As Apple launch their Arcade games store, this safeguarding podcast explores and explains some of the nefarious practices that some online games companies use to exploit children and expose them to harmful and illegal online gambling.
We’ve provided a full (lightly edited for legibility) transcript of the podcast below for those who can’t or don’t want to use podcasts and prefer to read.
Neil Fairbrother
So welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast where we talk about all things to do with safeguarding children in the online digital context.
The online digital context comprises three areas; technology, law, and ethics or culture with child safeguarding right in the centre of this Venn Diagram. It encompasses all stakeholders between the child using a smartphone and the content or person online that they’re interacting with.
Today’s podcast delves into the world of online gaming. Our guest will guide us through the apparently nefarious practices that some games developers use to exploit to children. Welcome Vicki Shotbolt, CEO and Founder of Parents’ Zone.
Can you give us a resumé, a brief resumé and background about yourself Vicki, please and also Parents’ Zone.
Vicki Shotbolt
I founded Parents’ Zone way back in 2004. My background is working with children’s charities and with parenting charities. I guess the best way to think of Parents’ Zone is to think of us as an organization that helps families navigate their way through the social impact of technology and the changes that that’s brought to family life.
I also, for my sins, sit on the UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) and Chair the Digital Resilience Working Group. So I spend a lot of my time thinking about the levers that we have, whether they’re legal levers or parenting tactics or support that we can offer to children directly, to help them get the best out of tech.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Thank you for that. Parents’ zone recently published a report called “Rip Off Games”. What was the background, the backdrop, the inspiration for that research project?
Vicki Shotbolt
That project came as lots of our projects do from young people. We spend a lot of our time listening to the young people that have lived experience of experiencing harm online and this particular report follows one that we did on “Skin gambling”. The reason we did a report on skin gambling was because a young person came to us and said there’s this thing called skin gambling and it’s really not good and you should do some work around it.
Having done that, we developed a community of young online gamers that talk to us and once again they said to us, you should really look at the financial model that sits underneath gaming because we don’t think it’s very good. Basically, that’s what this report set out to do.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now the EU Kids Online project run by Sonia Livingstone from the LSE identified four main types of online harms children face: aggressive, sexual, values and commercial. Commercial risks breaks down into advertising or embedded marketing, personal data, exploitation and gambling. Does your research backup those classifications?
Vicki Shotbolt
Yes, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the classifications. I mean that framework of online harm is one that we’ve been using for a very long time now, I think about 11 years it came out in 2008. And it’s interesting to see that as a framework, it’s still relevant. The issue with it is that the world changes very quickly online and it’s the detail that really matters and the new ways that people are finding for those harms to manifest themselves.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, maybe we can explore some of those later. Computer games are already on the restricted product list in the UK, along with fireworks and now gold cigarettes and all the other things, and also we have a Pan European Game Information classification system or PEGI as it’s known I think that has got six, seven, twelve, sixteen and eighteen age certificates whereby children under those ages can’t buy those games. That’s the principle behind it.
Now that may have worked when people were buying games which were stored on physical media such as DVD or Blu-Ray discs from a store because the staff could see the people buying and could perhaps ask for some kind of ID, but you can’t do that online. Or how can you do that online because the staff aren’t there. How do you enforce those age restrictions online?
Vicki Shotbolt
Well, there a couple of things there. I mean, the first is that actually lots of children played games that weren’t designed for their age range even when they weren’t able to buy them because lots of parents were happy to buy games for their children, whether or not they were necessarily within the tight age range. So there’s an issue there about how we feel about online games ratings generally.
The situation now, which is a gatekeeper question I guess, it’s the question about how do you make sure that young people aren’t accessing games that aren’t designed for them? Of course it’s more difficult when you don’t go into a shop and buy them. I mean that’s the real answer. The only obvious response to that is to say that you have to have age verification, which is a whole other world of pain if you decide to go down age gating the Internet. So this is a very complicated problem.
Neil Fairbrother
It is. Do you think we need to have an age verification or age estimation system?
Vicki Shotbolt
No, no. I think those organizations that seek technological solutions to social problems are looking in the wrong direction. Lots of research shows, including our own research that we did with the Oxford Internet Institute, that technological solutions like age verification don’t protect children from adverse experiences. So we need to be looking in a different direction. And actually in the case of gaming, there are other ways of fixing this problem.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. There are areas of government thinking that would seem to think otherwise, because age verification is being introduced to help prevent children from seeing legal adult pornography. Is there some lack of joined up thinking here or simply wrong thinking?
