Keywords

What It Means to Play

“Let’s play, mummy” is a sentence that I hear innumerable times a day. It’s my daughter’s favourite sentence, that along with “I just want to play a little more”. This one’s normally trotted out when I’m trying to get her to bed. Watching her play and playing with her is in equal amounts fascinating and tedious. At the minute, role play is high on her agenda: ranging from playing families to playing superheroes. Through this she is observing, understanding, replicating but also casually subverting the world around her. Our game of families often has daddy assigned to the role of sister; I’m baby or sometimes daddy, she is often mummy (though when she announced one day that its mummy’s job is to sweep the floors I started to seriously worry about the gendered division of labour in our house). Her play starts with a call to action, “let’s play!”, and is  conducted within its own space and time. Being what one can only describe as “wilful”, she tends to be in the driving seat about how play happens. “Silly Mummy” is another phrase I hear often, generally when I’ve contravened some hitherto unknown rule of play, maybe sitting in the wrong place, picking up the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing—who knows. It is also pretty clear when play ends—when it’s time to do something else, to go home or just to stop. And when play stops, everything goes back to what it was. It’s the same at the end as the start: the blanket that became a bridge when singing “London Bridge is Falling Down” ceases to be a bridge and becomes a blanket again. As you were.

What I’ve just described pretty much summarises how some major theorists have conceptualised what it means to play. Starting with Johanne Huizinga in the 1930s, attention has been given to the role that play has in our lives and in shaping our societies, with exploring what we mean by “play” a critical component (Huizinga, 1949). For Huizinga, play was essential in the establishment of cultural life and the antidote to the seriousness and vicissitudes of the real world (Anchor, 1978). How familiar these ideas still sound. For Huizinga, there were five principles that delineate play: First, play is voluntary and separate from the activities and skills required for work, or survival or gain (though again, some parents may be wishing that play was somewhat more voluntary than it seems when faced with a wilful three-year old). Second: play is rule-ordered, at the moment of engaging in play we willingly subject ourselves to a different set of rules and adherences, either formalised or learnt (or in my case, dictated). Third: play is conducted in what’s known as the “magic circle” meaning that the rules of play only pertain to the moment of play in time and space. Once we step out of that moment, the rules no longer apply. Fourth: play is different, it’s not ordinary and rules of life are different when you play. Finally, play does not have material consequences; it is non-purposeful and is not and should not be connected with material gain or profit. For Huizinga, the point at which play generates material consequences is the point at which it is no longer play in the purest sense. Huizinga has been critiqued for being surprisingly quiet on the point of gambling and whilst he acknowledged that wagering within play heightened tension, he insisted that gambling games were “sterile, adding nothing to life or the mind” (Huizinga, 1949: 48).

Other theorists extended these ideas, agreeing that play was voluntary, rule bound and unproductive but attempted to extend notions of play into categorisations of types of games. Caillois suggested that games could be distinguished into four main types: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation) and ilinx (vertigo), each existing on a scale from ranging from child-like play and exuberance to games requiring more mature thought, application and skill. For him, agon or alea games could become the object of betting and he noted that chance-based games frequently included staking of money or material goods as part of the play. In his view, there is no clear dividing line between games and gambling, wagering on a game of chance was an intrinsic part of the game play. Yet, he too persisted in insisting that play was non-productive. For Caillois, the role of money in play was part of a redistributive process between players: in his own words “property is exchanged, but no goods are produced. What is more, this exchange affects only the players, and only to the degree that they accept, through a free decision remade at each game, the probability of such transfer” (Caillois, 1958: 5).

These points about material consequences are ostensibly what separates our theories of what is a game from what is gambling. And our notions of what it means to play are complicated by semantic ambiguity of the term itself. After all, we often talk about playing roulette, poker, blackjack or slot machines in the same way we speak about playing monopoly, chess or nursery games. So, the question is what makes these types of play different from others? The differentiation, it seems, really does stem from outcomes and production. Most forms of gambling fit the first four of Huizinga's principles. Take roulette for instance: there are rules, it’s conducted in a specific setting, most consider themselves to be playing and once they move away from the table, away from the casino, the rules of the game no longer apply. Yet it also has material consequences. There are winners (most often the casino) and losers (most often the punter). When the roulette stops spinning everything is not as it began. Quite clearly something has been produced—profit and loss. So when “playing” roulette, can we really say that this play is unproductive?

