimately abandoned the game. Although a smaller proportion of players supported the change or expressed mixed opinions, these perspectives were considerably less frequent. By discussing the Brawl Stars case, this presentation highlights the complex role that gambling-like mechanics play in shaping player experience. Beyond their monetization function, LBs appear to influence enjoyment, engagement, and perceptions of game design, offering insights for ongoing debates on responsible game design and the regulation of gambling-like mechanics.

Harshdeep MANGAT, Tradable skins, microtransactions and gambling: Counter-Strike as a case study of regulatory failure in anticipating emerging digital economies

Tradable items in video games, largely comprising skins and cosmetics, have developed into fully functional marketplaces operating on many of the same principles as regular financial markets. These markets operate entirely around third-party websites and community-driven exchanges using established fiat currencies for exchange, consequently assigning monetary values to these tradable assets. Over time, tradable skins have expanded beyond their intended use and have been used as tokens to facilitate unregulated gambling, speculative assets comparable to stocks, and in some cases, the laundering or storage of illicitly acquired wealth.

The bulk of academic literature and discourse around microtransactions has focused on loot boxes. However, freely tradable microtransactions pose equally problematic challenges that have not been explored as extensively. Where Counter-Strike serves as a useful case study is that it contains one of the better-established loot box ecosystems in gaming with a highly developed market for tradable skins that has become one of the biggest facilitators of mainstream skin gambling. The video game also allows users to acquire such skins from many creative gambling-like mechanisms. Overall, Counter-Strike has created multiple avenues through which individuals, including underage users, can participate in a range of problematic behaviours with minimal to no regulatory oversight.

Using Counter-Strike 2 as a case study, this presentation will discuss how regulators have struggled to anticipate the socioeconomic implications of emerging digital economies. The presentation will explore factors that contributed to these regulatory gaps, what actions and interventions could have mitigated them, and discuss the lessons this case offers for addressing future developments in such digital economies and novel forms of video game-related online gambling.

Zixuan ZHU, Cashing Out: Liquidity-Based Gamblification and Market Governance in Video Games

Gaming-gambling convergence has become an important concern across game studies, gambling studies, and regulatory debates. Existing research has examined loot boxes, gacha, skin gambling, problem gambling, and the legal classification of random rewards in considerable depth. This paper focuses on a specific but under-theorised dimension of this debate: cash-out. Here, cash-out refers not only to direct withdrawal into real money, but also to the broader market processes through which random rewards, virtual items, skins, in-game currencies, and accounts become tradable and convertible into economic value. The paper asks two questions: RQ1: How do secondary markets create cash-out possibilities for random rewards in video games? RQ2: How can liquidity controls, inspired by anti-speculation mechanisms in financial markets, help govern gambling-like game economies? The study is not tied to a single jurisdictional definition of gambling. Instead, it develops a cross- jurisdictional policy framework intended to inform consumer-protection and gambling-regulatory debates in contexts where transferability and real-world monetary value affect the treatment of random-reward systems.

This paper does not treat cash-out as a necessary condition or primary source of gambling-related harm, but it is a crucial mechanism through which random rewards acquire exchange value, speculative value, and market-mediated risk. Paid loot boxes are linked to problem gambling regardless of whether their contents can be cashed out (Zendle et al. 2020); cash-out is therefore not a necessary condition of harm. It remains, however, a meaningful and under-researched lever for limiting the speculative, market-mediated dimension of gamblification. Loot boxes and gacha systems can be gambling-like because they involve paid chance-based outcomes. However, their gambling-like character is intensified when the resulting rewards circulate through liquid markets. Under these conditions, virtual rewards are no longer merely consumable play objects or signs of in-game status. They can become asset-like commodities whose value depends on scarcity, resale expectations, market demand, and the imagined judgments of other market participants.

This argument builds on several strands of existing scholarship. Research on loot boxes and gacha has highlighted the psychological and structural similarities between random reward systems and gambling, including their relationship to problem gambling and legal debates over "money or money's worth" (Drummond and Sauer 2018; Zendle and Cairns 2018; Xiao and Henderson 2024). Studies of virtual economies and real-money trading have shown that virtual assets can accumulate authentic economic value through platform-based and external markets (Castronova 2001; Heeks 2010; Lehdonvirta 2009). Research on speculation further suggests that gambling and financial speculation can converge when participants act on uncertainty, resale expectations, short-term price movements, and expectations about how other actors will value an asset (Arthur et al. 2016; Keynes 1936; Lee et al. 2023). More recent research shows that paid loot boxes with transferable content remain present on Steam and can possess real-world monetary value (Xiao and Henderson 2024), while Counter-Strike skins have also been analysed as high- volatility alternative digital assets with substantial historical market returns (Reichenbach 2025). Yet these insights remain fragmented across disciplines, leaving cash-out unexamined as a liquidity continuum across the wider digital games ecosystem.

Drawing on market microstructure and liquidity theory, the sociology of assetization, and financial approaches to speculation control (Birch and Muniesa 2020; Kyle 1985; O'Hara 1995), this paper develops a liquidity-based approach to gamblification. Cash-out is conceptualised not as a binary legal condition, but as a continuum shaped by six dimensions adapted from the liquidity dimensions of financial markets—transferability, priceability, tradability, transaction speed, market depth, and real-money convertibility—each an observable and, in principle, measurable attribute of a given game market. From this perspective, the risks of random reward systems escalate when game assets become highly liquid, rapidly tradable, and subject to speculative expectations.

Methodologically, this paper adopts a comparative typological approach. It constructs a typology of cash-out channels in contemporary gaming by comparing prominent cases selected to span contrasting market structures and degrees of liquidity: skin and item markets in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive/Counter-Strike 2 (Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment 2012; Valve 2023) and Dota 2 (Valve 2013); gold trading and service-based real-money trading in World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004); lower-liquidity account-based markets surrounding League of Legends (Riot Games 2009); and grey-market account trading in gacha games. These cases illustrate different cash-out channels, including platform-mediated trading, internal market systems, third-party item marketplaces, and account trading. Comparing cases across the six dimensions above, the typology enables graduated distinctions between degrees of cash-out, rather than treating game economies as simply gambling or non-gambling.

By mapping these channels comparatively, the paper shows how cash-out emerges through different configurations of market infrastructure rather than through direct monetary conversion alone. Therefore, the governance of gambling-like game economies should complement probability disclosure and categorical legal restrictions with more direct attention to market liquidity. Financial anti-speculation mechanisms offer useful regulatory analogies. Practical interventions include trading cooldowns, limits on transaction velocity, repeated-resale caps, position limits for high-value digital assets, and targeted structural friction applied to secondary markets tied to paid random rewards. The paper concludes that liquidity control aims not to eradicate player economies entirely, but to diminish the structural conditions under which random rewards transform into highly liquid, speculative, and potentially exploitative assets.

Timothy MERRITT & Daniel CERMAK-SASSENRATH (remote), How Do Players Experience Win/Loss Patterns? An In-The-Wild Study of a Casual Mobile Game

The ordering of seemingly random events may have an impact on players’ experiences, in both gambling and gaming. For example, early wins and streaks may seem to be an obvious hook that keeps players engaged, yet there is little empirical evidence of how players respond to event order. This study complements prior work in game design through an empirical, quantitative experiment that examines how patterns and sequences affect players’ reactions and behaviours. The study’s overarching research question is, “How does the sequence of in-game events affect player experience?” In our previous research, we examined theories and design patterns and found very few unique patterns. The “dramatic arc” was identified as a broad model for the strategic ordering of events and signalled the need for empirical research with players (Cermak-Sassenrath and Merritt 2026). The primary contribution to the discourse here is empirical evidence of binary event sequences that suggests categories of patterns that influence player experience and behavior.

Designers often describe choreographing event order as an art, balancing excitementand pacing to sustain interest (Cockburn, Quinn, and Gutwin 2017, 93). Yet, clear guidance on which sequences work best remains elusive, complicating design decisions. Although sporadic studies in game studies, HCI, psychology, and sociology have examined aspects of event ordering (Abbott 1995; Cockburn, Quinn, and Gutwin 2017; Frank and Smith 1989; Gutwin et al. 2016; King, Delfabbro, and Griffiths 2010; Langer 1975; Langer and Roth 1975), insights are typically informal and broad. While designers and researchers have long recognized that event order can shape engagement, systematic study of win/loss sequencing in games is limited. Across artistic and sociological fields, the Japanese principle of merihari—a balanced interplay of contrasts—has been invoked to guide pacing in interactive experiences (Carli-Dorsey et al. 2015; Dimmer 2012). Abbott’s foundational work on sequence analysis offers methods for characterizing temporal patterns in diverse domains, from rituals to spatial arrangements, yet its application to game events remains unexplored (Abbott 1995).

In game design practice, Zubek recommends alternating “high-intensity challenges” with downtime but leaves implementation to genre conventions (Zubek 2020, 174). Flow theory similarly emphasizes matching challenge to player skill for optimal experience (Csikszentmihalyi 1975), and Cockburn et al. identify mechanisms such as primacy, recency, duration neglect, and the peak–end rule as influential but do not prescribe concrete sequences (Cockburn, Quinn, and Gutwin 2017; Gutwin et al. 2016). Narrative frameworks—Aristotelian dramatic arcs and the Hero’s Journey— suggest rising and falling tension, yet they address story beats rather than discrete binary outcomes (Taylor 2013; Wesolowski 2009).

Adaptive systems like Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) automatically steer challenge by tweaking parameters in real time, indirectly affecting event order without generating predetermined win/loss patterns (Denisova and Cairns 2015; Hunicke 2005). Tabletop role-playing games, in contrast, rely on game masters to craft emergent sequences that balance player agency and narrative flow on the fly (Acharya, Mateas, and Wardrip-Fruin 2021; Four 2022).

Operant conditioning research highlights that reinforcement schedules—more than overall reward rates—drive engagement (Schüll 2012; Skinner 1953). Early wins in chance tasks can induce an illusion of control, biasing expectations of future success and underscoring the power of sequence position (Herman 2001; Langer 1975; Langer and Roth 1975). King et al. classify video-game reward structures alongside gambling mechanics but stop short of examining sequence effects directly (King, Delfabbro, and Griffiths 2010). The “hot hand” phenomenon further illustrates how perceived streakiness influences player beliefs and behaviors (Kou et al. 2018).

To advance this area, we report an empirical investigation using a casual mobile game deployed in the wild, focusing on how win/loss patterns influence play duration, level progression, and in-game ratings. Together with a game studio, we designed Pizza Time!, a casual single-player mobile game in which each level comprises ten pseudo-random win/loss events. The in-the-wild study employs a custom-made, casual, mobile game that was designed together with a professional game studio, and released in one national market. The game is a (pseudo-random) chance-based game; each level contains ten in-game events, in sequences comprised of 50% wins and 50% losses. Analysis of the gathered data from 94 players was examined in relation to three sequence categories: prefix/suffix, streaks, and alternations. Our between-subjects evaluation shows that prefix/suffix patterns replicate primacy and peak–end effects, with sequences beginning or ending in wins yielding higher continuation (Cockburn, Quinn, and Gutwin 2017; Gutwin et al. 2016, 92). Loss streaks – but not win streaks – significantly affect play duration and continuation, suggesting that clustered defeats deter players from continuing. Early-win bias may foster an illusion of control (Frank and Smith 1989; Langer 1975; Langer and Roth 1975), while streak-breaking events could exploit peak-end salience. Finally, recency effects should be further studied in future work to further explore the effects of late wins or losses on the willingness to continue playing (Cockburn, Quinn, and Gutwin 2017). The analysis shows that streakiness correlates with players’ willingness to continue, echoing sequence effects observed in prior research. Our key contribution is the gathering of empirical evidence for a tentative taxonomy of binary event sequences that suggest categories of patterns that influence player experience and behavior including – prefix/suffix, streaks, and alternations.

Future work should (1) experimentally manipulate these categories to test causal impacts, (2) apply the taxonomy in richer, skill-based games and diverse cultural settings, and (3) incorporate finer-grained behavioral and self-report measures. Ultimately, these insights can guide pacing, dynamic difficulty, and the sequencing of rewards across interactive experiences.

Poster Session and Drinks Reception

Asger Holmehøj BACH, Yuchen HUANG & Rune Kristian Lundedal NIELSEN, Prevalence of Random Reward Mechanisms in the Danish-facing Google Play Store

Random Reward Mechanisms (RRMs), commonly referred to as loot boxes, are features widely implemented in video games across platforms and genres. RRMs allow players to obtain randomized rewards — in many cases in exchange for real-world money (Nielsen and Grabarczyk 2019). It has been suggested that this particular structure for rewarding players is psychologically akin to gambling (Drummond and Sauer 2018). Additionally, a correlation between spending real-world money on loot boxes and problem gambling is well-established by multiple large-scale studies (Zendle, Cairns, et al. 2020; Zendle and Cairns 2018, 2019).

The prevalence of loot boxes has been measured by previous research in certain regions, including the United Kingdom (Xiao et al. 2021; Zendle, Meyer, et al. 2020), Australia (Rockloff et al. 2020), Belgium (Xiao 2023), and China (Xiao et al. 2024). Prevalence rates of loot boxes naturally vary for many reasons but are all relatively high: United Kingdom: 58-77%, Belgium 82%, China 91%, Australia: 62%.

No studies have examined the prevalence of loot boxes in Danish-facing digital storefronts. That is the aim of the present study. To accomplish this, the 100 highest-grossing games in the Danish-facing Google Play store were examined, and five variables were measured for each game: 1) the presence/absence of loot boxes that can be obtained by paying real-world money; 2) whether or not rewards can be cashed out for real-world money; 3) the number of downloads; 4) the age-rating of the game; and 5) compliance with PEGI content labeling.

The list of games to examine was composed of the 100 highest-grossing mobile games in the Google Play store in August 2025. Presence of RRMs were measured by two researchers. First, one researcher played the games from the list until an RRM was encountered or until shops and reward systems were unlocked and could be examined for RRMs. In cases where is was unfeasible to unlock everything, the internet was searched for wiki websites for the games in question, and then these wiki websites were reviewed for potential RRMs. The games were initially coded as having RRMs if it was possible to pay real-world money to obtain randomized rewards. When a game was found to have an RRM in it, the possibility of cashing out rewards for real-world money was measured by searching in social media groups as well as digital marketplaces, where players buy and sell in-game items. If cases of players selling rewards from RRMs for real-world money were found, the game was coded as having the possibility of cashing out rewards. The second researcher reviewed screenshots of RRMs and options for cashing out in order to confirm or deny their validity. The number of downloads, age-ratings, and content labels were provided by the Google Play store, with the age-rating and content labels being done by PEGI (Pan European Game Information). Games were coded as non-compliant if they contained RRMs but did not have the label In-game purchases (Includes random items). A link to the present study’s supplementary material is placed in the end notes1.

