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I have a confession. I’m not a gamer. Or so I thought. I was having this conversation with a good colleague of mine, sat outside the train station in a surprisingly sunny Sheffield: “Really” he said, looking puzzled, “not even something on your phone?” “oh well, now you come to mention it…..”. That was the point I realised that perhaps I was a gamer after all, just a particular sort. The sort who has one or two favourite games on their phone and pulls them out when they are bored (I reached my highest score on one game on a particularly long and tedious flight). I was also, until the COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel, an avid puzzler—Sudoku being the poison of choice—timing myself on how quickly I could complete this on my commute home. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that games, especially digital games, were more of a feature of my life than I’d ever given them credit for. I remembered playing Space Invaders on my brother’s hand-me-down console; getting my first Donkey Kong handset for Christmas (both long before we ever had a computer in the house); sitting with my big brother and playing Sonic when he got his first Mega Drive or the long nights playing Mario Kart after a session at our college bar (another confession, not a lot of work went on at University). We got (and quickly discarded) a Nintendo Wii and had far too many nights embarrassing our kids playing SingStar. Maybe I was a gamer after all? But the gaming world, the serious digital gaming world, seemed different somehow. Titles like Counter Strike, League of Legends, Defence of the Ancients just weren’t part of my gaming repertoire. And their surrounding communities were certainly not something in which I was embedded: a community which has its own language, its own rules, norms and cultures. Somehow this seemed impenetrable to me and that sense of impenetrability hasn’t necessarily diminished in the course of researching this book.

I come, instead, to this topic as someone who spent years researching gambling behaviours, looking at who does what and why and thinking about the impact of all of this. It was through gambling that gaming, as an object of study, came onto my radar. I was possibly one of many gambling researchers who previously never gave much thought to issues of much where gaming stops and gambling begins, who perhaps originally saw hard and fast distinctions between these things. Games were something to be played with friends and family (because that was my experience). Gambling was different. It involved businesses, corporations and money. It was conducted in different spaces and places, in different spheres. It was distinct. Yet this, I’ve come to realise, was lazy thinking on my behalf and increasingly the last couple of decades show that the boundaries of this distinction are breaking down, if they ever existed at all.

Several of my academic colleagues have highlighted the increasing convergence between digital games and gambling (c.f. Gainsbury, 2019; King et al., 2010). By this they mean that things that look and feel very much like gambling, that might be psychologically-akin to gambling, are an increasingly present feature within digital games (Drummond & Sauer, 2018). Loot boxes being the obvious example. Loot boxes are essentially treasure chests within games that you pay to open, with either real money or in-game money, which may or may not contain a high value prize. They look and feel a lot like gambling because the mechanics are really familiar to us—we lay down money (be it real or virtual) on the chance of obtaining a prize. But there is more too it than this, gambling-like features are threaded through the DNA of some games and whole new hybrid-industries have developed (social casino games, daily fantasy sports as obvious examples). Furthermore, games don’t just borrow gambling-like mechanics and turn them into things like loot boxes, some games now embed gambling within the heart and souls of their design. It’s the Diamond Resort and Casino which opened with much fanfare within Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V in 2019—where players can go and spend their hard-earned dollars (either real or GTA dollars) on the tables or the slots. It’s the wagering of tokens on the outcome of battles or spinning of roulette wheels to gain treasure that exist within games like DotA2 (Zanescu et al., 2020) or the slot-machine style function that is so central to games like Coin Master (whereby you have to spin a slot machine to perform an action within the game). This is big business and has, aptly, been called the “gambling turn” (Johnson & Brock, 2019) with researchers tracing how play has been monetised and the conditions that make this highly likely to continue (the cost of game production, the over-supply of the market, the changing nature and motivations of who is producing content, to name but a few).

Drawing on this, many excellent people have written on the structural similarities between gambling-like mechanics within games and “real” gambling, discussing the impact this might have on how people play both in the long term and short term (c.f. Drummond & Sauer, 2018; King et al., 2010). However, what I’m interested in are processes. When ruminating on this, I couldn’t help but wonder if by focusing on whether certain features of games (like loot boxes) are akin to gambling or not we may be missing some broader trends.Footnote 1 This, of course, does not mean that considering whether things like loot boxes are gambling or not is unimportant. It is, especially as so many children have access to and use these products. We regulate gambling for good reason and we naturally worry if it appears that new technologies are somehow circumventing these regulations (and governments are naturally interested in potential lost tax dollars along with other impacts). But, as someone interested in process and the sociological and historical context of developments, I found myself asking whether there was something more we should also be considering. How did we get into a situation where we (and by “we” I mean myself and academic colleagues along with regulators and policymakers) seem surprised to find that gaming and gambling are converging? Is this any different to what has gone before and, if so, in what ways? What are the processes of change that have led us to our current circumstances whereby whether a loot box is more akin to a lottery or a kinder egg is debated in the UK Parliament? I’m interested in the intersection between gaming and gambling, historically, conceptually and practically, understanding and tracing how these things have co-developed, have borrowed from and influenced each other and the ramifications this has for thinking about and understanding risk and harms. All of this requires attention to the broader social, cultural, political and economic forces at play.

This is what this book is about. I trace the origins of digital games and explore how viewing them as cultural artefacts, as something that has always taken inspiration from the societies, cultures and contexts in which they are embedded, makes the “gambling turn” less surprising, especially given the growing normalisation of gambling and tech-inspired boom that underpins both sectors (Chapter 2). I map out some of the key controversies and debates surrounding particular forms of gambling-like mechanics, like loot boxes, skin gambling, social casino, and trace some key themes, especially the roles and actions of corporations in promoting and cross-selling gaming and gambling products (Chapter 3). I’m not attempting to answer questions about whether loot boxes are gambling or not but do present new insight from children and young people themselves—who I had the pleasure of spending time with in the summer of 2019 (Chapter 4) and look at the implications of what they told me about what it means to play and how commodification of play complicates our understandings of it.