Vicki Shotbolt
I think we have to be really, really careful. Gambling isn’t at the moment illegal in all circumstances for all children under the age of 18, there are legal ways for children to gamble at the moment. So the situation is far, far more nuanced when we’re talking about gambling and children online.
The report that we did, The Rip Off Games, that was looking at a funding model of gaming, which has all sorts of other problems. Problems around fairness, openness, transparency, your consumer rights. These are not simple age gating issues. These are more complicated than that.
I think with the porn age verification, it’s a different deal. That’s the same sort of age verification that we’ve seen for a long time on gambling sites and we’re saying this stuff is stuff that children under the age of 18 should not see. That’s an offline legal situation that we already have in the UK and all we’re doing is putting in one further mechanic to make sure that they can’t see it online. It’s very different to educating the whole Internet
Neil Fairbrother
Games used to be sold on disc as we said earlier and despite the impressive capacity of Blu-Ray and other disk technologies, there were nonetheless limits in terms of their size, they were of a finite size and therefore they were limited in duration and capability and it was difficult to add to them. It was difficult to extend them. There was only so much you can do. But with cloud-based technology using virtualized servers that can be spun up instantaneously to cope with either increased demand or to provide game play expansion, games can now become unlimited in size, almost infinite in a sense. How has that affected game play and the risks that children get exposed to?
Vicki Shotbolt
So the issue that we looked particularly at in our report was around the funding model. One of the things that’s happened now that games aren’t something that you buy in a complete format from a shop, is that games can iterate and you can update games and you can introduce what’s known as a “Freemium” model. You can introduce all sorts of monetization techniques within a game.
The problem with cloud-based gaming is that it doesn’t have an endpoint, it can continue to have monetization techniques introduced at any point during your gaming and that’s fundamentally changed the relationship between buying a game that’s done, finished, you know what you’re getting to subscribing to a game that can keep changing.
Neil Fairbrother
So you sign up to us one set of terms and conditions, assuming that you can read them and can even understand them because often they are pages and pages of legalese and most adults don’t understand them let alone children. But nonetheless you’ve signed up to one set of things, the game is updated, you will probably get a notification to say the terms and conditions have been updated, but once again there will be pages and pages of legalese that no one ever reads, everyone thinks okay and you are exposed to a completely different framework.
Vicki Shotbolt
I wouldn’t say that it was the terms and conditions that change particularly. The terms and conditions probably stay the same because they are exactly as you described; pages and pages of legalese that the chances of a young gamer actually reading is fairly low. Actually, that’s harsh to young people. The chances of anybody reading them is fairly low.
The issue with the game changing is that perhaps the game is issued in the first place and it’s really glitchy so it’s not actually even ready to be released, but young gamers are encouraged to buy early because that makes them feel as though they are the early adopters. That’s what young people are, but actually they’re buying something that is not fit for purpose so then they have to wait for the updates to make the game even playable.
Or the game developer continually releases products that they make super, super attractive to young people throughout the course of play. So they introduce limited edition “skins” that young people want to buy. So endless shopping opportunities are introduced into games. You didn’t use to be able to do that when your game had to be finished and ready to go to a shop. That’s not the situation anymore.
Neil Fairbrother
Is there a trading standards issue here with the launch of unready games, games unfit for purpose?
Vicki Shotbolt
We think there is. We absolutely think there is, but the games industry gets quite weasely because it says, this is out for testing and you’re getting an early version of the game and it’s really all about part of the UX experience that we’re refining. So they find ways to make it appear that actually it’s okay to release something that’s a bit glitchy. We don’t think it is.
Neil Fairbrother
And that is a very fair point. Now when it comes to these games and the financial model, there is some particular terminology that is becoming more well known. It’s new terminology, it’s a whole new taxonomy, new way of speaking. And you’ve mentioned some of these things already, but you’ve got microtransactions, you’ve got something called DLC, loot boxes, player trading, skins amongst other things. What are these?
Vicki Shotbolt
All of those terms are basically split into two groups. So the microtransaction terms are really just about purchases with potentially very low value. So you might be buying something that’s only 69 pence. So it’s a microtransaction, it’s not a big shopping transaction. It’s a small in-game transaction. So that’s the kind of financial lingo, if you like.