Out of the 100 games examined, 83 of them contained RRMs. Of the games with age-ratings 3+, 7+, or 12+, 83 in total, 66 (79.5 %) of them contained RRMs. 14 games were coded as non-compliant, 8 of which had the PEGI age-rating 3+. Only three games, Pokémon GO (Niantic 2016), Roblox (Roblox Corporation 2014), and Pokémon TCG Pocket (The Pokémon Company 2024), were found to have possibilities for cashing out rewards for real-world money. The cases were found on the third-party marketplaces www.g2g.com and www.playerauctions.com that facilitate buying and selling of in-game items between players. Thus, players can turn rewards from RRMs into real-world money by selling them to other players.

The prevalence of RRMs in the Danish-facing Google Play store is similar to that found by Xiao (2023) in the Belgian-facing Apple App Store (82%). The prevalence found in the present study is higher than that found in two earlier studies of the United Kingdom (58-77%). It has been suggested by Xiao et al. (2022) that the increase in the prevalence from the first UK prevalence study to the second one was partly due to an increase in the popularity of loot boxes throughout the years. This may also be the reason for the higher prevalence observed in the present study. This prevalence is however significantly lower than the one found in China (91%) — according to Xiao et al. (2024, 604) there are significant differences between the Western video games market and that of the People’s Republic of China when it comes to game content and monetization strategies, which may be explained by cultural and legislative differences.

1Supplementary material for the present study can be found at: https://osf.io/ya49e/overview?view_only=d4d9c6bd586a4373af84e8c2c8882d09

Callum DEERY, Gambling-like mechanics in Roblox player generated content

INTRODUCTION

Roblox (2006) is one of the most popular games in the world (Filby 2025). It is a platform game, where the primary draw is not content made by the game’s developers but instead games made by players (Zhang et al. 2024). Player-developers are paid by the Roblox Corporation based on engagement with their games and in-game purchases (Roblox Corporation, n.d.), including gambling-like purchases (Roblox Corporation 2021). This system and Roblox’s popularity has led to concerns of the exploitation of players (and player-developers), amongst researchers (Kou and Gui 2023) and games journalists (People Make Games 2021). This research focuses specifically on the presence of gambling-like purchases (e.g. Loot boxes, Gacha, etc) in games on the platform as these purchases have been linked to problem gambling and extreme spending (Zendle et al. 2020; Drummond and Sauer 2018).

Eiger and Roesner (2026) investigated 86 Roblox games and found deceptive strategies such as “default to purchase” and “multi-currency exchanges” were both common amongst other problematic microtransactions. Analysis of player discussion on the Roblox subreddit by Kou and Gui (2023) similarly found microtransactions were ubiquitous, often to the direct harm of players, alongside a number of other issues such as problematic world design. Player-developers within Roblox are themselves concerned with the harm gambling-like mechanics might cause (Kou et al. 2025), and how Roblox’s monetisation structure shifts the burden of monetisation onto creators. Zhang et al. (2024) analysed Roblox player-developer discussions and found developers discuss both monetisation strategies and how to evade moderation efforts.

This research investigates specifically the presence and proliferation of gambling-like purchases within player-generated games. This covers both loot boxes (and similar) and social casinos (e.g. simulated poker or slot machines). These mechanics are given focus due to their high risks to young people. This research also captures the expected wagers and outcomes of designs. This is to assess the value of these transactions and their impact on the economics of the platforms.

1. How prevalent are gambling-like mechanics in player-generated content?

2. What is the expected value buy-in and outcomes of gambling on these platforms?

METHOD

The sample consisted of 100 games from Roblox’s “most popular” category. Each game was played and video recorded for 10 minutes, where necessary additional time was used to gather full details of identified elements. The following was identified:

● Presence of in-game purchases with purchasable Robux

Gambling-like mechanics:

● Loot boxes (inc. Gacha systems)

● Simulated gambling machines (e.g. slot machines)

● Simulated gambling games (e.g. card games such as poker)

For each gambling-like mechanic:

● Wager (how much virtual currency, if that currency was purchasable, items etc).

● Probabilities, if disclosed.

● What can be won

Metadata was also recorded: name, date of recording, player count at time of recording, use of content from an external brand as part of an official collaboration, and age rating.

RESULTS

Sixty-eight games contained loot boxes, 19 contained simulated machine gambling (all prize wheels), and 2 contained simulated gambling games. This is concerning as young people have limited ability to safely engage with these mechanics (Hardwick et al. 2025).

Gambling-like mechanics are central to the gameplay of some games in the sample. Examples include: “My Knife Farm [NEW CASES]“ which simulates opening knife cosmetic items from “Counter Strike:Global Of ensive”. “[🏆]Spin a Soccer Card” features a similar design and simulates opening player cards from “FIFA ultimate team”.

Age Ratings and Content warnings

Only 1 game “🦎Camo Or Snipe! 💥” was tagged with a gambling related warning: “Gambling (Unplayable gambling content)”. This game contained both loot boxes and simulated machine gambling. The highest age rating in the sample was “Moderate 13+” applied to two games: “[🐰]Neighbors🔊” & “PROJECT APEX”. This mirrors Carter et al. (2026), who found similar issues with age ratings in mobile games and argued that these put young people at risk.

Buy-in and Winnings

Minimum buy-in had a mean of 86.9 robux and a median of 50 robux, Maximum buy-in had a mean of 1501 and a median of 449 robux. This cannot be cleanly converted into a real world currency, as robux are bought in fixed bundles which vary in price depending on platform and location. These bundles also differ from the rate Roblox uses when paying developers. Using the most efficient HK$ bundles, the mean minimum buy in is HK$23.00 and the mean maximum buy in is HK$158.00. In terms of possible outcomes: 66 allowed a player to win items, 20 in-game currency, 1 transferable items. 18 had outcomes in multiple categories.

CONCLUSION

Gambling-like mechanics are prevalent in popular Roblox games, and players are not warned of the presence of these mechanics by age-ratings. Gambling is also embedded in the design of games on the platform. This raises significant player-protection concerns given the links between gambling-like mechanics and problem gambling.

Yuchen HUANG, Gacha Games In English-language Journalism: How Do News Stories Represent The Emergent Form Of Quasi-gambling?

Gacha games are a genre of video games that allows players to spend real money purchasing random virtual rewards (Blom, 2023). Gacha mechanics are highly prevalent in video games, and they have been criticised for being structurally similar to gambling (Xiao & Park, 2025). Also, spending on gacha mechanics is associated with problem gambling (Drummond & Sauer, 2018).

Journalism describes video games. However, the description often hold certain beliefs to set agendas by foregrounding certain phenomena while backgrounding others (Coleman et al., 2009) and shape public opinions towards video games in particular ways. Previous studies revealed that the US news magazines set a routine of conservative worries to provoke the public’s fears of the negative effects from video games as a new technology from 1970s to 1980s (Williams, 2003); News coverage also prolongedly connects video games to violence by emphasising violent gameplay afforded by games such as Death Race and Grand Theft Auto (Keogh et al., 2026). Regarding the growing popularity and high profitability of gacha games in English-language countries in recent years, unsurprisingly, gacha games have also been reported by English-language journalism. However, whether journalism’s description related to gacha games is different from previous studies’ findings and how journalism describes gacha games and shapes public opinions towards this video game genre remains unclear.

50 English-language news stories describing gacha games from Google News, gaming news sites and commentary websites were selected to ensure a balance in the diversity of sources and content and the depth of discussion on topics. Discourse analysis was conducted inductively. This study identified four recurring themes in coverage: 1). Gambling; 2). Addiction; 3). Exploitation of young people; 4). Player experience. Coverage in the Gambling theme used persuasive rhetoric (e.g., highlighting the amount of money players spent during the gameplay) to evoke public panic and hostility towards gacha games that might incur huge financial loss. In the Addiction theme, some news stories warned the risks of being addicted against professional knowledge (e.g., referencing to academic research in relation to the connection between gacha mechanics and psychological and pathological harm); other stories descriptively emphasised how certain design (e.g., dark patterns such as Fear of Missing Out) in gacha games could be addictive and predative. Coverage in the Exploitation of young people theme extended concerns of gambling and addiction to juveniles and focused on ethical considerations. Stories which used these themes as frames often focused on monetisation patterns of gacha games, drawing on previous academic and public discussion around video game gambling and addiction issues, emphasising the gambling and addiction aspects of gacha games and foregrounding their exploitativeness and predation while omitting other aspects (detailed in the last theme) (un)consciously. They are forces that sustain negative attitudes towards gacha games in the public sphere. On the other hand, certain number of news stories focused on Player experience, which stressed players’ first-hand gameplay experience on gacha games’ gameplay, narratives, and aesthetics. They acknowledged gambling and addiction issues but alternatively emphasised that such risks were manageable through players’ agency. These stories create an alternative force to shape rules of playing and discussing gacha games by challenging what “should” be associated with them. These news stories offer a channel to understand gacha games as a genre of video games in public discussion, which were marginalised by coverage in other themes that primarily emphasise gacha games’ gamblification design and their negative impact on players. External journalistic force shapes and is shaped by the virtual materiality of gacha games, and they co-construct a dynamic in public sphere.

Ryan NGUYEN, Hyoun S. (Andrew) KIM, Lisa HENKEL, David C. HODGINS, Philip NEWALL, Zsolt DEMETROVICS, Sherry H. STEWART, Daniel L. KING, Hermano TAVARES, Jung-Seok CHOI, Andre Luiz Monezi ANDRADE & Andrea CZAKÓ, Views on Gacha Games and Mechanics from a Canadian context: A qualitative study

“Gacha” is a monetization system commonly used in video games that allows players to spend real-world money for randomized virtual rewards (Koeder et al. 2018). Gacha has attracted attention due to its similarities to traditional gambling mechanics as well as to loot boxes (Tang et al. 2025). Consequently, it is not surprising that regulations regarding gacha games have emerged in several countries, including in-game probability disclosure requirements and age-based restrictions (Welsh 2025; Xiao et al. 2025). Although previous studies have shown perceptions of loot boxes as being similar to traditional gambling activities, little research has examined player perceptions of gacha specifically, despite its growing popularity and role within many present games (Tang et al. 2022). Furthermore, limited research has explored these topics within Canada, which currently has no regulations specifically addressing loot boxes or gacha mechanics (Fleming 2020). Therefore, it is unclear how Canadian players understand and differentiate gacha from loot boxes. This study aimed to examine Canadian perceptions of gacha, its relationship to loot boxes, and gambling-like mechanics.

Twenty-nine current gamers who also opened loot boxes took part in qualitative interviews to explore their experiences and perspectives on gambling-like activities within gaming. Participants were asked specifically about their familiarity with gacha games and mechanics. Additionally, participants were also asked about their thoughts on the similarities and differences between loot boxes and gacha. Content analysis was used to analyse responses. Overall, 70% of participants (n = 20) stated that they were familiar with gacha, while 30% stated they were not familiar (n = 9). Among the game titles with gacha mechanics directly mentioned by participants, the most commonly stated were games from HoYoverse (n = 15), Umamusume: Pretty Derby (Cygames 2021) (n = 5), and Fate/Grand Order (Delightworks 2015) (n = 4). When asked about the similarities, participants expressed that they view gacha and loot boxes as the same (n = 9). “Yeah, to the point where like, I think in in my mind, like, I'm not sure I would have even necessarily made a distinction between them” (Participant RN08). Additionally, participants also stated how loot boxes and gacha produce the same in-game interaction, for example, using a form of currency to open something to gain a desirable. Participants also mentioned the similar aspect of randomness found in both, in terms of obtaining a random reward or acquiring a random character. Participants also related their experiences with these mechanics to be of similar nature to gambling (n = 4). “It's like these games have become more like the slot machines and it's very obvious about it.” (Participant JA07).

In contrast, regarding differences, it was expressed how gacha is a central component to the game; for example, it is required for progression, competitiveness, and for an overall better in-game experience (n = 10). “For gacha systems it's more integral to like playing the game, cause from what I know it's like you need to interact with the gacha to get more units or more characters to play with.” (Participant OS08). Other differences noted were that loot boxes were perceived as purely cosmetic (n = 7), in comparison to gacha where the rewards impact gameplay (n = 7).

This study provides insight into how gambling-like monetization systems, including gacha, are perceived by Canadian video game players. Findings suggest that participants were very familiar with gacha systems and, although finding many similarities, were able to distinguish them from traditional loot boxes. These distinctions were based not only on their underlying mechanics, but also how the systems were experienced within gameplay, specifically their perceived role in progression and overall playing experience. Both were described as sharing a similar random element, while gacha was more commonly viewed as central to gameplay and loot boxes as an optional cosmetic feature. Despite these distinctions, many participants continued to view both as functionally similar, with some describing resemblances to gambling. This distinction between mechanics and player experiences suggests that approaches based only on the structural characteristics of these systems may not fully capture how players understand and experience them. Further qualitative research is therefore needed to better understand these experiences and inform potential policy and legislative approaches to gambling-like mechanics, particularly for loot boxes and gacha, which currently remain unaddressed in Canada.

Abel NOGUEIRA LÓPEZ, Joaquín GONZÁLEZ-CABRERA, Juan Manuel MACHIMBARRENA, Joël BILLIEUX, Ignacio GUADIX-GARCÍA & Antonio RIAL-BOUBETA, Loot box–related risk as a partial mediator between problematic gaming, gambling severity in Spanish adolescents

INTRODUCTION: Problematic video gaming and gambling-related harm frequently co-occur in adolescence, yet the mechanisms linking these behaviors remain poorly understood (Burleigh et al., 2019; Lucchini et al., 2025). Loot boxes1 have been proposed as a potential behavioral bridge between Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) and problem gambling, given their structural similarities to gambling and their widespread presence in games popular among minors (González-Cabrera et al., 2022, 2024; Raneri et al., 2022). Despite being illegal for minors, gambling opportunities among youth have expanded through digitalization, platform convergence and the normalization of gambling-like mechanics within digital leisure (Montiel et al., 2022; Richard et al., 2022). The boundaries between traditional betting (offline) and online gambling have become blurred, reshaping how gambling is accessed, perceived, and regulated. In Spain, 13.2% of adolescent gamers report spending real money on loot boxes monthly, and this figure rises to 45.9% among those who meet criteria for problem gambling (Márquez et al., 2025). In this context, this study estimates youth gambling prevalence and problem gaming in Spain and the statistical pathway through which loot box engagement may account for the relationship between IGD and gambling severity within the digital ecosystem, highlighting their potential implications for quality of life, emotional distress, and heightened vulnerability to suicidal ideation. METHODS: Data were drawn from a large, cross-sectional, stratified and representative school-based survey administered to 75,329 students aged 10–20 years across all Spanish autonomous communities (target population: 4.100.000) during the 2024–2025 academic year. The present analyses focused on a subsample of 4,730 regular video game players with valid data on all three key variables: problematic gaming, assessed with the Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGDT-10); loot box–related risk, assessed with the Risky Loot-Box Index (RLI); and gambling severity, assessed with the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI). Furthermore, self-reported lifetime gambling (offline and online), expenditure patterns, and gambling contexts were assessed, together with quality of life, emotional distress and risk of suicidal ideation. Descriptive and linear regression models were estimated to examine associations between variables, and a bootstrapped mediation analysis (B = 5,000) was conducted to test whether loot box–related risk statistically mediated the relationship between IGD and gambling severity. RESULTS: The data reveal that 53.5% of the sample play video games at least ‘once a week’, and 18.7% recognised do it ‘every day or almost every day’. The most popular video game at present for the overall sample is Brawl Stars (Supercell, 2018), an online video game for mobile phones historically associated with randomized rewards and currently monetized through in-app purchases, in order, by Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017), Roblox (Roblox Corporation, 2006) and Minecraft (Mojan Studios, 2011). 26.3% spend some money every month on buying video game items (skins, gems, players, etc.), of whom 4.9% spend more than €30 a month. The same can be said when the calculations are carried out in relative terms, based on the proportion of pupils who regularly play video games. The prevalence among students who play regularly stands at 2.3% (2.9% among boys and 1.1% among girls). This maladaptive use of video games is associated with higher levels of anxiety, somatisation and depression. The risk of suicide is more than three times higher (24.1% vs. 7%). Overall, 11.1% of students (10.6% of minors) reported having gambled for money at least once, 9.6% in person and 5.5% online. Bars and cafés were the most common offline gambling venues, whereas betting websites and video games were the main online channels. Among gamblers, 21.7% met criteria for problem gambling (2.4% of the total sample), with higher prevalence in boys and in Vocational Training2. Problem gamblers showed markedly higher levels of depressive symptoms and presenting a potential IGD. Problematic gaming was strongly associated with loot box–related risk, with IGDT-10 scores explaining approximately 18% of the variance in RLI. Loot box risk was, in turn, independently associated with gambling severity (β ≈ 0.36, p < .001), controlling for IGD. The direct association between problematic gaming and gambling severity remained significant (β ≈ 0.76, p < .001) but was attenuated when RLI was included in the model, indicating partial mediation. The combined model including both IGDT-10 and RLI explained approximately 23% of the variance in PGSI scores. CONCLUSIONS: Gambling and gaming are already present in a sizeable minority of Spanish adolescents and are intertwined with internet gaming and loot box monetization. Loot box–related risk appears to partially account for the association between IGD-related gaming problems and gambling-related harm in adolescents. These findings support conceptual models that frame loot boxes as a bridging mechanism problematic gaming with online gambling, reinforcing their relevance for prevention and the need for regulatory action.