Jacques Erhmann (1968) suggests that play that is consumptive and thus produces something for those who engage. This could be power, status or wealth. Jane McGonigal (2011) states that games are hard work and that “nothing makes us happier than good, hard work” (McGonigal, 2011: 28). And every parent sees their child learning through play. These may be “non-productive” in a material sense but suggests that play produces something. Huizinga and Caillois were both writing at a time where the “games” industry was distinctly analogue, with play focused generally on cards or board games or on more free-form child-like play (the kind of play I increasingly find myself engaged in), though Huizinga did envisage the increasing commodification of play and its transformation into entertainment (Duncan, 2016). Yet, what they would have made of the multi-billion dollar games corporations of the twenty first century is anyone’s guess.

Their theories largely pertain to a time when play was generally conducted within closed, tight networks of communities. This may be play among friends, families, colleagues or communities but by and large it was within a closed network. Within a closed network, one can see Caillois’ viewpoint more easily. If we take a group of people playing poker regularly, then over time, some within the group will be up and some will be down but the money flows in a bi-directional manner within the group in, arguably, a redistributive process. But the development of the digital gaming industry subverts these practices. The gaming community is no-longer a small, closed-knit, group of people—it can be large scale and transnational. It has reach. And it has memory. Leader boards, scoreboards, inventories of in-game items, skins, all of these things confer status and expertise within these gaming communities. In digital games, the winning of skins to adorn avatars may have little real-world material consequence but certainly has value to the players. It’s difficult to argue that this type of game play doesn’t have material consequences—it does, it’s just the material is “digital” and the value may be monetary but is also social and cultural. Furthermore, these large-scale gaming corporations are fundamentally extractive: the money spent within their games isn’t circulating between a circle of friends, it’s about gaining profits for companies. The digital game corporations monetise in-game practices to obtain money from players. Sometimes they need to, because this (aside from advertising) is their primary way of making money. For others, it’s an additional element of the economic model and boosts profits—especially as game production costs spiral. In the minds of those in charge of the corporations, this is not play. This is work.

More recently, writers like Jane McGonigal (2011) have dropped references to economic production from their definitions of game play. For McGonigal, games possess four traits: First: a goal—an objective to work towards which provides the players with a sense of purpose. Second: a set of rules govern how players achieve their goals. Third: a feedback system which tells you how close you are to achieving your goals and fourth, that participation is voluntary. Whilst these four traits can be applied to most games, they can also be applied to most forms of gambling (McGonigal, 2011). The primary goal of gambling is to win, and there are rules which limit how this happens. In roulette, for example, there are rules about how and when you place your bets. There are feedback loops—in roulette, the outcome of the spin of the wheel shows you precisely how near or far you were from winning your bet (albeit determined by chance) and people tend to engage in this freely, thus fitting McGonigal’s definition of a game. Arguably, the only difference between games and gambling is the staking of things of value (often money) as a primary rule and accumulation of these things of value as a primary objective.

Viewed in this context, gambling could simply be considered another form of game, but one driven by different operating mechanisms and end goals with the requirement to stake something of value. Game theorists have agonised over this distinction but in part the distinction may well boil down to this: gambling activities are, have been and always will be, a form game play. As Jasper Juul (2003) has recently argued, games are simple activities where you can choose to assign negotiable consequences to them or not. With gambling, consequences, material or otherwise, are an intrinsic part of their nature. They cannot be negotiated. These consequences, more often than not, relate to money, but can also relate to other things that we value. The issues around whether something like loot boxes are gambling focuses attention on who is making the decision about what is and isn’t valuable. We agonise over whether something is gambling or something is gaming because our whole regulatory and legal structures have been set up to see these things as distinct. And back at the time that Huizinga and Caillois were writing, they may have been so.

But not now. Arguably, traditional ideas of play and of games become qualitatively different when they become commodified at the pace and scale at which both the digital gaming and gambling industries have developed. Technological infrastructure, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, has created whole economic ecosystems and communities which trade digital commodities in a way that would be inconceivable to game theorists of the mid-twentieth century. Notions of a closed system of players engaging in an activity which doesn’t produce anything may still hold true for informal, non-commercial forms of game play; the type of play you do with your kids or with your families. But in the context of twenty-first-century capitalist economies, and the rapid growth of digital gaming markets, it’s difficult to support this (Duncan, 2016). This exemplifies a trend to which we need to be attuned—the power of commercial entities and how this subverts our notions of play and of games. Play itself is now a commodity and conducted not within small, enclosed circles of people but within and between multiple actors across space and time, and play is now not just against other people but play can be against machines, against algorithms.