The skins, the loot boxes, those refer to virtual items. So a skin is just a virtual item that you use to dress up, usually your virtual gun, that’s what a skin is. A loot box, again, is something that contains a virtual item. The issue with loot boxes is that you don’t know what’s going to be inside your loot box. So you opened up your loot box and you might get the thing that you want, but you might not.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes, the Gambling Commission has decided that loot boxes aren’t gambling as the rewards or the loot remain in the game and don’t have any monetary value beyond that game. But you say in your report that some loot boxes can themselves be gambled on third party sites and while the Gambling Commission recognizes this, they say it’s too difficult to regulate. So if it’s too difficult to regulate, does that mean that children can’t be protected from getting into debt, perhaps from gambling with their loot box winnings and then coerced into participating in offline Illegal activities such as county lines?
Vicki Shotbolt
That’s quite a long stretch, I have to say, all the way through to county lines criminality. So if I focus on the area that we know most about, which is should this be gambling or should this not be gambling? As far as we’re concerned, loot boxes are a form of gambling and the quickest, simplest thing that we could do in regulation is to recognize virtual currencies as currencies. The minute we do that, then all of those sites that are using loot boxes would have to consider themselves gambling sites and that would change a lot.
Neil Fairbrother
When you say we have to recognize virtual currencies as currencies, what do you mean by that? How would that happen? What needs to take place?
Vicki Shotbolt
It would simply mean that something that you could trade, something that you could purchase and then trade would become a currency, and that’s a simple change in legislation. What the Gambling Commission at the moment says is you have to be able to cash out your virtual item. So skin gambling is counted as gambling because you can cash out your winnings for actual real money. Whereas with loot boxes they say you don’t do that. You’re just buying something that’s a virtual item and that’s a straightforward transaction.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you talked about skins and skins are a way of a dressing up if you will, either yourself or something that you own a gun, you add more features to a gun for example, or a car or a motorbike or you have particular clothing I guess you could put your avatar into. How does gambling of that work? I can understand the purchase of it, but how do you gamble with a skin?
Vicki Shotbolt
Okay, you’re going to have to stick with me on this because this is quite complicated if you’re not a PC gamer. Skin gambling tends to happen pretty much exclusively in the context of PC gaming. You buy a skin through your game that you enjoy playing, could be any sort of virtual item. You then take those virtual items into a third party site and the third party site, which would look very familiar to anybody that’s looked at a casino site, that’s kind of what they look like if you visit them, but you’re using the skins that you’ve purchased in your game to gamble on that third party skin gambling site.
Neil Fairbrother
Oh, okay. So you’re using your skin as a form of virtual currency, so you can put your fancy new suit on number seven red.
Vicki Shotbolt
Exactly, exactly.
Neil Fairbrother
But it’s cost you money to buy that fancy new suit in the first place and that’s where the money might be lost?
Vicki Shotbolt
Exactly. And you can then take your winnings back into a site to cash your winnings in. So you start with a skin on a gaming site, you take it into a skin gambling site, you gamble with it, you win more skins or more likely lose your skins. But you may win more skins and then you take that into a third party site again to cash out. So it comes back out as traditional money.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now how do children pay for this? Because if you’re under 18 you can’t have a credit card, you can have a debit card I think above a certain age, 13 so is it all debit card based? If a child doesn’t have a debit card, they can’t do this. Is there some other way they pay?
Vicki Shotbolt
There are multiple ways that children can do this. Children are very enterprising is one thing, and parents and relatives are very generous so they can do it because you can buy gaming cards. You can go into a supermarket and just buy a card to spend on your favourite game. Your relatives and parents are probably not going to be particularly troubled about you spending money so they’ll give you cash.
If a child says to a parent, I want to buy something for my game, I don’t think most parents first thought would be, “Oh, I hope you’re not going to gamble with your skin!”. They probably have no concept that it’s even possible. So they get money from all sorts of ways. It’s not as hard as I think adults think
Neil Fairbrother
Your colleague, Lulu Fremont, wrote a blog entry for Parenting for a Digital Future and in this blog entry she says that “skin gambling represents a generational knowledge gap. Under our noses skin gambling is becoming a normalized part of children’s vocabulary and gaming activities. Nearly 500,000 UK children aged 13 to 17 participate in them in some form”, which is an astonishingly high number for such young ages, particularly the 13 age range, especially as the minimum age for most gambling in the UK is 18. There one or two exceptions, which you mentioned earlier, the National Lottery is one example where I think 16 year olds can play. So should skin gambling be explicitly cited as being illegal for anyone under 18?