1 Randomized, purchasable reward mechanisms embedded in video games

2 Technical and practical courses designed to prepare students aged 16 and over for the job market in specific trades, combining theory with practical training

Sarah HODGE, Digital resilience, health, and harms, with the digital convergences

Loot boxes have appeared in various forms in video games and have built on historical mechanics and features (Hodge, 2022; Nielson & Grabarczyk, 2019). They have arguably been part of the ‘gamblification’ of games (Brock, & Johnson, 2021). The expansion of loot box research helped lay the foundations for building scientific knowledge, awareness, and regulation to support users. One result is the PEGI label for in-game spending (e.g., Drummond, et al., 2020; Xiao, 2023; PEGI, 2026) but more research needs to go beyond loot boxes, to explore the continuing convergence (Brock, & Johnson, 2021) between technology and activities, that were previously separate, overlapping and combining (e.g., Zhang, & Zhang, 2025). While this convergence can lead to innovation (Zhang, & Zhang, 2025), considerations are needed, particualrly for the user: digital resilience, health, and harms.

Digital convergence can be seen with social media, gaming, and gambling (Gainsbury et al., 2014). Technology is enabling further convergence, and this convergence will continue with future technological advancements (Brock, & Johnson, 2021; Zendle, & Bowden-Jones, 2019). Examples of further and continued digital convergence, which needs more research include, gaming and gambling features in online dating and shopping applications, gaming social media content creators/influencers promoting gambling/gambling-like game features. Currently, much of the research is divided by technology device or activity, for example the addiction literature (Yu, & Sussman, 2020). This abstract aims to highlight theoretical considerations for the user in the context of digital resilience, health, and harms from previous research and how these are informing currrent and future research in light of the increasing digital convergence.

Previous research with lived experience participants of gaming and gambling harms have highlighted how the convergence can be particularly problematic when recovering from gambling addiction (Davidson et al., 2024). Participants reported how some of the video game features in online games such as buying power ups exasperated some of the challenges they faced with gambling related harms as well as technology enabling access to gambling 24/7 (Davidson et al., 2024). This highlights how if someone has had difficulties and harms these may easily transfer to other aspects of technology use, and how the convergence can exacerbate this. Therefore, looking at technology uses a whole could highlight how harms and challenges may manifest. For example, if spending is a challenge to a user, and they have experienced gambling-related harm, they may also experience challenges with in-game/app spending (this may be broader than just loot boxes and gaming and include shopping and dating applications etc.).

One approach could be a boarder continuum of digital addiction that could established/highlight the complexities of digital behavior particularly in light of the continuing convergence (Hodge 2026; Yu, & Sussman, 2020). Support for this approach can be suggested from shared underpinning features of behavioral addiction (Griffiths, 1995). As gambling addiction is recognized and could be used to aid in supporting, mapping and understanding other digital harms (Davidson et al., 2024; Hodge, 2026), especially due to suggested harms overlapping for example, preoccupation and narrow focus with the activity (Hodge, 2026).

Another aspect to a border approach is digital resilience, which could help acknowledge and encompass technology usage and understanding the role of harms, health and well-being for the user and those networks around the user (such as family members, and health professionals) (Bronfenbrenner 2005; Hodge, 2026; Hodge & Johnson, 2020). The two key aspects of how this approach can support are: 1) help mitigate for the nuances of technology and the convergence; and 2) provide a holistic structure for recognizing health and harms to support users. Digital resilience builds on the awareness and critical evaluative elements of digital/media literacy (e.g., Potter, 2022) but incorporates user/behavioral elements such as the potential challenges and consideration to health and harms. The digital resilience approach can be argued to be particularly helpful, when there is not a clear consensus with on-going debate in the literature on the role of digital addiction (e.g., Yu, and Sussman, 2020; Hodge, 2026). Especially the role of comorbidity with other addiction/harms (e.g., Estévez, et al., 2020), a boarder approach to the potential transference of technology harms could be better mitigated and supported.

Hence, the harms and health approach through digital resilience can be arguably more pragmatic and recognize impacts, which is particularly useful for those who work in healthcare services and educational institutions and have reported to be encountering technology-related harms (e.g., Davidson et al., 2024; Hodge, 2026; Ventouris, Panourgia, & Hodge, 2021). Moreover, the approach could support training (e.g., YGAM, 2026).

It is also acknowledged that while digital resilience is an approach to support understanding harms and health. It does not detract from the need for more and user support from systems/platforms (e.g., Drummond, et al., 2020; Xiao, 2021). Rather digital resilience can support the conceptual framing and approach with the ongoing convergence as well as how this may translate to support users experiencing harms and challenges.

In summary, this abstract discusses theoretical considerations of digital resilience as an approach to help address health and harms considerations from the continuing convergence of technology. Research and regulations in gambling can help map and understand other digital harms, and considerations for a boarder approach of digital health, harms and potentially addiction. Particularly, the application of harms and health to support the user and various stakeholders who may be supporting users, through identification and training of digital harms.

Amitoj Kaur CHANDI, Player plans, RNGesus laughs: Dark Patterns and Commodification of Play in Gacha games

The contemporary gaming ecosystem has seen a pronounced shift from traditional retail revenue in favour of free-to-play models which rely heavily on microtransactions. This emerging trend suggests a gaming landscape where player agency is compromised by intentional design tactics which transform the virtual realm into a controlled environment for monetization through the incorporation of deceptive design elements, or ‘dark patterns’.

Coined by Harry Brignull in 2010 , dark patterns – in the context of 1 videogames - are essentially understood as “something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.”2

The recent transition from ‘game as a product’ to ‘game as a service’ has sparked debates that address the range of such deceptive design practices that could be potentially woven within the warp and weft of user interface and gameplay mechanics (Yi 2024).

This concern, however, is further amplified in systems of chance and randomized rewards with established risk-based paradigms that are specifically designed to manoeuvre player decisions and exploit cognitive biases.

With roots in the late 20th century, the term 'gacha' is derived from Japanese 'gachapon' capsule vending machines and refers to a system of randomized item distribution (Marie 2024). While MapleStory (Wizet) first adapted this concept for the digital world in 2003 (Fujihara and Shibuya 2020), the mechanic subsequently became a staple in titles such as Dragon Collection (Konami 2010), Fate/Grand Order (DelightWorks 2015), and Fire Emblem Heroes (Intelligent Systems 2017). Following the explosive reception of Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020), today gacha has cemented itself among one of the most popular genres in gaming economy.

Despite its vibrant (and loyal) fan community that is manifest in an extensive array of literary, critical, and artistic reinventions of respective gacha play, the pronounced psycho-manipulative attributes associated with digital gacha narratives today have understandably drawn substantial scrutiny on questions connected to ethical gaming, gambling, addiction, microtransactions, and age restrictions, among others (Zendle and Cairns 2018).

At its core, gacha gameplay is a currency exchange model which relies on players accumulating and ‘pulling’ for digital assets by spending premium currencies to acquire characters, skins, and weapons, among other things. The more time and resources players dedicate to the game, the better the digital outturn. Each unlock further grants access to specific character backgrounds, stories, quests, and ‘lore drops’. The narrative primarily follows a time-bound event-driven gameplay which urges players to complete quests in a given timeframe in order to collect optimal rewards. ‘Grinding’ is encouraged, daily check-ins are rewarded, and inviting more players to join the game is incentivised.

Clearly, gacha games constitute a unique and critical frontier for understanding the nuances in dark pattern designs. By extending analysis beyond conventional emphasis on 2D interface layouts and corresponding non-diegetic elements, examining such complex and coercive ecosystems can not only bring attention to unassessed design strategies in ergodic digital spaces but also inform ongoing conversations on player consumption practices and digital regulation.

Accordingly, with focus on popular miHoYo titles, namely Genshin Impact (2020), Honkai: Star Rail (2023), and Zenless Zone Zero (2024), this inquiry aims to understand the nature and role of dark patterns in system design, and subsequent consumer practices in gacha-based videogames. By analyzing the many ways in which miHoYo influences player behaviour and decision-making across temporal, monetary, social, psychological as well as privacy design parameters (Zagal et al. 2013; Bösch et al. 2016), this inquiry examines how gacha systems manage to dictate the domain of digital play beyond standard gameplay boundaries.

ZHOU Ning & CHEN Yutong, Gameplay as Labor in Genshin Impact: The Hybrid Payment Strategy of Gacha Games

As one of the most successful games worldwide, Genshin Impact (miHoYo, 2020) relies on a gacha system as its core monetization mechanism. It uses Primogems, an in-game currency, to draw characters or weapons in a lottery-like manner. Players can obtain Primogems either through active gameplay or via real-money purchases. The system incorporates a pity mechanism and progressive probabilities. While public and regulatory debates have focused almost exclusively on whether this mechanism constitutes gambling, the act of earning Primogems through gameplay has received little sociological or economic analysis. This paper addresses this gap by using Genshin Impact as a case study to examine player activity within the gacha economic framework.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, we conceptualize gameplay-oriented Primogem accumulation as a form of labor. Second, we formalize the expected monetary cost of acquiring a target gacha character. Third, we empirically estimate the version-by- version supply of free draws available to players. Fourth, we identify the hybrid payment model, combining gameplay labor and monetary expenditure, as a strategy of second-degree price discrimination. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of our findings for digital labor theory.

Gameplay as Labor

The combination of rigorous goal-orientation and structural constraints strongly suggests that this form of gameplay possesses an inherent labor property.(Woods, 2022; Zhou, 2024) Rather than a form of pure relaxation or entertainment, it operates as an activity strictly organized by game rules, executed to achieve the specific aim of accumulating Primogems. The thriving "daigan" (power-leveling and grinding) industry in secondary markets provides empirical evidence for this analysis: if gameplay did not contain a labor dimension, a tradeable service market would cease to exist (Cao et al., 2024). Grinding services explicitly commodify and sell "gameplay time" and "task completion rates," a typical feature of the externalization and marketization of labor.

Consequently, we contend that within the context of gacha games, gameplay activities organized as a substitute for monetary expenditure can be conceptualized as labor. Although various discussions on labor in video games have emerged since Kücklich (2005) proposed the concept of playbor, the discussion about payment remains scarce: Fuchs (2014) even once argued that the exploitation of digital labor is “unlimited”, which apparently includes the game labor and is inconsistent with reality. On the basis of collected data, our study quantifies the game labor performed by players in Genshin Impact, as well as its form of compensation and payment, the primogems, which is lack of discuss currently.

The In-Game Economic Mechanism: Expected Price and the Sources of Free Draws

The probabilistic nature of the gacha system reveals the uncertainty of the specific price to acquire a particular items to individual players. However, from a macroeconomic statistical perspective, the "true price"players should pay for items is dictated by its mathematical expected price due to algorithmic designs such as the pity mechanism:

Expected Monetary Cost = Monetized Price per Draw x (Expected Draws - Free Draws)

Here "Free Draws" refers to the number of draws equivalent to the Primogems earned by players through gameplay without extra payment. In Genshin Impact, the channelsfor acquiring these primogems are strictly limited to configurations pre-established by miHoYo, spanning from Daily Commissions, version update rewards, time-confined events, the Spiral Abyss, to random chests from open-world exploration. The mutual characteristic of these channels is that they mandate player online presence and demand time-spending engagement in rigidly prescribed forms. More importantly, the aggregate amount of obtainable Primogems within each version is capped by an absolute ceiling. This implies that regardless of the additional time a player invests, the upper limit of labor that can be utilized to offset monetary expenditure is predetermined by the developer.

Data Measurement: The Supply and Monetary Value of Free Draws

To quantify this gameplay-derived subsidy, we estimate the version-by-version supply of gameplay-earned Primogems from publicly available game data and community-compiled statistics (Figure 1); these figures are indicative and may contain minor inaccuracies. The statistical scope comprises two categories of acquisition channels. Permanent (one-time) sources denote exhaustible content obtainable only once per account, including Archon and Story Quests, open-world chests, world quests, Teleport Waypoints, Statues of the Seven, achievements, and comparable one-off rewards. Time-limited (recurring) sources denote channels that reset with every version cycle and thus constitute a steady flow, including Daily Commissions, version events, the Spiral Abyss, the Stardust Exchange, mail compensation, redemption codes, and web check-in campaigns. Converted at 160 Primogems per draw, the cumulative supply across versions v1.0–v7.0 amounts to approximately 4,183 draws, of which recurring channels contribute about 3,392 (≈80.4 per version on average), while permanent sources account for roughly 791. In other words, under the developer’s configuration, a player’s labor within a single version cycle is institutionally capped at a level equivalent to roughly eighty draws which is strikingly close to the first pity threshold.

Figure 2 converts this supply into monetary terms. Valuing each draw at the standard retail rate (648 CNY for 8,080 Primogems, ≈ 12.8 CNY per draw), the expected cost of obtaining all 61 new limited 5-star characters across versions 1.0–7.0, roughly 93 draws per target character, or 90 under the Capturing Radiance mechanic introduced in version 5.0, amounts to approximately 72,000 CNY, while the gameplay-derived supply is worth about 54,000 CNY, offsetting 74% of the total. This compensation, however, is deliberately uneven. In versions featuring a single UP character, free draws typically cover 57%–108% of the expected cost (median ≈ 81%), whereas in dual-character versions coverage falls to 34%–96% with a median of only 54%. The hybrid payment architecture thus operates as a dual mechanism: it guarantees the basic reproduction of players’ labor-power, while concentrating the uncovered residual precisely in versions where desire is doubled, ensuring that the final gap is filled by purchase rather than by labor.