The conceptual ambiguity about where play ends and gambling begins is further obscured by them sharing common features. As Greg Costikyan (2013) has traced, uncertainty is a common feature of play and thus a common feature of games. Whilst this uncertainty manifests in different ways, from the skills and aptitude of the player, to uncertainty introduced by randomness and uncertainty programmed by algorithms, these features are shared by both games and gambling products. Notably, Costikyan argues that uncertainty isn’t always about outcome—in some games, the outcome is entirely certain; you will lose (think Tetris, Space Invaders and so on). It’s about uncertainty in the process and what that brings to the player (excitement, enjoyment, challenge, frustration). Indeed, it has been argued that utility to be gained from gambling is not, for some, always about the pursuit of money, the uncertainty of the outcome, but that utility can also be derived from the process of engagement, the process of play (Zou, 2011). Interestingly, Costikyan was rather dismissive of the utility of things like roulette, arguing that its wholesale reliance on randomness as its source of uncertainty made it rather dull and that it was only the staking of money that generated tension and thus appeal. Whilst the uncertainty in roulette does derive from randomness alone, people’s attempts to explain and control uncertainty are manifest in their explanations of how near or far they were from winning: developing what might be described as statistically magical thinking about what might happen at the next spin, something that the casino industry capitalises upon by advertising what the previous winning number was (in a blatant aberration of probability theory).

This desire to explain and control uncertainty, and its role in encouraging greater game play, is something that underpins the design of many gambling products—especially slot machines. Here “near miss” phenomena (the phenomena of “nearly” winning, because you might have had three matching symbols instead of four, for example) or of “losses disguised as wins” (where you win an little though not as much as you staked) are notable features that persuade consumers to continue to play—encouraging that sense of “I nearly made it, I nearly won”. There is considerable debate about the extent to which slot machine manufacturers either purposively design or enhance attention towards these features within their products. Underlying this, is something Costikyan termed algorithmic complexity—though algorithmic uncertainty is perhaps a clearer term. This is when the player is uncertain of their actions because the underlying algorithms are obscure (or driven by chance). This algorithmic uncertainty is a key feature of many digital games, requiring players to try to figure out intuitively how the system works (Costikyan, 2013). And it is this capacity for algorithmic uncertainty that raises concerns about specific features within some games, like loot boxes. It is unknown to the player exactly how (or whether) the prizes within the loot boxes are distributed. And as we saw in the previous chapter, there is concern that because the content distribution is determined algorithmically rewards may be distributed in unfair ways, in ways which, like the features of slot machines, encourage repeated purchasing and play. It is this potential manipulation of uncertainty that gives rise to increased concerns about the form and function of these types of products. That the mechanics which underlie them are shared with gambling products does little to dispel the conceptual murkiness between them.

Subverting Play?

And why are we bothered about this? Reflecting on the play I do with my daughter; you can’t help but feel that McGonigal is right—play is hard work. It’s hard work for me, trying to keep up with her but it’s challenging work for her too. One of her favourite game requests is “abcd” by which she means anything that involves her looking for or identifying letters of the alphabet. We also repeatedly attempt to teach our kids life lessons through play. Sharing is the big one. It’s not easy. Whilst watching our kids squabble over some piece of plastic tat, a friend of mine remarked “no-one really likes sharing, sharing’s hard, but we pretend it’s ok and try to teach our kids that”. These two kids in question are still learning to play “nicely”. Play has an integral role in teaching our children about the world around them, its norms and functions, what we value and what we don’t and how they should behave.

For this reason, we should be very attuned to any process that has the potential to change what it means to play or what play is teaching us. The play I’ve described above is a certain type—it’s play conducted within strict boundaries, co-constructed with friends and most often observed (more accurately, refereed) by parents or caregivers. Lessons about societal norms are reinforced: the caregiver who steps in when their child is not sharing; cause and consequence explained. Yet, this is just one type of play that pervades modern-day society.