When I started this book, I thought it was mainly about the intersection between games and gambling. As I’ve written it, it’s become clear that it’s also, partly, about attention. Or rather our lack of it and what happens when we don’t take the time to understand the fuller processes of recent developments or to situate them within their historical contexts. Had we done so, we might have seen that games and gambling exist in a co-dependent way, with one borrowing and adapting from the other, and that processes we see today are a notable amplification of this. We may have noted that whenever communication technology develops, gambling adapts, capitalising upon new opportunities and that the gaming industry does the same. What we witness today is the exponential growth of those trends. And we may expand our focus beyond whether something is gambling or not gambling to instead ask about the conditions and context that make something more or less worrying, more or less harmful, and more or less in need of action.

Before I go further, some caveats. First, throughout this book, I tend to talk about digital games. Others may call them video games or computer games but as Aphra Kerr (2006) has cogently argued games exist across many platforms and the term digital games embraces arcade, computer, console and mobile games. I talk about all these different types of games throughout the following chapters and thus use digital games as an all-encompassing descriptor. And while we are on terminology, I use the terms gaming and gambling in distinct ways. In English, we are fortunate to have different terms to describe games and to describe gambling (broadly meaning betting or wagering). Other languages have no such distinction—in Swedish gambling may be described as hasardspel (games of chance; spel being the word for games) or in French as Le Jeux D’argent (games of money; jeux also being the word for games). Notably, the verb in these descriptions is that of games, potentially recognising the interplay between the two. But in English, these two terms have come to be viewed as discreet, despite repeated attempts by the “gambling” industry to reposition itself as a softer, more playful form of activity: The American Gaming Association is not the trade body for digital games or any other kind of games industry, but rather the trade body of the American casino industry. Put simply, when I talk about gaming, I do not mean gambling—that is the wagering of something of value on an uncertain outcome for a potential prize. Likewise, I tend to use the phrase gambling-like if we are talking about something that looks and feels very much like my working definition of gambling but that tends not to be regulated as a gambling activity.

Second, the contents of this book are intended to provoke thought, discussion and debate. I’m reminded of a quote from E. H. Carr, the eminent historian who said: “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them; it is he who decides to which facts to give to the floor, in what order and in what context” (Carr, 1961: 9). This book follows that approach, curating examples to highlight certain debates or themes. It is not, and should not be viewed, as exhaustive on each topic, but rather hopes to act as primer for broader debate, especially for those where this maybe their first engagement with the topic. To this end, where I’ve noted the actions of particular companies, or examples of particular games, these should not be viewed as the only companies or games displaying these kinds of behaviours but rather that they have been “given the floor” to exemplify a point. It is not my intention to single out particular corporations but rather to use certain case studies to illustrate broader actions in which many, many others also engage.

Third, as a British-based researcher, there is a notable British bias in the text. Where appropriate, I’ve made some cross-national comparisons, but these too are broadly limited to North America and Australia. I have little knowledge of gambling and gaming in other jurisdictions, notably Asia or Africa. Thus, there is a systematic bias towards Anglophone countries in my writing and thus in my arguments.

Fourth, I recognise that both the gambling and gaming “industries” are exceptionally diverse, encompassing a vast range of products and producers. They are massive, multi-billion pound industries, supporting and spawning further industries in a complex and growing ecosystem. The gambling industry is estimated to be worth over $440 billion per year and the gaming industry over $150 billion per year, with greater growth in percent terms forecast for the gaming industry in coming years. Beneath these figures lies a vast network of producers ranging from large-scale global providers to niche, small independent organisations and entrepreneurs, each with a different ethos and organising principles. In gambling, this ranges from society lotteries to global corporations like Entain (formerly GVC), the parent group for more than 30 different high-profile gambling corporations (like Ladbrokes, PartyPoker). Gaming is the same, ranging from small-scale independent producers (including talented amateurs) to the mega triple-A games from major studios (think Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty), supported by world-leading publishing houses. And of course, with such a diverse landscape, there are varying practices. Not all games include monetisation practices or loot boxes. Mobile games, some triple-A games, yes but others in the industry are actively disdainful of this practice. However, their inclusion in many of the most high-profile and popular games around increase their ubiquity. When I talk about gaming industries and their use of gambling-like practices, I’m talking about those producers who make use of these functions—it is not my intention to tar all with the same brush.

Finally, this book is time bound. One of the people who reviewed the original proposal noted how hard it is to look at a topic like this because it’s so fast paced, so fast moving. They were not wrong. When I first developed this proposal, it was mainly going to focus on social casinos, a new phenomena that many were then concerned about. Life got in the way and it took nearly five years to complete this book—by which point we were talking about skin gambling, esports and loot boxes. By the time this book is published we may well have moved onto the next thing (possibly cryptocurrencies or developments related to pending 5G networks—these things are already happening; as I write there is an industry conference happening on the benefits of blockchain for gambling). So, for complete transparency, the primary research on which this book draws was conducted in 2019, mainly over the summer, and main writing was undertaken in the summer of 2020. By the time it is published, it will likely be 2021 and regardless of COVID-related developments, we will almost certainly have new preoccupations with regard to gaming and gambling. My request is that we don’t forget the old ones.