Mixed Payment as a Price Discrimination Strategy

Synthesizing the expected value formula, when players accumulate primogems through active gameplay, they are converting their own labor into a form of mixed payment in nature. From the perspective of economy, this institutional design contains a mechanism of second-degree price discrimination. By leveraging probability and pity mechanics, developers construct a selective consumption system: players with high willingness to pay but low time elasticity gravitate toward paying for draws directly; players with low willingness to pay but high time elasticity to accumulate Primogems through sustained gameplay labor, effectively exchanging their time for price discounts.

However, the mere premise that "labor can offset currency" is insufficient to explain the core function of the probability mechanism. The critical insight lies in the fact that because the total volume of obtainable Primogems per version is fixed, developers can precisely regulate the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital by adjusting the drop rates, thereby striking an optimal equilibrium between user retention and commercial profitability(Cao et al., 2024; Ma et al., 2025).

By calibrated positioning of drop rates within an intermediate equilibrium, the developer ensures that while the pure labor route remains viable, it is designed to be exceedingly protracted, thereby incentivizing mid-to-high willingness-to-pay players to utilize fiat currency for "acceleration." Concurrently, the free Primogems distributed in each version are meticulously designed to be just sufficient to maintain continuous login behavior among active users, yet inadequate to grant them comprehensive access to all content for free.

Conclusion

Using Genshin Impact as a case, this study frames repetitive gacha gameplay as regulated digital labor shaped by capped, version-specific Primogem rewards. Its hybrid payment model enables players to substitute time for money, functioning as a form of second-degree price discrimination: players with greater willingness to spend money can purchase draws directly, while players with greater willingness to spend time can obtain them through gameplay. The results show that gameplay-derived rewards constitute a substantial but systematically limited form of compensation, covering a large share of the expected monetary cost of limited characters while leaving a persistent gap for monetary expenditure. Adjustable gacha probabilities,pity systems, and reward caps therefore allow developers to regulate the substitution between gameplay labor and monetary payment. Beyond a random-draw mechanism, the gacha framework functions as an economic architecture that converts player time into monetizable value, differentiates consumers according to their time and monetary constraints, and supports sustained revenue generation.

Xintong ZHAO, The Pastoralization of Gambling: Historical Ideologies and the Casino in Stardew Valley

The convergence of video gaming and gambling has become a pressing concern for researchers and policymakers alike. Existing scholarship has predominantly examined gambling-related game mechanics such as loot boxes and other random reward mechanisms, with particular attention to their psychological effects, monetization practices, regulatory challenges, and potential for harm (Nielsen and Grabarczyk, 2019; Spicer et al., 2022). This literature has established important distinctions between gambling and gambling-like mechanics, particularly according to their relationship to real-world economies and randomized rewards. Yet gambling in games has often been approached primarily as a problem of risk, monetization, or player welfare. This paper takes a different approach. Rather than asking whether a given game mechanic constitutes gambling or causes harm, it asks: what cultural work does gambling perform within a specific game’s narrative, spatial, and ideological context?1

Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016) provides a particularly revealing case. A single-player farming and life-simulation game presented in pixel-art style, it centers on agricultural labor, community life, and the restoration of a neglected farm. Although set in a fictional contemporary world rather than a historical period, its emphasis on land, self-sufficient labor, and rural community resonates with the pastoral ideal and, more specifically, with Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the yeoman republic, in which independent landownership and agricultural labor were associated with civic virtue and economic independence (Jefferson, 1972; McCoy, 1980). The game is rated E10+ by the ESRB and PEGI 12. In its later progression, players can gain access to the Calico Desert, where a casino offers slot machines and blackjack under the supervision of the mysterious Mr. Qi. The casino therefore appears to introduce a strikingly different economic logic into a game otherwise structured around agricultural production and community building.

This paper argues that the casino in Stardew Valley is neither a meaningless addition nor simply a concession to player demand. Rather, it constitutes a digital re-enactment and resolution of a longstanding tension in American cultural history: the conflict between Jeffersonian agrarianism, which idealizes independent landholding and productive labor, and a gambling and speculative ethos associated with the American frontier and the Gilded Age, in which risk-taking, chance, and the pursuit of wealth without direct labor became culturally significant (Lears, 2003; Fabian, 1990). The specifically American historical framework is important because the game’s pastoralism is not merely a generic celebration of rural life. Its emphasis on land, agricultural independence, and escape from alienating forms of work can be read alongside a longer American cultural tradition in which agrarian virtue and speculative capitalism have repeatedly existed in tension. I argue that Stardew Valley does not allow speculative desire to overturn its agrarian social order. Instead, through spatial segregation, the quantification of luck, and a closed economic loop, it performs what I call a “pastoralization of gambling”: the game domesticates speculative desire and reincorporates it into a broader logic of agricultural production.

The analysis proceeds in three parts. First, it examines the spatial logic of the desert casino. Located outside Pelican Town, the casino is physically separated from the game’s principal community and agricultural spaces. I argue that this spatial arrangement can be read through Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, in which the frontier functions as a zone of risk, mobility, and opportunity positioned beyond established social order (Turner, 1893). The casino thus provides a contained space in which players can engage with speculative practices without allowing them to become the organizing principle of the town.

Second, the paper analyzes Mr. Qi as a figure through whom gambling becomes subject to observation, quantification, and control. His surveillance of player behavior and the casino’s numerical representation of chance connect gambling to the broader logic of modern managerial and data-driven systems. Rather than presenting chance as entirely unpredictable, the game renders it calculable and operational within a rule-bound system. This transforms gambling from an external threat to the agrarian order into a controlled form of play.

Third, the paper examines the game’s random-number-generation mechanics and closed currency system. I argue that these mechanics transform gambling from an open-ended pursuit of speculative wealth into a contained cycle of risk, repetition, and delayed reward. Because casino winnings remain within the game’s internal economy rather than being convertible into real-world money, and because progress within the casino is structured through repeated player activity, gambling becomes functionally closer to grinding for rewards than to unlimited speculation. The speculative impulse is consequently subordinated to the game’s broader labor economy. This distinction also places the casino outside the primary concern of scholarship on monetized gambling-like mechanics, which has focused heavily on random reward systems connected to real-world expenditure and potential harm (Nielsen and Grabarczyk, 2019; Spicer et al., 2022).

The paper ultimately argues that Stardew Valley offers a digital reconciliation of two historically opposed American traditions. By subjecting the casino to the logic of the farm, the game constructs a space in which the speculative desire for “something for nothing” is disciplined, laborized, and redirected toward productive ends. This case demonstrates how game mechanics can operate not merely as technical systems but as forms of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007): they can reproduce, negotiate, and potentially resolve cultural contradictions through rules and player action. In Stardew Valley, gambling does not simply interrupt the pastoral fantasy. Instead, the game pastoralizes gambling itself, transforming an unruly capitalist impulse into a contained and ultimately productive form of play.

1 This paper is based on a close reading of game mechanics and does not rely on developer interviews or player survey data. As such, it adopts the methodological position that game rules themselves constitute a form of cultural text amenable to interpretive analysis.

Yuchen HUANG & Xiaoyao REN, US vs Genshin Impact: Settling video game loot box consumer protection concerns? An international comparison of gacha monetisation design

INTRODUCTION

Loot boxes and gacha are video game mechanics that allow consumers to spend real-world money purchasing random items (Drummond & Sauer, 2018). The high prevalence of loot boxes and gacha in video games (Xiao & Park, 2025) and the association between purchasing them and problem gambling (Zendle et al., 2020)raise parents’ and regulators’ concerns.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (2025) alleged breaches of consumer law regarding how loot boxes were marketed and sold in the mobile game Genshin Impact [原神] (2020) and announced that it reached a settlement with Cognosphere (trading as HoYoverse). Cognosphere paid a US$20 million financial penalty and promised to change the monetisation design of all its games to address the FTC’s concerns, specifically:

• Provide an option to directly use fiat currency (e.g., US$) to purchase loot boxes without requiring consumers to exchange fiat currency into virtual currency before the purchase;

• Disclose (i) the range of total potential costs in fiat currency for acquiring featured rare items from loot boxes and (ii) the associated probabilities on the in-game purchase page, official website, and in-game login page. The disclosure on the in-game purchase page must be made automatically without requiring any input from the consumer;

• Disclose (i) the number of loot boxes that can be bought with each virtual currency bundle of varying value and (ii) the exchange rate between fiat currency and one loot box. The disclosure must be made automatically without requiring any input from the consumer; and

• Seek parental consent prior to any sales to young consumers aged under 15.

Cognosphere’s compliance with the settlement has not been independently verified. Examining Cognosphere’s implementation in the US version of all its games and comparing the results with other regional versions of those games provide international policy insights that can improve consumer protection.

METHOD

An account pretending to be a 14-year-old consumer born on 1 December 2010 was set up to access the US, European, and the Taiwan-Hong Kong-Macau servers of all Cognosphere games: (i) Honkai Impact 3rd [崩坏 3] (2016), (ii) Genshin Impact [原神] (2020), (iii) Tears of Themis [未定事件簿] (2020), (iv) Honkai: Star Rail [崩坏:星穹铁道] (2023), and (v) Zenless Zone Zero [绝区零] (2024). In each server of the game, all loot boxes and virtual currency bundles found were screenshotted, attempts to purchase loot boxes and bundles with fiat currency were recorded, and the presences of the range of costs in fiat currency and the probabilities at all required locations were checked.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Loot boxes were found in all games across all servers. The compliance status of the US version of each Cognosphere game with the settlement is shown in Table 1.

The US version of all games still required consumers to exchange for virtual currencies with US$ before purchasing loot boxes, although Cognosphere reduced the number of currency exchanges required to only one for some prominent loot boxes (e.g., Figure 1), compared with other regional servers. Moreover, exchanging for virtual currencies multiple times was still required in all versions of all games when consumers purchase other loot boxes, such as those requiring ‘energy’ (a type of virtual currency) purchasable with US$ to claim random rewards after battle.

Similarly, only prominent loot boxes (e.g., Figure 2), instead of all loot boxes as required, disclosed the range of potential costs in US$ for acquiring featured items from loot boxes and their associated probabilities. Such information disclosure for any loot box was not detected in other regional servers.

The required information about virtual currency bundles was provided for only prominent, instead of all, loot boxes. Such additional information was not found in the US version of Honkai Impact 3rd and other regional servers.

A parental consent was found in the US version of all games. Cognosphere required the young consumer account to be linked to a verified adult email address. When the account tried to use US$ to make in-game transactions, Cognosphere did not allow the transaction and instead sent an approval request to that adult email address. This process was not identified in other regional servers.

PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

All Cognosphere games examined contained loot boxes; however, we found widespread non-compliance with the settlement terms. Some attempts were obviously made to comply in relation to the prominent loot boxes, but the requirements apply to all loot boxes. Notwithstanding, in the US server, this settlement has forced Cognosphere to disclose certain important information that consumers should know and that can help them make more informed purchasing decisions. Strict enforcement of the settlement terms is necessary to ensure Cognosphere implements all requirements and truly improves consumer protection.

Differences of Cognosphere’s monetisation design between regional servers suggests that certain important information is only given to US consumers because the FTC settlement has forced Cognosphere to do so. Cognosphere is arguably discriminating against non-US consumers based on their geographic location. European and Asian regulators should also consider strict enforcement of their consumer laws. The requirements set out in the settlement should become the new baseline to be more widely adopted by Cognosphere and other companies.

Pierre-Xavier CHOMIAC DE SAS & Sophie ROMAN, Gambling-like mechanics in video games: A challenging regulatory framework

As video games raise, more than ever, concern over rising overconsumption and addiction, the regulation of addictive processes in video games is a complex issue. Since the addictive processes in video games are not subject to any dedicated framework, they are indirectly subject to pre-existing regulations derived from positive law, alongside dedicated rules that specifically target certain video game mechanics.

Gambling/gaming: a dissolving legal distinction. Historically, the gambling and betting sector on one hand, and the video game industry on the other, evolved with little interference. However, the transformation of monetisation models — driven in particular by the rise of mobile devices — has progressively erased this boundary. While loot boxes triggered a strong reaction from regulators worldwide, other mechanics are now attracting increasing scrutiny: intermediate virtual currencies, battle passes, daily login rewards conditioning player reconnection, and behavioural profiling-based dynamic pricing all sit at the intersection of gambling and game design.

Consumer law: ill-equipped for sector-specific practices. These mechanics do not necessarily meet the legal definitions of gambling in most jurisdictions, creating a structural grey area that existing regulatory frameworks struggle to address. Traditional consumer law mechanisms — withdrawal rights, conformity guarantees, contractual consent defects — were not designed for the accumulation of repeated micro-decisions embedded in interfaces far more complex than the conventional commercial environments on which legal categories were built.

The legal characterisation of digital content compounds the difficulty. The French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation), in its October 2024 ruling (UFC-Que Choisir v. Valve Corporation), confirmed that dematerialised games and content acquired on platforms are governed by a licence of use rather than a sale. While this decision reinforces publishers' business models, it shifts the litigation battleground: liability now concentrates on continuous conformity obligations and unfair contract terms. Terms and Conditions clauses authorising the unilateral modification, degradation or removal of content — illustrated by "nerf" practices and server shutdowns such as the The Crew case (Ubisoft, 2024) — present a serious legal risk in this regard.

The concept of dark patterns, central to this debate, operates more as a standard than as a legal category with an established regime. Identifying these practices within the video game environment is particularly challenging given the complexity of game interfaces: grinding, dynamic difficulty adjustment, and AI-driven personalised recommendations may equally optimise or exploit the player's experience.

A rethought regulatory framework. Faced with the inadequacy of traditional frameworks, public authorities are deploying new regulatory strategies. With respect to loot boxes, the response of States has been profoundly fragmented, revealing an absence of consensus on the applicable legal characterisation.

Belgium, as early as 2018, ruled that loot boxes constituted illegal gambling on the grounds that items obtained could be resold on secondary markets for real-world money, compelling several major publishers to withdraw them from the Belgian market under threat of criminal sanctions. The Netherlands adopted a similar position, conditioning their lawfulness on odds disclosure and the absence of cash-out mechanisms. Other States opted for targeted restrictions focused on minors: Brazil enacted legislation in 2025 prohibiting the sale of loot boxes to under-18s; Australia now mandates a minimum 15+ classification for games containing them. In the United States, in the absence of federal legislation, the New York Attorney General initiated proceedings in 2025 against Valve Corporation, alleging that loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2 constitute illegal gambling under state law. However, research has revealed an apparent contradiction between formal legal prohibition and continued market practice and demonstrates that unilateral, unenforced bans are structurally vulnerable to circumvention.