Perhaps this is why so much attention has been given to the role of digital games. Since their inception, debate has raged about impact. None more so than whether violence in digital games leads to violence in real life. The actual evidence base on this is “messy”, the science inconclusive. Yet, this remains front and centre of people’s thoughts. Media coverage of mass shootings nearly always include some speculation of whether the perpetrator played violent video games. This is the “Grand Theft Fallacy” as Professors Patrick Markey and Chris Ferguson (2017) call it, whereby people link video game play with violent acts, regardless of whether that link exists or not. Yet parents continue to worry, as do governments, about this. Sufficiently so that the Australian Government took precautionary action (concerns were not just of violence, but of sexual content also) and introduced strict games classification rates, refusing some games classification and thus release until content was modified (as seen with various modifications to Grand Theft Auto titles) (Keogh, 2019). Witnessing the learning potential of play among our children makes it hard to shake these connections and exacerbates concerns about where play takes us.

This is why we raise concern about loot boxes. We see them embedded into games, we recognise them—they look and feel an awful lot like gambling—and our children are using them, a lot. We then worry about the impact on children—are we indoctrinating them into gambling from a young age, what lessons are they learning from this and what’s the impact of this? (Gainsbury, 2017). In a society when gambling is ever present, is this just a further example of its reach? We’ve been conditioned to think of gambling and gaming as separate things (something to which theorists have clearly contributed) with this separation entrenched legally because gambling is something that is regulated, age-prohibited and for some health-harming. Games by contrast, or so we are told, are fun, are entertainment and are harmless. They aren’t subject to the same strict rules and regulations of gambling and this heightens our concerns when we see gambling-like activities encroach into this space.

As we’ve seen through earlier chapters, the potential impact on children is something that nearly always garners media, policy and regulatory attention. And it is quite right to voice concerns. But in an age when public engagement and lived experience are key, we too rarely take the time to explore what young people themselves think about these things. I often think back to a conversation I had with a colleague when considering this. We were discussing the precautionary principle and whether it was appropriate to put age limits on the 2p penny pusher machines that are unique feature of British Seaside Arcades.Footnote 1 He shook his head ruefully and said that children’s rights should be around freedom and supporting children to make mistakes in a safe environment. It made me think that we needed to better consider the perspectives of young people themselves in this debate.

To that end, I spent the summer of 2019 meeting with young people and exploring from their perspectives what they thought about the intersection of games and gambling. Their views were fascinating. They were fascinating. They came from all walks of life: from the engaged Grammar school boys for whom talking to me was a break from normal lessons; to the young people who were taking part in National Citizen Service programmes over the summer, so many of whom had clearly been enrolled because their parents quite simply needed something to do with them; to the super chatty school girls, who were getting to talk about something different. All in all, I spoke with over 50 young people aged between 14 and 17, conducting 7 different focus groups either in schools or as part of their residential National Citizen Service programme. And they were savvy. Seriously savvy. These young people were aware of how the world worked (mainly borne out of experience) and had something to say about it. It was a huge privilege and hugely enjoyable to talk to them. One of the main things I wanted to know, from their perspectives, was what was gambling and what was gaming, how they understood these things and why. We also talked about the role of game designers in this process. This is where I realised just how savvy, but also in some respects subservient, these young people were.

Gambling like or Gambling-Lite?

It’s difficult getting young people to express themselves, especially on something as abstract as gambling. There is so much to unpack, so much to question. We started gently, by asking what people had done last night: inevitably, nearly all had played games. From here discussion opened onto what kinds of games they played, and why, and what they thought of some of the features in games, like loot boxes. It was a more naturalistic and holistic way to get to our topic. From there we talked about what kind of things loot boxes were like and generated cards listing a range of things that they mentioned (and some others that I threw in for discussion). In small groups, they then sorted these cards into groups splitting out whether they thought these things were gambling or not. These groupings then became the basis of discussion.Footnote 2 From this, we got to see the kind of things these young people were thinking about when making decisions about what was and wasn’t gambling. And the disagreements among them—more than once I ended up refereeing intense debate about McDonald’s Monopoly competitions. Or Match Attax cards or FIFA packs.

