Abstract
Politicians, health officials, and scholars have argued that loot boxes (virtual items that can be redeemed to receive randomly selected other virtual items) in video games function as a type of gambling, and research has shown that loot box purchasing is correlated with gambling behaviors. Whether loot box purchasing shares other characteristics with gambling such as risk and protective factors, however, has not been explored empirically. This study uses data from large, random samples of American youth to regress both gambling and loot box purchasing (as well as purchasing other downloadable content) on previously established risk and protective factors of gambling. Results suggest that, aside from gender differences, loot boxes share little in common with traditional forms of gambling. The data also indicate that youth gamers are less likely to have purchased loot boxes in comparison to previously estimated adult gamer prevalence rates.
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The data used are available through the University of Delaware Center for Drug and Health Studies.
Notes
Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online platform for crowdsourcing survey participation. Researchers can use the service to offer a payment in exchange for completing a survey as a method of recruiting participants. Research suggests that samples collected through this platform are not necessarily generalizable to the overall population (Walters et al. 2018).
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The data used in this research were collected by the University of Delaware Center for Drug and Health Studies as part of a study supported by the Delaware Health Fund and by the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health, Delaware Health and Social Services.
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DeCamp, W. Loot Boxes and Gambling: Similarities and Dissimilarities in Risk and Protective Factors. J Gambl Stud 37, 189–201 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-020-09957-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-020-09957-y