France chose a more targeted response by creating, through the SREN Act of 21 May 2024, a sui generis legal category: jeux à objets numériques monétisables (JONUM — games with monetisable digital objects). As a three-year experiment, the framework requires operators to file a prior declaration with the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), implement strict age verification, provide spending and playtime self-limitation tools, and comply with ancillary reward caps. This represents an unprecedented attempt to regulate the interstitial space between video gaming and gambling.

Intensifying oversight of the video game sector. The European regulatory framework is progressively deploying a range of increasingly stringent consumer protection measures, the scope of which is extending to video games. At EU level, the Digital Services Act, fully in force since February 2024, prohibits interfaces that impair users' decisional autonomy. Its application to video game dark patterns is promising, yet hampered by the difficulty of identifying and measuring their effects within complex gaming environments.

The Digital Fairness Act (DFA), whose legislative proposal is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, explicitly targets addictive mechanics in video games — loot boxes, virtual currencies, retention design — as a priority area. In the context of the DFA's active preparation, the European Parliament's IMCO Committee formally reaffirmed its position calling for the future text to impose a strict prohibition on randomised purchase mechanics in games accessible to minors across the European Union. In parallel, PEGI undertook in March 2026 the most significant reform of its classification framework in over a decade, integrating monetisation mechanics into age classification criteria for the first time: games incorporating paid random items now receive a minimum PEGI 16 rating, “time-limited and/or quantity-limited offers” receive a minimum PEGI 12, NFT receive a minimum PEGI 18 and mechanics designed to encourage players to come back every day in order to acquire content received a minimum of PEGI 7.

These converging developments outline the contours of a co-regulatory model under construction, combining hard law (DSA, DFA), national experimental frameworks (JONUM) and strengthened sectoral self-regulation (PEGI). Their coherence remains to be built.

An effective co-regulatory framework to construct. The regulation of gambling-like mechanics in video games appears to be developing in successive layers, without adequately accounting for its impact on the industry. The French JONUM experiment, the DSA, PEGI's reforms and the forthcoming DFA together constitute fragmented and complex responses that may severely affect the broader ecosystem and the business models of numerous studios.

Publishers must now navigate these evolving regulatory requirements and conduct careful analyses of their own mechanics: the boundary between legitimate incentivisation and prohibited manipulation remains difficult to draw contractually; algorithmic transparency obligations remain unclear; and the international fragmentation of applicable regimes generates considerable compliance costs.

The French JONUM experiment, still in its infancy, may offer the most instructive laboratory for assessing whether purpose-built regulation can bridge the gap where general consumer law has failed. Time will tell.

Joseph GODFREY, It's 2045, I Spent $700 Rolling for Klee, and Genshin Impact Shuts Down: Copyright Law, Media Preservation, and Gacha Games

INTRODUCTION

Software preservation is a difficult task, but gacha games exacerbate the typical problems with software preservation and present their own problems inherent to the genre. Books, music, and films can all be archived relatively easily, and legal deposit laws generally reflect that.1 The same cannot be said for software.

A book can be read hundreds of years after its publication if stored correctly, and more fragile mediums like film or audio cassettes can be shifted to other, more robust formats with some effort. While it is much easier to make copies of software than of more analogue mediums, the difficulties lie in actually running that software in the future. Thankfully, this problem is not insurmountable.

Software emulation be used in place of the required hardware or software; copy protection can be broken if needed to run the software; and, with a lot of time and resources, even software that depends on connecting to a remote server can be made functional.2 These are technical problems with technical solutions, but these solutions may run afoul of copyright law. This paper will examine the copyright issues around preserving gacha games. This paper specifically concerns US and EU copyright law, though the principles are broadly universal.

PRESERVING GACHA GAMES

As a general rule, gacha games follow a `live service' model. They are periodically updated and require a connection to a remote server to play. This alone makes them tremendously more difficult to preserve than more `traditional' games, which come with all the files one would need to archive. A game cartridge manufactured 30 years ago can have its contents dumped and enjoyed today with software emulation, but a gacha game downloaded onto a phone not even a year ago may be completely unusable today should the developers stopped supporting it.

Defining Preservation

Preservation in this instance can be defined in a number of ways ranging from a fully playable experience to mere documentation, with each definition having its own associated costs and legal ramifications. Developers generally go with one of two options when deciding to no longer support a gacha game, either:

• Just shutting down the servers

• Altering the game to run without a server connection

The most preferable outcome from an archival standpoint is the ability to play the game without connecting to a server.3 Although rare in the gacha space, sometimes developers will release an offline version of their games, usually for a fee to offset the development costs associated with the conversion.4

As alluded to earlier, this kind of preservation can be done without authorisation from the original developers, but that undertaking is of questionable legality.

Making unauthorised copies of a gacha game is copyright infringement. However, copyright infringement is not absolute, and relevant exceptions may apply here.

Fair Use

Perhaps the most notable is the US fair use doctrine,5 which assesses whether the use of a copyrighted work is non-infringing based on four (non-exhaustive) factors.6 The fourth - potential market effects - is generally considered to be the most important.7 With that in mind, one has to wonder what the market effects of modifying a gacha game to run after it has been sunset actually are, especially when done non-commercially.

Lemley (2021, 1268—1274) makes the argument that reproducing out of print works should be considered a fair use, and posits that ``[b]y abandoning any effort to sell or license the work, the copyright owner should be understood to have relinquished any claim to market harm or effect under the fourth factor'' (2021, 1273).

The EU Computer Programs Directive

Under EU copyright law, making alterations to software is permissible when ``theyare necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose.''8 Case law is (very) limited, but may be used to argue that reverse engineering and modifying a gacha game to run after support has ended is non-infringing, and that this cannot be prevented by contractual means.9

1 Legal deposit is a requirement to send copies of published works to designated libraries. See, for example, the UK’s Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003.

2 See, for a particularly relevant example, the private server reimplementation of GenshinImpact (MiHhoYo 2020). “Grasscutter,” Grasscutters, GitHub, Last modified April 27, 2025, https://github.com/Grasscutters/Grasscutter. See also the private server reimplementations for Dragalia Lost (Cygames 2018) and Love Live! School Idol Festival All Stars (KLabGames 2019).

3 This usually necessitates removing the gacha mechanics from the game, such as rolling for characters. Depending on the extent of their implementation, this could mean significantly altering key aspects of the game. One has to wonder how accurately a gacha game is preserved if the gacha element is removed.

4 Examples of this include Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete (Nintendo 2024) and Mega Man X DiVE Offline (Capcom 2023).

5 17 USC § 107.

6 Those factors being the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount and substantiality of the work used, and potential market effects.

7 Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc v Nation Enterprises 471 US 539, 566 (1985).

8 Directive 2009/24/EC on the legal protection of computer programs [2009] OJ L111/16, art 5(1).

9 Case C-13/20 Top System SA v Belgian State ECLI:EU:C:2021:811 [57], [66]–[68].

Jingru PENG, Protecting Minors from Blind Boxes: Procuratorial Public Interest Litigation as a Supplementary Regulatory Mechanism in China

Blind boxes are physical gambling-like products sold at retail in which consumers pay to receive a randomly selected prize (Xiao 2022). Nowadays, blind boxes are widely accessible to children in shops surrounding school campuses across China. Despite the existing age-based restrictions on minors’ purchases, the broader social harms that blind boxes may cause to children’s wellbeing have remained systematically underaddressed by authorities.

This paper argues that China’s procuratorial organs serve as a supplementary regulatory mechanism. As constitutionally mandated legal supervisors, they fill the structural gaps in existing blind‐box regulation to protect children. The analysis is based on nine cases published by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and provincial procuratorates from 2022 to 2026. These cases were officially designated as typical or guiding examples regarding blind‐box sales and the protection of minors. Using a doctrinal legal framework, the paper explores how procuratorial organs convert their legal oversight function into concrete regulatory measures through administrative public interest litigation (APIL). This conversion compensates for the structural weaknesses of the current administrative regulatory regime for blind boxes in the protection of children’s interests.

In practice, the APIL pathway encounters two major obstacles when applied to this issue. First, the harm to minors is predominantly psychological. It includes the gradual formation of gambling attitudes, impulsive spending, and competitive consumption habits. Existing regulations do not clearly define whether such psychological effects meet the legal threshold of harm to public interests. Second, supervisory responsibilities are scattered among multiple authorities. Market supervision, education, and public security departments each assume partial roles, but no statute allocates primary responsibility. This fragmentation renders it difficult to identify which authority has failed to act.

To navigate these obstacles, procuratorial organs have developed two practical strategies that transform their supervisory authority into effective regulatory action. The first strategy addresses the ambiguity of public interest harm. Procuratorial organs adopt a preventive interpretation of legal interest impairment (Zhao and Mo 2024). They treat blind‐box sales as posing a prospective risk to minors’ psychological development and gambling‐related attitudes. This prospective risk alone is sufficient to satisfy the harm threshold, dispensing with proof of actual damage. To consolidate this substantive position procedurally, they convene public hearings. These hearings assemble educators, parents, legal experts, and administrative representatives, forging a consensus that reinforces the finding of harm even in the absence of explicit statutory standards.

The second strategy resolves the difficulty of determining administrative non‐performance. Procuratorial organs combine legal deterrence with institutional collaboration (Wang 2026). Pre‐litigation procuratorial recommendations create a credible threat of judicial review. This nudge prompts administrative rectification without litigation in most cases (Qi and Yu 2025). Concurrently, joint institution‐building with market supervision and education authorities establishes regional regulatory standards and long‐term governance mechanisms for blind‐box sales in school settings. This collaborative approach clarifies dispersed responsibilities without triggering inter‐agency conflict, securing durable compliance at lower institutional cost.

The paper further examines whether public interest litigation can extend regulatory coverage to gambling‐like physical products. The preventive conception of harm is justifiable because protecting minors from gambling‐like exposure is urgent. Still, this conception would benefit from further empirical validation. Existing research on the psychological effects of blind boxes on minors remains limited (Zhai et al. 2026). This evidentiary gap does not undermine the precautionary logic behind procuratorial intervention. The paper also notes that procuratorial collaboration may blur the boundary between legal supervision and administrative governance. With these caveats, the Chinese experience offers a comparative reference. It is useful for jurisdictions confronting similar regulatory inaction toward such products.

Dominik SZCZEPANIAK, Lana STEPIŠNIK & Rune Kristian Lundedal NIELSEN, Tactile Digital Blind Boxes: Improving the loot box through sensory interaction

Loot boxes have become a common monetization and reward mechanism in contemporary digital games. These virtual items, also referred to as random reward mechanisms (RRMs), provide players with randomized rewards of varying rarity (Nielsen & Grabarczyk 2019). Over the last decade, loot boxes have received considerable academic attention, particularly because of their structural similarities to gambling and their association with problematic player behaviors, including excessive spending, psychological distress, and lower well-being (Drummond et al. 2025; Drummond & Sauer 2018; Villalba-García et al. 2025; Zendle & Cairns 2018). Existing research has largely focused on the ethical and economic implications of loot boxes, particularly their reliance on variable reward schedules and dark design patterns intended to maximize engagement and monetization (King & Delfabbro 2019; Mathur et al. 2019).

Comparatively little attention has been directed toward the interaction design of loot box systems and the experiential qualities of the opening process itself. Loot boxes typically reduce user interaction to a minimal action, such as pressing a single button, which is followed by an automatic opening sequence. In contrast, physical blind boxes and collectible systems emphasize embodied interaction and sensory engagement through tactile manipulation, anticipation, and ritualized opening practices (Dourish 2001; Molesworth & Denegri-Knott 2013). Research on anticipation and reward suggests that such sensory and interactional elements can substantially influence emotional engagement and perceived value (Clark et al. 2009; Knutson & Greer 2008; Larche et al. 2021).

The primary aim of this study is to investigate whether interaction design inspired by physical blind box opening rituals can enhance user satisfaction in digital reward systems. To this end, we introduce the digital blind box, defined as a randomized virtual reward mechanism that incorporates interactive opening mechanics inspired by physical unboxing rituals in order to enhance anticipation, engagement, and perceived value, while avoiding reliance on monetization-driven dark design patterns. Building on research on loot boxes, gamification, user experience design, haptics, and blind boxes, the study examines how sensory interaction may shape users’ experiences of uncertainty-based rewards.

A secondary aim of the study is to examine the introduction of friction into the loot box experience. One reason why loot boxes may be more harmful to players than their physical counterparts is the ease and speed with which they can be purchased and opened. Friction is a central concept in research on gambling, habit formation, and addiction (e.g., Schüll 2012). Adding pleasurable friction to the loot box opening mechanic may improve the loot box in two ways: (1) by making the act of opening more enjoyable in itself and less focused on the reward, and (2) by slowing down the opening process, making it less automatic and less likely to cause financial harm.

To address the primary research question, we developed a digital prototype in the Unity engine. Users open the digital blind box in a manner that emphasizes the tactile and haptic qualities of the experience: clicking and holding a mouse button switches the system into opening mode, after which the user opens the box through a controlled dragging motion (Figure 1). Through this more intentional and embodied interaction, e aimed to simulate aspects of physicality by means of movement, visual feedback, and pacing, thereby enhancing player agency in the opening process.

In addition to reconceptualizing the loot box experience, the study’s practical goal was to explore whether such an interaction design could positively influence user satisfaction compared with a conventional opening mechanic consisting of a single button click (Figure 2). To this end, the study combines a literature review with a controlled within-subjects experiment (N = 14) using a custom questionnaire, the Digital Blind Box Interaction Questionnaire (DBBIQ), to measure and compare several constructs across the two versions. The constructs comprise enjoyment, personal gratification, visual aesthetics, usability/playability, frustration, perceived agency, anticipation, overall satisfaction, and interaction preference regarding the opening experience. Through this approach, the study aims to test the concept of perceived hapticity in digital blind boxes and to contribute to a broader understanding of how sensory interaction may shape user experience in digital reward systems. The findings suggest that introducing an additional sensory input during the opening of a digital blind box can enhance user satisfaction (Table 1). The drag-based opening received higher scores than the button-based opening on most constructs, including enjoyment, personal gratification, perceived agency, anticipation, overall satisfaction, and interaction preference. Participants appeared to engage more actively when the interaction required deliberate input – what we describe as pleasurable friction – indicating that the added interaction made the experience more meaningful rather than merely functional. The drag-based interaction also yielded lower frustration scores than the button-based opening.

Differences in visual aesthetics and usability/playability between the two versions were not statistically significant, suggesting that the improvements in user satisfaction were attributable to the interaction itself rather than to differences in visual design or usability. These results support the concept of perceived hapticity, whereby visual and motor engagement can simulate a sense of touch in digital environments. Whether the added friction also reduces the potential harms of loot boxes, for instance by slowing the pace of purchasing and opening, was not tested in the present study and remains a question for future research. We propose further research into digital blind boxes and their gamification, as well as into the introduction of hapticity in novel interaction contexts.