Unsurprisingly, views and experiences were varied and inconsistent. But there were some clear themes. The first was the clear sense of fun and enjoyment that these young people got from digital games. I was struck at how embedded digital games were within their everyday lives. When asked what people had done the night before, nearly all had played a game of some sort or regularly did so—including the groups I did with girls only. Only one of the boys included in the groups said that they didn’t play digital games at all. He was almost apologetic when saying so—it was clear how exceptional he was among his peers. Among the boys there was a notable sense of friendly competition between them, general and gentle banter around their game play, where one boy was ribbing the other over his desire to become a professional esports player. They spoke about how this was something that they did together, to compete with and against each other, and of the social connections this fostered between their friends and families. Themes of gaming to “wind down”, to escape, to explore other universes (especially those where different rules apply “you get to play God!”) were common. For others, games were a way to channel negative energy into something positive “it’s good to focus on games”. Some spoke of the deep satisfaction that engagement in games gave them, especially around strategy games like Minecraft. The overarching sense was one of positivity.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, there were a broad range of views about what practices constituted gambling or not—the differences tended to coalesce around the uncertainty of rewards and the value placed on these outcomes. When asked to expand on what the differences were between different types of arcade games (the penny pushers vs PacMan, Whack-a-Mole or Street Fighter) the girls in this group explained:

Because in terms of like just the gambling games like 10p machines, you’re putting money in with the hope that you’ll get money out, whereas with like proper games you’re paying just to have some fun and like play the game. (Group 5)

Yeah. So there’s a gamble because am I going to get something, am I not going to get something? (Group 5)

I was going to say it’s the same concept, like any kind of thing, you could be like on your phone on something, you’re still going to lose something, it doesn’t have to be money for it to be gambling, as long as there’s a risk that you’re losing something, it’s the same principle. (Group 4)

For them, gambling was about chance, the chance to potentially win something back. It didn’t matter much what the prize was, or even if the stake was real or virtual, the mechanics of paying something to potentially get something back made it gambling. Some were unequivocal, a currency was a currency despite whether it was virtual or not:

  • Researcher: [asking about the card sort exercise]And where did you put your betting with virtual currency on online?

  • We put that in gambling.

  • Researcher: So did it matter to you that the currency was virtual rather than physical?

  • No, because it’s still a currency.

  • Researcher: Okay, so say a bit more about that.

  • Because on games you sometimes pay to get the virtual money, and so like it’s still betting because you’re putting forward your currency and you’re unlikely to win, it’s still a value of some sort, even if it’s still virtual.

  • Researcher: So and what did other people think about that, the other, the betting with the virtual currency?

    • Still gambling.

    • Still gambling.

    • Yeah. (Group 5)

Other groups were not so clear and there was fierce debate about whether wagering virtual items constituted gambling or not. In this group, two boys clashed over their contrasting views of virtual currency:

Boy 1: But some of the stuff they [game producers] do is actually illegal because like you said the loot boxes and the packs and stuff, it’s low chance, it is gambling, it’s low level gambling.

Boy 2: But a lot of people play just can’t, they just will see it as a difference between real life and virtual, and they will find it as two different things, because in real life you can see the money you’re wasting sort of thing, and you can just see yourself losing the money, whereas in the virtual it’s just numbers.

Boy 1: Well I think it’s quite dangerous if you think that there is a difference, because you’re still spending money for something, you know, and it is essentially gambling, but because it’s coming through a different medium it’s not, you know, you don’t have like that image of it in your head so it’s excusing them in a way. (Group 2)

It’s just numbers. It’s just code. These were phrases that one boy in this exchange repeated time and time again. His disdain was clear—he thought people spending money on this was daft, it gives you nothing, just lines of code and he was unclear why people would invest in this (his views neatly mirroring the theories of Huizinga). At one point in the discussion, he suggested that it was more sensible to gamble for real money, because then at least you’d get something real in return. The other boy, however, took a more nuanced view—for him the virtual still had value; you were still getting something that had meaning to him, and you were still spending money to obtain it. This was the risky element for him and why he felt these things were “low level” gambling.

Others took a much more black and white perspective, that the currency had no value outside the game and as such it didn’t feel much like gambling to them:

It’s virtual money so you’re not really losing anything if you think about it because it’s not actual money, it doesn’t actually have any value. So you’re not going to lose anything so there isn’t really a risk of you losing out on something but there’s a chance that you will gain something. So it’s not really a gamble in that sense. (Group 5)

For some, it was less about the value of outcome and more about the process and the broader risks that this might lead too. Understanding that gambling might lead to addiction was common, and for this boy, this was integral to his view of whether loot boxes were gambling or not. It didn’t matter to him whether the rewards were currency or not, the potential for compulsion was what made it something different, something beyond play:

Because [loot boxes] is a form of gambling, taking a risk and you might get lucky with a skin or something like that or you might not, then you might want to take that risk again, that continuation of that risk, gambling… There is a risk, not that it’s just a physical risk of going into debt but becoming addicted to that kind of thing, you might start to become reliant, I guess and then eventually that might cause problems in later life. (Group 1)

As similar perspective was put forward in another group, where two boys were arguing about whether wagering with virtual currency counted as gambling or not:

Boy 1: Technically it is gambling because you are spending something.