Vicki Shotbolt
We would say so, yes. And the reason we think it’s important, apart from questions about whether somebody under the age of 18 ought to be gambling, is that as long as it’s not recognized as gambling, the sites aren’t being regulated. And that’s the key thing. So at best you’re being ripped off, at worst you are potentially ending up with a problem relationship with gambling.
Neil Fairbrother
You refer in your report to the “Steam community market’ and also “Valve”. Obviously in good old Victorian engineering you get valves and you get steam, but we’re not talking Victorian engineering here, we’re talking about 21st century gaming, so what is the Steam community and what’s the connection with Valve or isn’t there a connection?
Vicki Shotbolt
There is a connection. Steam is just the platform on which young people buy games and trade skins. Valve is a corporation that owns Steam.
Neil Fairbrother
Ah, okay. So a bit like an app store for games?
Vicki Shotbolt
Exactly. It’s exactly like that.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now in your report, you say that “…third party betting sites are connected to Steam’s API, the open Application Programming Interface, which enables users to access their skins from elsewhere, gamble with them, and then transfer any winnings back into their Steam account”, which as much as you’ve described a short while ago. You go on to say that “And with the third party sites offering instant cash payments in exchange for skins, this network of interconnected, but unaffiliated platforms allow players to use skins like chips in a casino and none of these sites including Steam, operate a robust age verification system”. Now earlier you said you don’t think that age verification is part of the solution, but here you are implying that it might be?
Vicki Shotbolt
There we’re saying the age verification doesn’t happen. They don’t do any checks to see whether or not you’re over 18. So whether or not we think that would be the most effective way to clamp down on this, I didn’t think it would be because it wouldn’t get around the problem of each of those sites doing one part of the activity, but no one site is responsible for all of it.
So there’s nothing illegal about selling games or selling skins. There’s nothing illegal about gambling on a site, but never taking your money out. That’s not classified as gambling. There’s nothing illegal about letting you cash out your skins. These are three different sides, three different parts of the chain and the only becomes illegal when you put all three together.
Neil Fairbrother
And is the industry constructed so that they are deliberately kept apart?
Vicki Shotbolt
It’s difficult to know. I don’t Steam is going to go into the business of gambling. They’d be bonkers to do that. Skin gambling sites, obviously they are set up for gambling, but they’re entirely independent of Steam. I think what’s difficult to figure out is why there aren’t more blocks in this chain. So Steam could deal with this really, really easily by not making it possible for people to connect into that API. You shut the API down, then problem would’ve gone away, problem solved. Payment providers could deal with it really, really easily. They know where this money’s being cashed out, but they choose not to do anything about it.
I don’t think it’s a connected industry. I think it’s each part of the industry saying we just don’t want to know. We don’t know what’s happening elsewhere in the chain because if we know that we might have to do something about it.
Neil Fairbrother
So here’s another term then, what is grinding? It sounds quite horrendous!
Vicki Shotbolt
Grinding is just playing the game for a really long time in order to get to the next level. That’s all it is really. Putting your hours in on a game.
Neil Fairbrother
And what’s the problem with it?
Vicki Shotbolt
The problem with it is that, when you talk to young gamers, the big problem with it is it is boring. Nobody wants to have to grind away at a game for a long time in order to get to the next level. Gamers would tell us that the reason some games developers put it in place is because they can then offer you ways to avoid the grind. And those ways usually involve spending some money.
Neil Fairbrother
That’s a nice segue into the next question or two. Your report says that gaming platforms use “psychological manipulation” when it comes to microtransactions. And you highlight “Loss Aversion”, “Reward Removal” and “Fun Pain” as three particular examples. What are those three, Loss Aversion, Reward Removal and Fun Pain?
Vicki Shotbolt
Loss Aversion is as it sounds really. Gamers do not like to be seen to be losing, so they [gaming companies] incorporate techniques for you to avoid the experience of losing so you can get around levels. For example, you can get around doing difficult things in a game just by going “Oh I’ll buy a loot box and I’ll get better at it and therefore I’ll be able to win”. That’s the Loss Aversion thing.
Fun Pain is where you’re put into a painful situation, you might be running out of moves or just about to face a loss, so you’re in a difficult, painful situation. But you can be rescued by answering a pop-up, or buying something, or opening a loot box. So the Fun Pain is taking you to the point of the painful place and then giving you a way out of it.
Neil Fairbrother
Which costs you money?
Vicki Shotbolt
Yes it costs you money.
Reward removal – players are given a reward and then threatened that that’s going to be taken away if you don’t carry on playing or you don’t open more boxes or you do that now or the grade that you’ve got to already, you’ll fall back some grades.