Day 2

Session 5 – Beyond Loot Boxes

Charlotte EBEN (remote), Virtual and physical gambling-like products – an overview of the current research

Gambling-like products, such as blind boxes, card packs, or video game loot boxes, have recently gained significant worldwide popularity. Whereas such gambling-like products share structural and psychological characteristics with legally regulated traditional gambling (e.g., roulette and slot machines), they are, however, generally not regulated as gambling.Nevertheless, stakeholders are concerned about potential harms, including overspending and the normalization of gambling amongst the youth. Whereas the relationship between problem gambling or experiencing gambling harm and spending on virtual gambling-like products (i.e., loot boxes) is well-established and replicated, little research has been conducted concerning the relationship between problem gambling and spending on physical gambling-like products (i.e., blind boxes and card packs). The current presentation aims to summarize the state of the art in research comparing virtual and physical gambling-like products and their impact on problem gambling.

Philip NEWALL, The gamblification of investing: How a new generation of investors is being born to lose

Investing and gambling share key features, in that both involve risk, the coming together of two or more people, and both are voluntary activities. However, investing is generally a much better way than gambling for the average person to make long-run profits. This paper reviews evidence on two types of “gamblified” investment products where this advantage does not hold for investing: high-frequency stock trading and high-risk derivatives. This review defines a gamblified investment product as one that leads most investors to lose, that attracts people at risk of experiencing gambling-related harm, and that utilizes product design principles from gambling (either by encouraging a high frequency of use or by providing the allure of big lottery-like wins). The gamblification of investing produces novel challenges for the regulation of both financial markets and gambling.

Yuening LI, Let's Play Crypto: Normalising Financial Speculation in Neobanking Apps

INTRODUCTION

Gamification has traditionally been understood as the incorporation of game-design elements to increase user engagement (Deterding et al., 2011; Wagner, 2021). One example is Alipay’s retro-style farm game, which links daily spending tasks and social interaction to variable, loot-box-like rewards. Earlier forms of financial gamification often involved inserting a relatively discrete game within a financial service. More recent developments, however, increasingly embed game mechanics directly within specific financial functions and products, including social interaction, referral systems, and financial learning (Li, Kerr and Ryan, 2025; Ferrari, 2022). This paper examines an underexplored form of gam(bl)ification within regulated financial services through the case of Revolut, a neobank (Janamolla, 2024) that integrates game-like mechanics into the process through which users encounter, learn about, and engage with speculative financial products. Rather than introducing users directly to speculative investment, Revolut presents cryptocurrency through short lessons, quizzes, animated progress paths, rankings, and crypto rewards, reframing participation in speculative finance as an enjoyable, educational, and relatively low-stakes activity embedded within a familiar banking infrastructure. In regulated financial environments, overt game-like design may attract concerns around manipulative or dark-pattern practices, therefore gamified mechanisms are designed to embed within ostensibly functional activities such as financial education. This paper asks: (1) How are speculative financial products gam(bl)ified through the design of regulated banking apps? and (2) How does gamified learning reshape users’ understandings of speculative financial participation?

METHODOLOGY

The paper draws on a broader research project examining the platformisation of banking in Ireland and combines three sources of empirical data: (1) a modified walkthrough (Light, Burgess and Duguay, 2018) of Revolut's Crypto and Learn features, examining interface design and required user actions; (2) ten expert interviews with banking developers, designers, and financial regulators responsible for implementing digital banking services; and (3) eleven user interviews exploring engagement with cryptocurrency, investment, and other advanced features within neobanking apps.

FINDINGS

The findings demonstrate that neobanks increasingly function as sites through which ordinary banking customers are introduced to speculative financial products through gamified learning. The walkthrough reveals that Revolut’s Crypto and Learn features consist of more than forty learning modules covering blockchain and crypto ‘basics’, and individual crypto assets. Each lesson combines short animations, progress indicators, multiple-choice quizzes, and cryptocurrency rewards that can be immediately converted into fiat currency. Gam(bl)ification also extends beyond the lesson format through features such as rankings of top gainers and losers and, in some cases, loot-box-like rewards advertised as ‘up to’ a specified amount. Moreover, users do not know the exact fiat value they will receive, as the reward continues to fluctuate with the cryptocurrency exchange rate after it has been awarded. Completing these activities also activates cryptocurrency functionality within the user’s banking account, embedding initial participation in speculative financial products within routine banking activities. According to D3 (2024), a backend developer, the rewards were designed to encourage users to ‘get a bit of crypto to start with’ while making learning ‘fun’. From the platform’s perspective, these rewards function as introductory or ‘seed’ crypto intended to reduce barriers to initial participation and familiarise users with speculative financial products.

User interviews, however, reveal a notable disconnect between platform intentions (Mansell and Steinmueller, 2020) and user perceptions. Many participants completed the quizzes primarily to obtain the rewards rather than to learn about cryptocurrency or begin investing. One participant (U-C1), a woman aged over 65, completed almost every available lesson and received more than 60 euro worth of cryptocurrency, yet stated that she was ‘not interested in crypto’ and only participated after a friend shared a Facebook post advertising the rewards. She described the experience as ‘like Duolingo’ rather than investing, highlighting how speculative financial participation could be experienced as casual, game-like learning. Similar patterns emerged across users, many of whom immediately converted their crypto rewards into euros while continuing to reject the identity of a crypto trader or investor.

DISCUSSION

The paper argues that these findings demonstrate a broader process of speculative financial socialisation. Rather than encouraging users to invest directly, gamified interfaces make initial participation in speculative finance appear compatible with ordinary banking practices. While users are introduced to information about volatility, market uncertainty, and limited regulatory protection, these risks are framed as matters for individuals to interpret and manage, embedding responsibilisation within a reward-based learning journey. Gamified learning therefore familiarises users with speculative financial products, terminology, and infrastructures through trusted banking interfaces and relatively low-stakes participation. This process is comparable to the normalisation of gambling through socially legitimate and low-stakes activities such as bingo (Ducheneaut, Moore and Nickell, 2007; Cox et al., 2026), which can familiarise participants with chance-based financial practices within trusted social settings. While banking apps are not gambling venues, they can perform a comparable normalising function by embedding speculative financial products within everyday banking practices and presenting participation as educational, rewarding, manageable and, at points, structured through chance-based reward mechanisms.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, this paper argues that the gam(bl)ification of financial products extends beyond interface aesthetics or generic reward mechanics. Neobanking apps increasingly function as institutions of speculative financial socialisation, introducing users to speculative products through gamified learning, rankings, and chance-based rewards while normalising initial participation within trusted financial environments. Crucially, this process does not necessarily produce sustained trading or an investor identity; rather, it lowers the threshold for entering speculative financial infrastructures and makes participation appear educational, rewarding, and compatible with everyday banking. In doing so, neobanking apps reshape the relationship between banking, play, and speculative finance, contributing to emerging scholarship on platform governance, financialisation, and the gam(bl)ification of financial products.

Kuma Xiaoyu XIONG, Chelsea Xiaoyao REN & Elvis LO, Physical gambling-like products transparency: card packs, blind boxes, and gachapon

Physical gambling-like products, such as card packs, blind boxes, and gachapon machines, provide consumers with randomized rewards. This has long raised concerns about the potential to stimulate gambling interests, especially among parents and policymakers, because the primary consumers are children and adolescents. China is the only country to adopt dedicated regulatory policies for these gambling-like products, requiring age restrictions, parental consent before purchase for older children, and transparency about the probabilities of obtaining different prizes.

In this talk, we will present our findings on the compliance of card packs, blind boxes, and gachapon machines in the Hong Kong and Mainland China markets. More specifically, we collected information from 50 card packs we purchased in Hong Kong, 50 blind boxes purchased in Mainland China, and 100 gachapon machine posters from the Mainland’s official Bandai store. Only 20% of the card packs provided probabilities on the package or via a hyperlink, while 94% of the blind boxes disclosed the probabilities on the package. However, we found that even when probabilities have already been disclosed, the information remains incomplete and misleading. As for the gachapon machines’ probabilities, 99% of the posters disclosed the probabilities. Only 8% presented them as percentages or counts, and 87% only stated ‘equally distributed’ on the packaging, without providing any further explanation. 4% of the posters even provided incorrect distribution information, which can greatly mislead consumers.

Results also show that there is a current lack of dedicated regulations of these gambling-like products in Hong Kong compared to Mainland China, and that consumer law should be better enforced in said region to mandate transparency to help consumers make more informed purchasing decisions. However, although there are regulations in Mainland and the probability disclosure rate on our blind boxes and gachapon posters is relatively high, problems still remain, such as inconsistent disclosure formats, incomplete information, and misleading content. This suggests that existing regulations should be further refined to provide more detailed and product-specific implementation standards.

Session 6 – Streaming

Luke CLARK, Watching winning: who watches gambling streams and why?

Gambling streams are a relatively under-studied example of the convergence of the gambling and video gaming ecosystems. A distinctive aspect of gambling streams is that they are a form of vicarious consumption in which the viewer only observes the streamer gambling. Our research has identified risks from such spectating, among i) experienced gamblers, who experience craving in response to gambling streams (Wu, Abarbanel & Clark, 2024, Journal of Behavioral Addictions) and ii) gambling-naïve youth, for whom streams are a route of gambling exposure that can influence behavioural intentions (Fu, Wu & Clark, 2026, Journal of Gambling Studies). In analyses pooled across three online surveys (n = 544 adults with experience of both gambling streams and gambling), we assessed motivations to watch gambling streams, motivations to gamble, and problem gambling severity. Motivations to watch gambling streams were positively associated with the same motivations to gamble (enhancement, coping, and social), suggesting common gratifications. Coping motives to watch gambling streams were associated with problem gambling severity, and mediated by coping motivations to gamble. Further associations were observed for specific stream formats (watching slots, esports, and loot box openings) as a key topic for ongoing research.

Geoffrey LEE, Edging the Max Win: Loot Box Practices of Popular Live Streamers

On February 25, 2026, New York’s attorney general Letitia James sued Valve Corporation (Valve) for ‘illegally promoting gambling through video games popular with children and teenagers’ (James 2026, para. 1), emphasising how the loot box system – where players pay for a chance, represented through a spinning carousel on screen, to receive a rare virtual cosmetic item – in games such as Counter-Strike 2 (Valve 2023) and Dota 2 (Valve 2013) resembled those of slot machines. Of the games named, Counter-Strike 2 was positioned as especially notorious because of the sheer value of its loot box system, with some cosmetic items priced in the hundreds of thousands and a rare few in the millions (SteamAnalyst 2026). Valve introduced a change to Counter-Strike 2’s loot box system a month later (CS2 2026), forcing players in Germany to use the new ‘X-ray Scanner’ feature to reveal the item they would receive from the loot box before opening it. These recent events come in the wake of a rapidly growing body of research highlighting both the presence of loot box systems in video game monetisation (Hong 2019; Zendle, Meyer, and Ballou 2020) and its relationship with the problematic consequences of gambling, or problem gambling (Gibson et al. 2022; Zendle and Cairns 2018; Brooks and Clark 2019). Furthermore, the game’s historic ties with practices such as betting cosmetics on match outcomes (Holden and Ehrlich 2017; Greer et al. 2019; Abarbanel and Johnson 2019) reveal how, despite attempts at regulation and increased awareness of risks, gambling remains core to the game’s culture. Attempts to address these trends must therefore also understand how gambling has become normalised in gaming cultures.

This paper draws on an ongoing ethnographic project examining the use of humour by live streamers and their communities on the live streaming platform Twitch to argue that the cultural practices established by live streamers significantly contribute to the treatment of gambling as a form of play. The project involves three hundred hours of observation across ten popular live streamer case studies. The ten live streamers were selected from an original group of sixty observed live streamers based on the types of jokes used within the communities; tools such as Twitch’s ‘Browse’ feature and TwitchTracker were used to select live select live streamers that had established communities (viewer counts in the thousands to tens of thousands, see (Conde and Casais 2023) across different types of content. Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) of this data revealed that, when engaging in loot box mechanisms, live streamers foregrounded experiences of community and dramatic narratives over the monetary consequences of their gambling. These practices aligned with gamble-play mechanisms – features that emphasise experiences of fun over monetary gain – that have been increasingly incorporated across media and games, regardless of whether they have been explicitly marketed as ‘gambling’ (Ross and Nieborg 2021; Zaucha and Agur 2025; Albarrán-Torres 2018). They demonstrated the extent to which these mechanisms, originating as design features, had become normalised as cultural practice; furthermore, these live streamers evidenced how these practices might be intertwined with existing game cultures, establishing a frictionless pipeline from playing games as a social experience to engaging in gambling and potentially problem gambling also as a social experience.

To demonstrate how live streamers might enshrine gamble-play as a cultural practice in addition to a design mechanism, I present one specific case study, the Counter-Strike 2 live streamer ohnePixel. With a seven-day average of over a hundred thousand live stream viewers at the time of writing (TwitchTracker n.d.), ohnePixel regularly engages with not only the game’s loot box system, but also its similar, gambling-esque ‘trade-up’ (Demirkol 2025) and ‘terminal’ (Mnmzzz 2025) systems. Throughout this content, ohnePixel establishes specific rituals that dramaticise his own gambling for comedic effect. When combined with how this content is integrated into his own gameplay and commentary on competitive tournaments, ohnePixel evidences how the blurring of gambling and play is enacted on a cultural, as well as technological, scale. That ohnePixel is known primarily as a Counter-Strike 2 live streamer provides additional nuance to existing research studying gambling-specific live streamers (Hughes et al. 2025; Koncz et al. 2023), revealing an overlooked area where gambling might be normalised under the broader umbrella of play-based entertainment. Such a trend coincides with gambling’s entanglement with physical, product-based consumerism, such as in blind boxes (Xiao 2022), suggesting that the merging of play and gambling across culture is allowing for the unfettered proliferation of problematic gambling mechanisms. Although play’s exploitation by corporations has been previously explored on a broader scale (Sicart 2026), this paper provides an account of how this process is enacted within specific community contexts while also demonstrating how such an approach can elucidate why gambling mechanisms continue to persevere in spite of regulatory efforts.

Emil Lundedal HAMMAR, The intersection between gaming, gambling, and social media platforms in the case of five Danish gambling streamers on Twitch, Kick, and YouTube (awarded the Best Paper Prize)

As European policymakers are increasingly confusing gambling, games, and social media in their attempt to legislate young Europeans’ access to digital citizenship (Euractiv 2026), it has increasingly become essential to understand to what extent games, social media, and online gambling practices are related to each other (Abarbanel and Johnson 2020; Thorhauge and Nielsen 2021). This confluence of games and gambling is further corroborated by the tendency of what used to be legitimate gaming news sites that have now been taken over by parasitic SEOs who takes over high-authority websites to rank low-quality content. Following this acquisition, these gaming news sites then promote gambling streamers (Ryan 2026), thereby directly bridging gaming content with online casinos and betting. In this view, the presence of gambling streamers playing online slots games on gaming-oriented platforms such as Twitch and YouTube reinforce the perception that games, gambling, and social media are intertwined (Johnson and Jackson 2025). Yet the question remains to what extent phenomena such as gambling streamers operate within video game related online contexts or if their affiliation with games are tenuous if not entirely arbitrary. To better answer this, this presentation investigates the disseminative strategies of five Danish gambling streamers – i.e. what tagging labels and outreach methods they employ on Twitch and YouTube to gain more viewers – and to what extent their actual content streams are connected to ‘video games’.