Boy 2: Yeah, but it doesn’t have monetary value.

Boy 1: But it does kind of encourage you. It does kind of encourage you.

Boy 2: But you can’t spend it on anything else itself.

Boy 1: No, but there is something else you could spend it on. (Group 3)

Yet again, we see some youth focusing on the process, of the mechanics of what wagering might lead to being part of their thinking of how they classified this: “But it does kind of encourage you” or by saying:

It’s still gambling so no matter what you’re still gambling in a certain sense. Because even though you’re gaining money, you’re gaining that virtual money, in a way your mind is thinking “yeah, this is my money and I’m going to make sure that I’m earning more money through betting it all” and trying to get more money from whatever game you’re playing. (Group 5)

[when asked how they differentiated between gambling and non-gambling activities] How addicted you can possibly become. So with Pokémon cards you’re less likely to think someone could easily, as easily get addicted to, whereas with say lotteries, that’s something people get addicted to a lot easier. (Group 4)

I think that even though it is like online, you are still, like even if it is just virtual money or real money, like that you’re spending, it is still gambling because you are betting money on something that you may or may not get a return on, so if it doesn’t have like the same consequences as it would in the real world it is still by definition gambling and it still leads to an addiction. (Group 2)

For these young people, it was the affect that the wager had on how they subsequently think and feel, and how it might encourage certain behaviours that were integral to their views on what this practice was. Without the affect, it was less clear whether they felt the behaviour was gambling or not. Instead, ideas of chance, of risk and control, and potential for addiction influenced how they viewed these practices and the types of engagement they felt they were.

Perhaps because of these disparate views, wagering with or for virtual items or currency tended to be seen as a relatively low-risk gambling activity. Part of this was bound to how the currency was obtained. For some, it was easy come, easy go. One girl specifically asked me whether I thought gambling on the slots or the tables in the Grand Theft Auto casino counted as gambling. Turning it round, I asked her what she thought:

It’s still gambling but like it doesn’t actually matter that much, if I lose the money I get it back.

  • You can literally rob a bank and.. [all laugh].

  • If I lose it, I can go OK. (Group 7)

Others felt the same thing:

…because it’s not real money, so if you bet on it you don’t really lose that much….All you’re going to lose is the virtual money that you get from the game. (Group 1)

But even so, there was a distinction for some in how that money was obtained. A loss of virtual money didn’t feel like a loss if the gamers hadn’t bought the currency, if they had earned it or been given it as a reward. It was different though, if you’d bought that currency. For some, that felt qualitatively different:

Because you play the game because you enjoy it so it’s like if you lose it you’ve enjoyed earning that money so it’s not really a massive loss.

  • Unless you’ve like paid for it.

  • Yeah, if you’ve paid for it then… (Group 1)

The Role of the Producers

The sense of positivity that surrounded our discussion of games wasn’t unbridled positivity. Among the youth I spoke with, there was clear awareness of industry practices, specifically that of the mechanics and monetisation of game play, and the influence this exerted over their behaviour. Among some there was a palpable sense of the control that young people felt games and games mechanics exerted over them.

I think one of the main problems with like maybe playing games, that sometimes it looks like they can control you, it can make you do stuff which you wouldn’t normally do. (Group 4)

The agency these young people gave to games was striking. The way they spoke about some game mechanics was akin to them talking about a person encouraging them to do certain things. For them, games were actors, and were recognised to be such, with these actors within their gaming systems and networks offering subtle and not so subtle inducements to behave, and often spend, in certain ways. For some, this manifest in a palpable sense of loss of control and was bound with the competition that the gamers enjoyed. But they also recognised a sense of manipulation by the game, to encourage you to play to the exclusion of all else. This was particularly notable when I asked one group of boys to describe what they liked about games:

  • The competitiveness of games, there’s ranking systems and friends compete with each other to see if you can get the highest rank and then say they are better than each other

Researcher: Is that a good thing?

  • It can be because if you get too competitive it could lead to you playing a really long time at times instead of doing other things but then if your just doing it on a weekend or like an hour an day, that’s not that bad then, that’s alright

Researcher: Okay.

