DOSP-VHR-003375 | SBO Gameable

The GAM(E)(A)BLE project pursues unique interdisciplinary strategic research on the blurring lines between gaming and gambling among teenagers.

The lines between gaming and gambling are becoming increasingly blurred in (online) games that are popular among children and young teenagers (De Cock et al., 2018). The growing amount of new forms of easily accessible online games with gambling elements such as slot machines showing features one can win to proceed in the game, rises the concern that minors are being progressively exposed to gambling.

As Hardoon and Derevensky (2001:211) already labelled offline gambling as “the most frequently reported potentially addictive behaviour engaged in by children and adolescents”, the societal need to study exposure to online and therefore less controllable gambling related activities is high. The gray zone in which games that include non-monetary forms of gambling such as free casino games operate due to the lack of an obligatory strict classification system, makes it hard for parents and children to see potential risks.

The convergence of gambling and digital gaming is a recent phenomenon, triggering a significant expansion of new forms of online gambling activities that are more covertly and unrestrictedly than traditional land-based, offline gambling. These so-called ‘simulated gambling games’ do not require monetary payments, and hereby escape legal, regulatory scrutiny (Gainsbury, Hing, Delfabbro, & King, 2014).

With their lootboxes, skin lotteries, the use of skins as wagers for casino and card games, they do, however, share similar structural characteristics with gambling (Griffiths, King, & Delfabbro, 2013), with a realistic emulation of financial gambling (Gainsbury et al., 2014), that either induce people to play/gamble or are inducements to continue playing/gambling (Griffiths et al., 2013, p. 328; Parke & Griffiths, 2006, p. 151).

The rationale for this project is that these novel, emergent simulated gambling games might pose a significant societal risk which scope tends to be underestimated given their covert nature as ‘disguised’ in socially-accepted types of video games and apps. This is fortified by the lack of any legal, regulatory scrutiny, and the broader context of increased normalization and liberalisation of gambling practices (Macey & Hamari, 2018).

In particular, there is a scientific urgency to study early exposure to simulated gambling activities (King, Delfabbro, Kaptsis, & Zwaans, 2014, p. 305), considering that gambling behaviour starts already in pre-adolescence (Bellginger et al., 2014; Gupta & Derevensky, 1998; Vitaro & Wanner, 2011). Because simulated gambling activities are typically represented in youth-friendly games classified as all-ages entertainment (King et al., 2014), without any regulatory scrutiny, age restriction (King, Delfabbro, & Griffiths, 2010), or (parental) advisory labeling, they are likely to pose particular risk to youth. Studies on simulated gambling have only recently begun to be published (King & Delfabbro, 2016, p. 200) and due to the recency of the phenomenon, no studies have been following young simulated gamblers during their developmental stage as adolescents.

There are good reasons to focus on early adolescents, given that first gambling experiences are likely to occur online (Griffiths, King, & Delfabbro, 2012), and the fact that simulated gambling might yield similar experiences to monetary gambling (Gainsbury, King, Russell, Delfabbro, & Hing, 2017, p. 337) which may form risks to make this young age cohort more likely to gamble later in life (Gainsbury et al., 2014; Lopez-Gonzalez & Griffiths, 2016).