This presentation tests the hypothesis that gambling streamers derive from, areembedded in, and affiliated with online video game cultures (Muriel and Crawford 2018). Between April 2023 to August 2026, we have compiled a set of quantitativedata of the five most popular Danish gambling streamers on Twitch and YouTube,where we scraped their YouTube accounts for API platform data and collected 94 Twitch streams and 945 YouTube videos. All five streamers are white Danish men in their 20s or early 30s. We use this dataset to identify to what extent their algorithmic, disseminative strategies are connected to online gaming culture, such as categorizing their gambling streams on Youtube as ‘Gaming’ or listing their live streamed gambling on Twitch as a video game rather than the ‘Slots’ category. Our findings reveal that all four gambling streamers categorize their videos on YouTube as ‘gaming’ while circumventing any legal punishment by the Danish Gambling Authorities by setting the videos to require viewers to be 18 years of age. We use the site Twitchtracker.com to provide a history of each of the five gambling streamers to pinpoint what content they have streamed over time and to what extent video games were part of their streaming offerings and when they pivoted to primarily streaming online gambling.

We complement our quantitative data with a qualitative content analysis of 233 hours of Twitch and YouTube videos where we identify the specific instances where video games as a phenomenon and activity are brought up during the streams, and if so, what the nature of the conversation around gaming are. This qualitative dataset reveals that gaming does not take up the majority of conversation, but instead is only brought up as a leisure activity on par with chatting about football or going to the movies. I.e. the conversations around games across all five gambling streamers are not affiliated with what is considered traditional gaming culture. Our results show that while the five gambling streamers do employ algorithmic strategies associated with games to gain more viewers, the actual streams treat gaming more as a normalized leisure activity as part of broader, mainstream youth cultures. Meanwhile, our historical contextualization of the streamers reveal how their origins were partially through live-streaming video games where they would later pivot towards mainly if not solely streaming online slots. Thus, the presentation’s preliminary findings help uncover the intersection between gaming and gambling and social media in the case of five online gambling streamers, where video games are not directly related to the gambling content, but the platform relations to games and their historical associations with video game culture have meant that there is a sort of background radiation of gaming emanating from each of the streamers.

Marium Ibrahim AHMED & Eva GROSEMANS (remote), Gambling by proxy: Loot box live streams and the digital gambling ecosystem

While loot boxes have been at the centre of regulatory debates due to their structural and psychological similarities to traditional gambling mechanisms (Spicer et al. 2022; Xiao 2024), streaming platforms remain popular sites of engagement with loot box content. Despite action being taken against gambling content, with Twitch announcing a ban targeting slots, roulette, and dice games and YouTube updating their gambling content policy to address skin gambling and casino-style content, loot box streams thus far remain outside the scope of platform-level surveillance (Gerken 2022; YouTube 2025). Previous research highlights the increasing gamification and gamblification of monetisation on streaming platforms (Abarbanel & Johnson 2020; Johnson & Woodcock 2019) and the blurring of boundaries between gambling and non-gambling activities with the passive consumption of gamblified media, conceptualised as interpassive gambling (Hoebanx & French 2023). Loot box content is a prominent manifestation of interpassive gambling; however, little attention is paid to the gambling-like interaction and participation that a live stream’s modality affords beyond mere passive consumption.

To observe how loot box opening streams create conditions for gambling-like participation, a qualitative content analysis was conducted on YouTube. This novel and under-researched topic was explored through two sub-questions examining the role of the streamer in facilitating viewer participation (RQ1) and the ways in which viewers demonstrate investment within loot box opening streams (RQ2). Two games were selected: Pokémon TCG Pocket (Pokémon; Creatures Inc. & DeNa 2024) represents the digitalization of the physical trading card games which loot boxes borrowed their mechanics from, while Counter-Strike 2 (CS2; Valve Corporation 2023), has a well-established streaming culture and loot box ecosystem. Three streamers, TimTheTatman and Nadeshot for CS2 and Jonsandman Plays for Pokémon, were chosen based on their varying streaming styles and popularity, assessed by metrics such as subscriber counts and average number of live viewers.

Twenty live streams were analysed: eleven featuring CS2 cases and nine showcasing Pokémon packs. The CS2 streams combined gameplay with loot box openings and averaged 6–10 hours, while the Pokémon streams consisted primarily of pack openings and averaged 1–2 hours. The data analysed comprised the different modalities of a live stream: the streamer’s video feed captured through a webcam, the streamer’s verbal and non-verbal actions and cues, the visual overlays and alerts, and the chat log, excluding the Twitch chat visible on screen.

The results shed light on how loot box live streams function as a gambling-adjacent environment embedded within a broader digital gambling ecosystem. A range of streaming techniques were used to create an engaging atmosphere, where the streamer directly invited the viewers to become active participants in the stream and explicitly framed themselves as opening loot boxes on behalf of the viewers. At the same time, streamers employed monetisation strategies, such as tiered recognition systems and direct solicitation, to encourage financial contributions from the viewers. Viewers demonstrated their investment in the stream through ritualistic behaviours, such as manifesting and claiming credit for favourable outcomes, and financial contributions. Most notably, viewers constructed wager-like transactions through the live chat, offering financial contributions contingent on specific loot box outcomes or streamer actions (e.g., "10 gifted if Wipz pulls gold"), revealing that the gambling logic can be emulated by the community itself, independent of the platform or streamer. Lastly, viewers actively followed and participated in gambling and gambling-adjacent activities introduced by streamers while moments of convergence revealed that for several viewers the stream exists within a wider personal landscape of gambling activity, positioning the loot box live stream as a node within a broader digital gambling ecosystem.

In conclusion, the gambling-adjacent nature of the loot box live stream is not an inherent property of the gamblified content, but a result of a symbiotic social environment actively constructed through a combination of streaming techniques, monetisation strategies, and viewer engagement, enabled by the interactivity that the live stream affords unlike pre-recorded content (Hamilton et al. 2014; Smith et al. 2013). Loot box streams function as more than an alternative site of loot box engagement; streamers encouraged direct loot box spending by channelling giveaway rewards back into the loot box economy and normalised gambling and gambling-adjacent activities by positioning them as an extension of the loot box experience.

Future research combining observable data with in-depth viewer interviews could investigate the underlying motivations and authenticity of viewer engagement, while cross-platform studies extending beyond YouTube would address a meaningful gap left by this study. As loot box content continues to grow in popularity and streaming platforms become increasingly gamblified, these findings emphasise the urgency for regulatory attention that looks beyond isolated content regulation to account for the ecosystem-level dynamics through which gambling culture permeates digital spaces.

Session 7 – Policy and Regulation

Laura HENDERSON, An International Tour of Loot Box Regulation

Across the world, policy-makers have been looking for the right tools to regulate the randomised video game monetisation mechanics known as loot boxes. In recent years, many regulators have turned away from seeking to include loot boxes within existing definitions of gambling, and towards more nuanced consumer protection measures. This ties in with broader trends in digital regulation, focusing on providing information to consumers, and the protection of children.

This presentation will cover regulatory approaches to loot boxes across different jurisdictions, providing context for further discussions of law and policy throughout the conference. It will include a particular focus on recent key developments, such as Brazil’s law prohibiting games likely to be accessed by children from containing loot boxes. It will also compare age ratings for games containing loot boxes, probability disclosure requirements, and loot box presence disclosure requirements across jurisdictions.

Tianyi ZHANGSHAO, Ben EGLISTON & Marcus CARTER, How Mainland China Governs Video Game Monetisation: An Imbalanced Framework

China has emerged as a crucial jurisdiction to study video game monetisation for two reasons. First, it is both a major force in global game production and one of the world’s most lucrative game markets. It is home to Tencent, the world’s largest game publisher by revenue (Elliott, 2023), and has the world’s largest mobile game market (Wang, 2023). At the same time, many of these commercial successes have been built on the widespread adoption of controversial monetisation designs, such as loot boxes (Xiao et al., 2024). Second, monetisation has become a central arena in which regulators, industry actors, and players contest the boundaries of acceptable gaming practices and negotiate competing visions of what constitutes proper gaming (Zhangshao et al., 2026). The Chinese government also sought to broaden the regulation of video game monetisation beyond loot boxes. However, the proposed measures remain under review after triggering a strong negative response from the market (Ye, 2024).

Existing research on China’s regulatory approach has primarily examined individual regulations or regulatory measures, focusing on their implementation, impact, or effectiveness. Scholars have been discussing how specific regulations (e.g., the console ban 2000-2015) shaped China’s gaming market and culture (Davies, 2024), and how the Chinese government managed to exert control over game content and gameplay through multilevel censorship (Song, 2023). Another strand of research has focused on the implementation of the probability disclosure policy for loot boxes, documenting widespread suboptimal compliance among game companies (Xiao et al., 2024). While these studies have generated important insights into the design and effects of particular regulatory interventions, they tend to examine regulations in isolation. Consequently, we know considerably less about the broader governance framework through which the Chinese state simultaneously regulates, supports, and shapes video game monetisation as an object of governance.

Against this background, this paper asks two questions: How is video game monetisation regulated in China? And how is it supported? By addressing these questions, we aim to map the broader governance framework through which video game monetisation is governed in China. To do so, we conducted a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of 138 Chinese governmental regulatory documents across various levels of government, as well as industry self-regulatory documents. The dataset comprises five categories of documents: national laws, departmental regulations, 14th and 15th Five-Year Plan documents, local government policies and regulations, and industry self-regulatory documents. These materials were collected between November 2025 and March 2026 from China’s National Database of Laws and Regulations, local government databases, and industry association databases (OSF links).

The analysis identifies that video game monetisation in China is governed through a dual framework. On the one hand, it is embedded within a broader regulatory regime for media and cultural products, emphasising content moderation and consumer protection, particularly for minors. These policies aim to curb the cultural and ideological boundaries of games, mitigate players’ risks and regulate spending behaviours. On the other hand, the state actively promotes the development of “high-quality” games, esports, and game-adjacent services and technologies, primarily through performance-based funding schemes in which economic performance serves as a key eligibility criterion. These findings demonstrate how China’s governance of videogame monetisation simultaneously restricts and promotes commercial development.

We argue, however, that this governance framework contains two important imbalances. First, regulatory measures are predominantly organised around the protection of minors, extending standards designed for children to the broader player population, which may fail to protect either group effectively (Carter et al., 2025). Second, as in other jurisdictions such as Australia (Darbas, 2025), state support mechanisms rely heavily on performance-based funding criteria that favour commercially successful firms and high-profile projects, making it more difficult for smaller studios to compete for public support. Rather than reducing inequalities within the industry, these funding arrangements risk reinforcing existing market advantages.

By conceptualising monetisation as an object of governance, this paper shifts attention from individual regulatory interventions to the broader governance arrangements that shape commercial opportunities in the videogame industry. It contributes to scholarship on videogame governance, cultural policy, and platform regulation by demonstrating how regulation and industrial promotion work together to create the conditions in which videogame monetisation becomes possible. This paper also provides a solid foundation for understanding how monetisation has been regulated within existing frameworks and offers a starting point for rethinking what aspects of monetisation should be regulated and how regulatory approaches might be designed more effectively.

Jean Carl Nathaniel E. SUPAN, Who Owns Gaming?: Analyzing Gambling’s Semantic Displacement of Digital Games in Philippine Cultural Policy

Scholars tracking gaming-gambling convergence may assume once-separate activitiesare now bleeding into one another through loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and skin betting. In this framework, hybrid products escape traditional safeguards by evading strict legal definitions of gambling (Leahy 2022). The Philippine case inverts this entirely.

In Philippine statutory law, the word "gaming" belongs to a single state actor: the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR). Established under Presidential Decree (PD) No. 1869 and amended by Republic Act (RA) No. 9487, it holds a monopoly to "regulate and license all games of chance," alongside "sports gaming pools (basketball, football, lotteries, etc.)" — naming basketball and football directly within gambling's founding vocabulary.

By 2025, PAGCOR had labeled its 32.117 million registered online gambling users as "Filipino electronic gaming players" (Ager 2025). During the same period, 96% of Filipino internet users were playing video games (Statista 2025).

I conceptualize this institutional lock-in as semantic displacement: the structural exclusion of a stakeholder group from policy recognition because the vocabulary needed for their identity is already legally occupied. Building on Freeden's (1996) decontestation and Radaelli's (2023) semantic space occupation, I argue that semantic displacement operates structurally, not intentionally. PAGCOR did not deliberately target digital game developers. Instead, because the state defaults to "gaming" as a synonym for gambling, local creators are effectively silenced in policy discourse.

Domestic trade organizations like the Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP) systematically omit "gaming" from their vocabulary, using "game development" or "digital interactive media" instead. This functions as a form of nondecision-making (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), where entrenched institutional agendas suppress novel challenges by confining discourse to familiar, safe boundaries. Consequently, this narrows the space available to non-gambling developers.

I ground this in a qualitative document analysis of 28 Philippine government legal instruments spanning 1907 to 2025, read as active tools of governance (Asdal and Reinertsen 2022). It revealed that Philippine law built four parallel definitional tracks for "game" without ever constituting the term itself. These include (1) a dominant gambling track that entered statutory vocabulary through PD No. 1869 in 1983, (2) a professional sports track governed by the Games and Amusements Board since Executive Order No. 392 in 1951, (3) a school sports track anchored by the Palarong Pambansa (National Games) Act of 2013, and (4) a proposed folk-heritage framework via House Bill (HB) No. 7103. None of these accommodate digital games.

Two 2025 bills confirm this is not a hypothetical. House Bill (HB) No. 5812 names "gaming" as one of three enumerated forms of online gambling, alongside betting and wagering. HB No. 4732 defines "electronic games" outright as "virtual games of chance." While pending, both reveal the framework: gambling is primary, gaming its subordinate.

Hence, HB No. 3751's explanatory note explicitly states the "need to distinguish esports from gambling through official regulation and institutional recognition." Similarly, every esports bill filed since 2022 (HB Nos. 5401, 7411, 3751, 5608, and Senate Bill No. 2121) routes around the word "gaming" entirely. The Philippine Creative Industries Development Act (RA No. 11904) also calls digital games "Digital Interactive Media." This is nondecision-making again: debate that stays confined to safe boundaries because the boundary, gambling as the default category, was fixed before anyone arrived with standing to contest it.

To be sure, modern game design relies heavily on randomized loops, ranging from the gacha systems in Genshin Impact (miHoYo 2020) to the procedural card mechanics in roguelikes such as Balatro (LocalThunk 2024).1 This is not only a foreign concern: PinPow, an unreleased Filipino roguelike, builds its loop around RNG-driven mechanics (Rodriguez 2026). Similarly, Tambakan Taktiks, a deck-building roguelite reimagining a traditional barangay game2, layers card combat with dice-based chance (Bantilan 2026). Both are within PD 1869's "games of chance."

Exposing this semantic displacement does not mean I advocate for converging games and gambling. Where overt gambling already demands urgent regulatory attention, keeping the two sectors institutionally distinct remains the more practical path. However, institutional divergence alone does not resolve chance-based monetization risks within video games; it merely relocates the problem. Addressing these risks requires proactive institutional evaluation of the kind the Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) system or the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) already performs.