  • really hard to control how long you play for, so in many ways it’s a waste of time and you don’t…You can’t control how long you do it for and that means that your wasting time without confining how long you’re going to waste time and you know, you’ve got other stuff to do. (Group 3)

Here, the enjoyment and value the boys ascribe to the function of competition within their gaming worlds is clear, but it is equally clear that some felt there was an external force—the game itself—leading them to play for longer than they should. Others explained this sense of loss of control in relationship to their desires. In this conversation with a group of girls, I was particularly struck at how the girls perceived game design mechanics as capitalising on their desires and needs within the game. They were talking about the ability to buy additional lives within games and said:

  • I think most games nowadays have that, like, you know, if you need more lives or if you need more…something like that

  • you have to pay with your money

  • I need money to do that!

Researcher: So why do you think that game developers do that?

  • Because they know we’ll do it. We need it.

  • The game was free so they need a way to earn money.

  • Otherwise it’s not profitable to just make the games free and just have people on them.

Researcher: And you said we need it, what do you mean by that?

As in they make, like games are supposed to be addictive in order for you to keep playing on their app or whatnot, so then you get to a point when you are so into the game you need your life if you lose it, so then there are like, they know we will do it because we need to complete so and so level. (Group 6)

It’s worth spending a minute or two deconstructing the last part of this exchange. First, is the recognition that these games are deliberately designed to be addictive. They are designed to be habit forming and to hook you into continued play and to hook you into coming back, time and again. This is not necessarily new insight, but is notable that these young people were aware of the design motives underpinning these games. She talks about getting to a point, a point where you are so engrossed in the game you absolutely need to continue playing. It’s at this point of inflection, where the need is greatest and the habit is formed—that the game designers can best sell their products—in this case the ability to purchase further lives to keep on playing. It’s striking too that this is described as “Because they know we’ll do it”. They, the game designers, know exactly what is needed to encourage these behaviours because “they” have designed these features into this process. To the young people I interviewed, it came across as a “knowing process of manipulation” of game play by designers to monetise actions. As striking as this point is, perhaps what is more so is the knowing acceptance among young people that this how the system works.

And knowing acceptance does appear to be the right term for this. The young people I spoke with were savvy, they displayed a solid understanding of the structure of game play and their mechanics, particularly in relation to features of monetisation. As one lad put it, it’s all about “money, money, money”. And of course, at a basic level it is. The reality of the economics of game production, especially those operating on a freemium model, is that they need to embed micro-transactions within their games to make them profitable. The success of the micro-transaction model is such that these processes have been broadly incorporated into games by most designers, largely to expand the profitability of games. Research with game designers themselves has highlighted how they are encouraged to incorporate many different micro-transactions into the games they design, with older (and presumably more senior) game designers valuing profitability over and above ethical concerns (Johnson, 2018) (though that was not the case for all game designers). The debate about these micro-transactions, and their poster boy, loot boxes rages on with some researchers, like Mark Johnson (2018), noting that game designers are “sleep walking” into a range of issues, being unaware of the full ramifications of the products they design.

From the group conversations with young people, it is clear that they are aware of these processes and how games are designed to extract money from them through a range of mechanisms. It’s also clear that they did not all necessarily object to this, in some respects there was a strong sense of protection that pervaded their attitudes towards game designers:

..it’s like a business, so the whole aim of it is to aim [to make] money sort of thing, it’s just like you can’t really blame them, but for doing all the stuff that’s making them earn more money. (Group 2)

it’s kind of looking at the developers as another source of income, because once you but the game you’re not really going to buy the same game again, so if you buy the game when you’re going to spend more money inside the game, so it just gives them a bit extra. (Group 4)

But equally, whilst understanding the motives, some young people were concerned about the impact, describing how the system encourages you to spend money and to keep spending money and how because “a lot of people get addicted to the game and they could spend loads of money on the game, so it could, like take over their lives”. Others noted that they thought the system was “immoral” and that companies only did this as they could get away with it and that some corporations were so powerful within the sector, they could act as they please.

As noted above, young people were aware that these mechanisms exerted a form of power over them, one that they could not always necessarily control. They expressed the belief that these processes encouraged them into action that they may not necessarily have wanted to take. This was bound with essential features of game play, such as competition where things like leader boards encourage continued engagement or where encouragement to spend was linked to progress within the game itself. The groups frequently described situations where they spent more than they should have done on games or gave examples of knowing people who did similar:

So I bought it [a loot box] because I saw a YouTuber… I saw a YouTuber, they did a pack opening, they had spent like hundreds of pounds and got a few good players and I was like ah, if I just spent a little bit maybe I could get a good player. I didn’t and it felt like a massive waste of money and then like I vowed never to buy FIFA points again. (Group 3)

Researcher: So you were saying you spend way too much money, what kind of things are you spending money on?

