Adolescents who play video games with loot boxes and other gambling-like elements are more likely to engage in real-life gambling

There has long been concern about videogames introducing elements that mimic gambling behaviour. It started with loot boxes and then moved on to skins, which are cosmetic items in videogames that can later be bought and sold on a secondary market.

In recent years, it has been well studied that ambling-like elements could lead to playing with real money in the future, especially considering that these gambling-like elements also involve real money. Here, the authors are trying to determine whether a young person who starts by playing video games (gaming platforms) might later move on to gambling with real money (gambling platforms). There is a vast amount of literature on this topic, but very little based on longitudinal studies, as is the case here. I think this is one of the novel aspects of the study.

In this study, over the course of a year, more than 500 adolescents in Belgium were followed, being given the same survey at the beginning and at the end of that period. The aim was to understand whether those who engage more with these types of elements in videogames are also more likely to gamble. But does this mean that one leads to the other? Or could the relationship go the other way around: perhaps those who gamble with real money are also more likely to start playing videogames that contain these elements. Or maybe there is no direct relationship at all, in the sense that a third variable could explain the link: some people might simply be drawn to these types of elements and enjoy both videogames and real-money gambling.

The study shows that the relationship that happens is the most obvious one, where playing a videogame with gambling-like elements comes first, leading on to real-money gambling. This is an important finding because it indicates that such videogames need to be firmly regulated to prevent this transition from one type of play to another.

As for the limitations, this is a study based on self-reported data, meaning that participants completed a survey either at school or later at home via a link. This introduces a range of potential biases, including memory biases or social desirability bias, which could lead participants to underreport or even overreport their gambling, depending on what they think is acceptable among their peers. In studies measuring behaviour, this limitation—whether the reported behaviour accurately reflects reality—is always present.