These findings carry implications far beyond the Philippine context. Most research on gaming and gambling regulation examines how different jurisdictions monitor convergence mechanisms (Xiao 2023). The Philippine case reveals a deeper layer: the fundamental assumption that gaming and gambling are independent categories requiring separate frameworks, was never institutionally achieved in the first place. This offers a necessary recalibration of Anglophonic and European convergence frameworks. At the same time, the primary regulatory challenge here is not policing an eroding border between two distinct industries. Rather, it is to build the foundational conceptual infrastructure necessary.

1. The Balatro case is directly informative here. Shortly after its February 2024 release, the Pan-European Game Information system (PEGI) reclassified the game from 3+ to 18+ for "prominent gambling imagery," temporarily pulling it from sale in several territories. Publisher Playstack successfully appealed in February 2025, and the game was reclassified at 12+, with PEGI acknowledging that its fantasy context distinguished it from actual gambling. The episode illustrates that the gaming-gambling definitional boundary operates not only at the institutional and policy level, as the Philippine case demonstrates, but at the product classification level in real time, across jurisdictions that nominally treat gaming and gambling as separate categories.

2. A barangay is the smallest unit of local government in the Philippines, roughly equivalent to a village, ward, or neighborhood district. The term also carries a broader cultural meaning, referring to traditional community life and the informal games historically played within it.

Mario Eduardo MARTINEZ GUARNIERI (remote), Beyond Disclosure: Youth Protection and the Regulation of Randomised Rewards in South Korea, Japan, and Brazil

INTRODUCTION

The convergence of gaming and gambling is most sharply visible in what the literature terms 'random reward mechanisms' (RRMs), paid features in which a random procedure yields a reward of uncertain value (Nielsen and Grabarczyk 2019). In most loot boxes and gacha systems, RRMs replicate the psychological architecture of gambling without satisfying its legal definition. Multiple study designs confirm that loot box spending correlates with problem gambling severity, with the association consistently stronger in adolescents than in adults (Zendle, Meyer, and Over 2019). This paper analyses South Korea, Japan, and Brazil as three successive points on a regulatory spectrum, each representing a distinct response to the problem of protecting minors from monetisation mechanics whose psychological harm potential is well-documented but whose legal classification remains contested. The analysis draws on primary legislation, self-regulatory instruments, enforcement data, and compliance evidence from industry responses to Brazil's Digital Child and Adolescent Act (Lei 15.211/2025, ECA Digital), in force from March 2026.

WHY MINORS REQUIRE SPECIFIC PROTECTION

Adolescents are not simply adults with smaller budgets. Incomplete prefrontal cortex development leaves them more susceptible to variable-ratio reinforcement, the scheduling mechanism deployed by slot machines and gacha systems alike (Casey, Getz, and Galvan 2008). Higher engagement with paid RRMs among minors is consistently linked to gambling-related cognitions, impulsivity, and problem gambling or gaming disorder symptoms (Spritzer et al. 2026; Garea et al. 2021),1 and the affected population is large. In Brazil, 78% of internet users aged 9 to 17 play online games.2

THREE REGULATORY MODELS

South Korea's trajectory illustrates the limits of voluntary approaches. The Korean Association of the Game Industry (K-GAMES) introduced probability-disclosure guidelines in 2017, but the scheme relied on the industry to monitor itself. Compliance reporting was biased and failures were attributed to overseas companies (Xiao and Park 2025). Sustained player protests eventually led to legislative action. In March 2023, Article 33 of the Game Industry Promotion Act was amended to require probability disclosure by law from March 2024, implemented through the Enforcement Decree (Presidential Decree No. 34114, January 2024) and the MCST Explanatory Note on Probability Information Disclosure (MCST 2024).3

The model remains a transparency regime with no restrictions on minors' access to probabilistic mechanics.

Japan's regulatory engagement with gacha predates the global loot box debate. In 2012, the Consumer Affairs Agency (CAA) banned complete gacha (kompugacha) under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, on the grounds that concealing probabilities and cumulative costs constituted deceptive promotion. The legal basis was consumer protection rather than gambling law (Kasahara and Hounslow 2012; Fujihara and Shibuya 2020). The 2016 CESA guidelines subsequently required individual drop-rate disclosure. Japan's approach eliminated the most deceptive gacha forms and established a transparency baseline, but left minors equally exposed to the underlying probabilistic mechanics.

Brazil's ECA Digital is the first major market to adopt a preventive harm-reduction approach to paid RRMs (Spritzer et al. 2026). Under Article 7 of Lei 15.211/2025, games directed at or accessible to minors may not offer features in which payment yields randomised items or advantages of uncertain value, covering cosmetic and functional rewards alike. The prohibition is grounded in the psychological harm mechanisms to which adolescents are developmentally vulnerable, among them variable-ratio reinforcement, near-miss effects, and reward anticipation under uncertainty, without requiring a determination that loot boxes constitute gambling. Sanctions include fines of up to 10% of company revenue and service suspension.4

The practical effects were immediate. In March 2026, Riot Games implemented mandatory CPF-based age verification and temporarily reclassified League of Legends and other titles as 18+ pending monetisation adaptation, an outcome that transparency-based regimes had not produced (G1 2026; Riot Games 2026). Community reception was divided, with some player communities framing the law as a censorship instrument rather than a child-protection measure (Kurtz, Freitas, and Lima 2026).5

CONCLUSIONS

The three cases reveal a progression not merely in stringency but in regulatory rationale. South Korean and Japanese frameworks treat the problem as one of information asymmetry, assuming that informed consumers make autonomous choices. That logic may be defensible for adults, but it is poorly calibrated for a population whose developmental profile makes it less able to moderate exposure to addictive reward schedules. Brazil's public health model shifts the question from whether players are informed to whether the underlying mechanism causes harm to this particular population.

Mapping the three jurisdictions onto their regulatory foundations of transparency, targeted prohibition of deceptive designs, and preventive harm reduction reveals that each level addresses a limitation in the previous one, while only the third directly confronts the developmental vulnerability of minors. Brazil's ECA Digital functions as a novel regulatory endpoint and as a natural quasi-experiment. As enforcement data accumulates, it will be possible to assess whether prohibition reduces harm or displaces it. The paper argues that the productive question for global policy is not whether paid RRMs constitute gambling, but which regulatory foundation best protects the population most demonstrably at risk.

Session 8 – Ethics

Eliya COHEN, Monetization Ethics in Games

Much of the literature on in-game purchases emphasizes addiction, gambling-like mechanics, deception, and exposure to children. Yet, many players who object to existing monetization strategies are adults who do not view themselves as addicted or misinformed. They often know the mechanics being used, understand the economic incentives facing developers, and still report feeling taken advantage of. This talk has two ambitions. First, I argue that opportunities for exploitation can arise even for adult players who are both fully informed and not addicted to games or their mechanics. Interestingly, these opportunities for exploitation are grounded in vulnerabilities that arise from ordinary structural features of gameplay and the natural power asymmetry between the designer and player. These are vulnerabilities we want to preserve, since they are part of what makes games meaningful and valuable. This pushes the onus onto design change rather than consumer vulnerability mitigation. Second, I hope to complicate the legal discussion around whether loot boxes meet statutory definitions of gambling in some US jurisdictions by interrogating one dominant reason why they do not.

Elena PETROVSKAYA (remote), Predatory to deceptive: understanding problematic microtransactions and who they might affect

Problematic microtransactions in games force players to choose between investing their time, attention or money to continue meaningful progress within a game, causing concern across player communities, academic research, and regulators. However, most countries have yet to effectively isolate and address the problem with this form of game monetisation, partly due to the nebulous nature of how these design elements are defined and conceptualised. In part, this leads to uncertainty around how they can be regulated in an efficient and player-centric way.

This presentation provides an overview of player-centric research into defining and understanding microtransactions, first charting a landscape of so-called ‘predatory’ microtransactions before going deeper into the qualities which make such design problematic — as well as how microtransactions tie to broader instances of deceptive and manipulative design. We will discuss the violation of player values, examine whether there can be such a thing as ‘vulnerable’ groups when it comes to microtransactions, and assess why it is important to study microtransactions through a player-led perspective, and best practices for doing this, drawing on examples of research with different demographics, such as adolescents in Japan and older adults in the UK and US. Finally, we will attempt to plot a path forward for regulation, bearing in mind the above and balancing player needs with feasibility and existing laws.

Wenyu ZHOU, Jack MCGARRIGLE, Robert HEIRENE, Simon DYMOND & Sally GAINSBURY, Dark Patterns Across the Gambling User Journey: Evidence from an Australian Pilot Audit

Most gambling research treats harm as a problem of individual vulnerability. A public-health view shifts the focus to the product. It argues that harm often comes not from misuse, but from the product working as designed (Wardle et al. 2024). Interface design is central here, because it can steer users and weaken autonomy (Gray et al. 2018; OECD 2022). Operators use two main mechanisms. A dark nudge exploits a cognitive bias to push a house-friendly action, such as a pre-ticked marketing consent or a countdown timer that manufactures urgency (Newall 2019). Sludge is the opposite: it adds friction to a protective action to discourage it, such as burying account closure behind email-only support (Sunstein 2022; Thaler 2018). Together these are called dark patterns. These concepts are well studied in privacy and e-commerce but rarely in gambling.

The question matters in Australia, which records the highest gambling losses per person in the world (Sathanapally et al. 2024), yet subtle interface manipulation falls largely outside its regulatory scope.

This paper reports early observations from the Australian pilot of an ongoing cross-national audit. The full Australian sample comprises 18 sites, 10 regulated and 8 unregulated, spanning wagering, lottery, and keno; here we draw on the regulated sites only, as the unregulated arm and full analysis remain in progress. We coded interface features against a gambling-specific taxonomy (McGarrigle et al. 2026), mapped onto a seven-phase user journey adapted from the Behavioural Insights Team (2022). We coded an instance only when we could reproduce the evidence with screenshots and navigation paths. We also measured structural friction with a Clicks Ratio (Mills et al. 2023). It compares the clicks needed to open an account against those needed to close one. A ratio below one means leaving is harder than joining. The audit is descriptive and does not estimate prevalence.

This study observed manipulative design practices across several regulated sites. In one instance of complex framing, one site defaulted to combining separate single bets into a multi-bet, requiring users to manually separate them. This bundling obscures the true odds, making the combined bet the path of least resistance.

Platforms also applied asymmetric friction to user actions. For example, one regulated site required only four clicks to open an account but significantly more effort to close it, introducing indirect pathways and alternative offers. Conversely, another platform made closure easier than registration, showing that this friction reflects a deliberate design choice rather than a technical or industry necessity. Similar asymmetry appeared between engagement and self-protection on a single platform: registration required just one click (implicitly accepting all terms), whereas setting a temporary self-exclusion required navigating a lengthy, multi-step confirmation process.

These preliminary findings illustrate that manipulative designs are embedded throughout the user journey, from betting to account management. Although these platforms are licensed, subtle interface manipulation of this kind falls largely outside the scope of current Australian regulation, which highlights clear targets for future policy. Future research will expand this audit cross-nationally and investigate similar dark patterns in video game economies, such as skin betting and cosmetic purchases.

Changsok YOO, Lihua QUAN & Yue DONG, How Loot-Box Dark Patterns Cause Service Failure and Erode Player Trust in Games

INTRODUCTION

Loot boxes are among the most lucrative and most contested monetization mechanisms in digital games and have long been studied as a gambling-like harm linked to problem gambling (Brooks and Clark 2022; Zendle et al. 2019). Yet most players who dislike loot boxes are not problem gamblers. Their bad experiences—opening a box only to receive a worthless duplicate, discovering that the odds were opaque, or feeling pressured by a limited-time offer—are better understood not as clinical harm but as consumer harm. Building on research that defines the loot box itself as a dark pattern (Chen et al. 2026; Petrovskaya and Zendle 2022), we reframe the problem these dark patterns create not only as a gambling-like or social harm but also as a service failure— a service whose manipulative design falls short of what players legitimately expect (Bitner et al. 1990; Smith et al. 1999)—eroding how players evaluate the game and its operator.

Two research streams inform this reframing yet have developed largely in isolation. In marketing and information systems, dark patterns reliably reduce trust and brand attitude through perceived manipulation and perceived unfairness (Kim et al. 2023; Riquelme et al. 2019; Voigt et al. 2021; Witte et al. 2025). In gambling psychology, the chance structure itself—near-misses, losses, and outcomes appraised as unfair—produces frustration, regret, and anger (Stange et al. 2016; Wu and Clark 2015). However, no study integrates these cognitive and affective mechanisms in the loot-box context, and, to the authors’ knowledge, none has modeled loot-box dark patterns as a service failure that erodes player trust and perceived service quality. We develop and test a structural model of loot-box dark patterns as a service failure eroding player trust and game attitude.

RESEARCH MODEL

We propose a stimulus–organism–response model (Figure 1) in which loot-box dark patterns operate as a service failure. Perceived loot-box dark patterns—a stimulus modeled as a bundle of six dimensions—shape two parallel organismic states: cognitive appraisals (perceived manipulation and perceived unfairness; H1) and negative emotions (frustration, regret, and betrayal; H2). Drawing on information manipulation theory, equity theory, and the service-failure literature, these appraisals in turn reduce service trust (H3) and game attitude—a perception of service quality (H4)—while a parallel affective route runs from negative emotions to service trust (H5) and game attitude (H6). Service trust and game attitude should, in turn, shape behavioral intentions—continuance, in-game spending, and recommendation. We will test the model with a cross-sectional online survey of approximately 300 adult game players in China, one of the largest loot-box and gacha markets, who have opened a loot box within the past six months. Each respondent will anchor all measures to a single self- nominated reference game—the game on which they spent the most on loot boxes (or opened most frequently, if they spent nothing)—selected from the top 16 loot-box games in China, with an open-ended option for other titles. We will code each game’s loot-box type and game characteristics as covariates for design heterogeneity. Perceived loot-box dark patterns will be modeled as a second-order formative construct comprising reflective dimensions (currency obfuscation, probability opacity, false scarcity, sunk-cost pressure, variable-reward framing, and pay-to-win) adapted from established deceptive-design scales and taxonomies (Brignull 2010; Mathur et al. 2019). Perceived manipulation, perceived unfairness, negative emotions, service trust, game attitude, and behavioral intentions will be captured with established multi-item reflective scales. To focus on ordinary game players, we will exclude problematic gamers using the PGSI-SF index (Volberg and Williams 2012). Data will be analyzed with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), assessing the measurement model (reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, formative VIF and outer weights) and the structural model (bootstrapped path and mediation effects). Data collection and analysis will be completed before the conference.

The study offers three contributions. Conceptually, it reframes loot-box harm as a service failure and a consumer-trust problem that complements the dominant problem-gambling lens, treating the loot box as a bundle of dark patterns rather than a single chance-based product. Theoretically, this study integrates the cognitive route established in marketing research and the affective route established in gambling research under a single higher-order account—service failure—in which manipulative design violates the legitimate expectations players hold toward a game service. Practically, it shows publishers and regulators how exploitative monetization can backfire on trust and loyalty across ordinary players. Beyond informing regulation, these findings can help firms recognize the potential losses hidden in manipulative monetization and build more sustainable business models.

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Get in touch at leon@beclaws.org

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