My parents won’t hear this will they?

Researcher: No, your parents won’t hear this.

Yeah, I think it’s… Like when I was younger it was like this like addictive like compulsion, like because you know there’s an item’s shop in games so you just pay money and like… (Group 1)

I just think that paying for in-game stuff can get difficult, because when you do it one time, and then trying and buy more and so you can become the best, beat everyone else, yeah, so it’s just easier to play if you pay for it, whereas if you play you have to spend ages playing to get the same thing. (Group 2)

I used to play this game called Roblox, and I just realised I bought so many memberships and like currency on it, I spent like £1,000. (Group 7)

The system of micro-transactions is underpinned by two inter-related features which combine to further motivate engagement in certain game play behaviours: that of competition and of the aesthetic and social value given to objects within the game.

For some of the young people I spoke to competition was everything, it was the primary motivator. Competition was both for oneself, judging one’s progress against the game, within the game, but also against other people especially friends. This was frequently bound up in notions of self-worth, pride, ego and, frankly, bragging rites. One participant tried to explain to me how he felt that the competition, the need to be seen as the “better man”, drove his consumption:

Like for instance like when there’s a new trend, like in the game, say like when Clash Royale came out which was ages ago, and it’s like trying to get the highest trophies, and you can, there’s like in game purchases so you can get chests, which gives you like advantages in the game

  • I think what you are saying, then competition

  • Yeah, so like

  • That drives…the competition makes you want to spend money on the game. (Group 4)

It is important to remember here that the gaming worlds that these young people are talking about are constructed worlds. These items have value within this world because someone has given them value. When it comes to skins, the value is aesthetic and prescribed through processes of rarity and game play skill that determines worth. That secondary markets have been set up to trade and sell these items demonstrate the value they possess within this constructed world. Their initial value and worth within the game is generated and prescribed by the game developer, who set the level of rarity, who sets the prices for these items, who generates the rules about how and when certain objects may be acquired. In doing so, the designer creates a wider value system in which these items are embedded, one that goes beyond price but that is reflected in players notions of self-worth, social status and of achievement attached to ownership of these goods. Just as the entrepreneur may want to have the best house, car or gadgets to demonstrate their worth or skill, the same processes are evident and designed into many games. These skins are more than a just a digital item to be bought and traded, they are symbols of self-worth and young people were acutely aware of this:

Well, I think it’s quite a good way for the game to make you spend money on them because really the skin that you get when you start the game is quite…so the game makes you spend money on it to look better in-game. (Group 3)

when I get a loot boxes, nothing in there is actually going to help me in-game but I think if a I get a better skin it might make me look like a better player, so if I get a better skin it’s just to look better in the games really.

Researcher: And is that important to you?

Well, yeah in certain games you don’t want to be judged that people think you’re a bad player so if you have a…normally if you have a good skin people think you’re a better player in the game. (Group 3)

Games, Gambling and Play—New Processes

The distinction between what constitutes a game and what constitutes gambling has never been clear. Theorists have argued over it. Parents, regulators and policymakers have worried about it. Legislators and the gaming industries have disputed it, increasingly so with the introduction of loot boxes and other gambling-like mechanics in digital games. Perspectives from young people reveal myriad views, which centre around the value of the virtual. We worry about aspects of game play because we know precisely of the power and potential of learning through play. In this context, young people’s association between gambling-like mechanics and addiction should raise warning flags, especially alongside feelings of the gaming industry pushing and manipulating them to spend, regardless of whether they thought this was OK or not. Game play has commercialised in ways that Huizinga or Caillois may have found difficult to comprehend, which further challenges and subverts their notions of what it means to play. It certainly seems unwise to suggest that digital games produce nothing. They have produced whole cultural and economic ecosystems that have given enormous pleasure and meaning to many and have spawned entirely new competitive industries. But with this comes the recognition that some actions may lead to negative and harmful consequences. Young gamers feeling a sense of coercion to spend reflects this, even if some did display an (arguable) level of resignation that this was simply what companies needed to do. Through these practices, we see how commercial entities design and influence behaviours: creating need, creating value, creating habits and, importantly, creating profit.