Neil Fairbrother
And presumably you don’t get your money back?
Vicki Shotbolt
And you don’t get your money back, exactly.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now we do have a body responsible for all things gambling the Gambling Commission. What’s their view of all this and what can they do to stop children gambling in this way, for example, skin gambling and UK law versus international companies and so on? What can they do and how effective can they be?
Vicki Shotbolt
I think the Gambling Commission can be incredibly effective and has been effective and we should remember that they were way ahead of the curve on age verification with gambling sites, it’s taken the porn industry a very, very long time to catch up. So we know that they can be effective if they have the legal precedent behind them. So if the law says the right thing, then the Gambling Commission is good at making sure that they enforce it. The single biggest change that we could do that would make a difference would be recognising these virtual currencies as currencies because then the Gambling Commission would be able to start regulating them.
Neil Fairbrother
The Online Harms White Paper published earlier this year has proposed a regulator for the Internet and also a “Duty of Care” for online companies. Are these proposals something that could help?
Vicki Shotbolt
I think we need to see a lot more flesh on the bones to know whether or not those proposals could help. We have to be really, really careful with the Duty of Care thing. Of course it’s important for organizations to have a duty of care to their users, I think that’s quite sensible how it actually operates. Different question but quite sensible. That’s completely different to facilitating and encouraging people to do things that should be illegal. That’s not about a duty of care, that’s about breaking the law. The law’s not quite right at the moment when it comes to online gaming and gambling, but that is not the same as the duty of care issue.
Neil Fairbrother
No, I can see that. When I looked at the Online Harms white paper in the context of this discussion, I was rather surprised to find that skin gambling in particular, or online gambling as a genre in total, wasn’t really identified in the Online Harms white paper either as a “Harm with a clear definition” or as a “Harm with a less clear definition”. This is looking at the famous Table 1 where all the various different online harms have been listed. But gambling itself isn’t there, let alone a very specialist niche part of it, skin gambling. Is that an oversight of the report? Is that a weakness in the proposal, in the Online Harms white paper?
Vicki Shotbolt
We’d call it a gap, let’s call it a gap. Yeah, it’s not there. It is mentioned, gambling is mentioned in the Online Harms white paper, but it’s not given the prominence that we think it ought to have.
Neil Fairbrother
There was a court case couple of years ago, in 2017, where two Directors of a company called Game Gold Trading Ltd, which operated a gambling website called Futgalaxy.com, were successfully prosecuted for running an unlicensed gambling website on which children were known to be playing by the Directors, but according to the Gambling Commission, they turned a blind eye in order to achieve substantial profits. The Judge involved in the case was shown footage of a 12 year old boy using the site and he described what he had seen as “horrific’. What are the effects that this online gambling can have on children?
Vicki Shotbolt
I think we’d have to be careful to differentiate between people that end up with a pathological problem with gambling and children who experience harms, but that doesn’t necessarily lead them onto long-term gambling problems. For us, when we think about young people and gambling online, our concerns are around things like they’re being exploited. We’ve already decided that young people ought to be protected from things that exploit them and this is a form of exploitation. They don’t know the odds of winning, they’re very vulnerable to some of these nudge techniques that are being used. So that is in and of itself a harm.
Then there are the more tangible harms around things like you’re losing money and if you lose money then you’re getting that money from somewhere. At best you’re probably going to get into trouble, at worst it’s a further vulnerability that might lead you into further issues and problems online. So, you know, I think there are loads of reasons that we’ve already rehearsed in an offline sense around why we don’t want young people gambling. All of those things apply online.
Neil Fairbrother
The age of 13 is used often as a minimum age to be on social media sites and a lot of these online games have got some social media element, because it’s online it can allow connectivity and your 13 year old who is perhaps a skim gambling may end up in a conversation with quite possibly another adult, it being a gambling site.
But the age of 13 came out of the US law, the COPPA, the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act, which is itself up for review at the moment. Now, the rating system for games in the UK, this PEGI system we use has got certain ages as we discussed earlier. Should those ages perhaps be implemented in the COPPA legislation because at the moment there is one age, 13, but time has moved on since that age was first put in place, things have become so much more sophisticated now. So should there be a more gradated approach to age in the COPPA legislation? Would that help with some of these issues that we’re facing with online gambling sites?
Vicki Shotbolt
Age is tricky one, particularly in a digital context, because what we know about young people is that they find ways around age restrictions. So it’s a very blunt tool and it’s also not very helpful. I mean, if you talk to people that look after vulnerable children, I think about the work that we do with social workers and they say what an enormous challenge it is with looked after children where they’re not allowed to start using digital services until they’re older and by the time they’re older you’ve missed the opportunity to educate them and talk to them and set good habits up.
It’s no good talking to a child at the age of 14 about how to stay safe online. You need to start talking to them when they’re eight. So I think we have to be really careful about age gating the Internet and access to services.
COPPA is there for marketing reasons. You know, COPPA isn’t a law that’s designed to protect children from gambling or anything else is. It’s there to protect children from inappropriate marketing. We don’t have a good age framework at the moment around the Internet. Our preferred model is the Internet becomes a place where we recognize that people of all ages are on it and using it. And that’s why I think the duty of care approach is a much more interesting one than a simple age gating approach.
Neil Fairbrother
One of the consequences of the proposed duty of care is that the executives of a company with an online product will be personally liable for the content and therefore presumably the behaviour of people using their online services. Is that something you would like to see in the gaming industry?
Vicki Shotbolt
Yep, absolutely. And it isn’t that much different from Health and Safety legislation. That doesn’t mean that every time there’s a health and safety breach, the Directors of a company end up in prison. That’s not how it works and the way that the duty of care has been conceived in the Online Harms white paper, which actually it’s kind of wrong to call it a white paper, it’s more like a minty green paper, it’s still in the consultation process, but the notion was that companies would need to have a look at the behaviours that were happening on their platforms and make their platform safer in response to what was happening on their platforms.
So you end up with an iterative process that is taking care of the people that are using the service and I think that’s a very sensible approach. But ultimately, just like with Health and Safety regulation, the people that put out these products and services do need to be accountable for the harms that happen when people use them.
People often say, oh, well what will this do to very small companies? And we always say, you would never ever apply that to a toy manufacturer. You wouldn’t say, oh, it’s really unfortunate that my child choked on that toy, but it’s okay because you’re only small and we still want you to be able to make toys. You don’t do that. We have minimum standards and those minimum standards are usually as a starter for 10 around safety. So I don’t see any reason why the online world should get a get out of jail free card.
Neil Fairbrother
The gaming is predating on children or appears to be predating on children. When people use the term online predator, we normally think about an individual person, usually a man, probably wearing a Hoodie or some other cliched item of clothing. Do we really need to reconsider this and create a “Corporate Predator” classification. Can a corporation be a predator?
Vicki Shotbolt
I think you probably can. It can definitely be exploitative. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. I think predator is quite a strong word, but I think we’re seeing some very exploitative practices and I think the gaming industry is probably leading the way in those exploitative practices and it’s a real shame. It’s such a shame because what we learn from working with young gamers is how important gaming is.
Gaming is a massive industry in the UK. It’s a huge success story, which is something that we say in the report. We want young people to carry on gaming and having a good time. We are absolutely fans of the gaming industry, so it’s a real shame for the industry itself, but also for all the people that enjoy it, that these exploitative financial models have started to creep in because that’s going to spoil gaming for everybody.
Neil Fairbrother
Will market forces apply here because as people wise up and become knowledgeable about all of these psychological tricks and exploitative techniques, people will just stop playing them?
Vicki Shotbolt
We don’t think they will. And one of the things that was really interesting in our work was that older gamers, and it feels kind of weird to say that because when we say older gamers we’re talking about 19, 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds, we’re not talking about older gamers as you and I might think of that term, but older gamers who remember what it was like before these freemium models became so common, they are the ones that are saying it’s not right for these younger gamers that are coming into gaming.
The problem for the younger gamers is that they’ve never experienced anything different so they just think this is gaming. So actually I didn’t think we will see consumers saying we’re not going to game anymore, because young gamers want to game. It’s a fantastically compulsive, enjoyable, important part of their life.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So we’re running out of time, unfortunately. What are your conclusions from your report and any recommendations that you make?
Vicki Shotbolt
I think our main recommendation is that we do have to look at the definition of gambling. We need to get those virtual currencies recognized as currencies. We’d like to see the UK looking in detail at what the options might be for dealing with loot boxes, and we want to see a change in some of the PEGI ratings. We don’t think that the current age rating system for games is fit for purpose anymore. So we’re calling for calling for a really good close look at the gaming industry.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Well, unfortunately, I think we’re going to have to leave it there because we are absolutely out of time, Vicki thank you so much for the that, it was absolutely fantastic.
Vicki Shotbolt
A pleasure!