Loss Chasing, Sports Betting, And Online Gambling with Dr. Luke Clark

Yeah, like the main concern is around young people, um, right, that, you know, loot boxes are particularly common within mobile games like smartphone games.

Those games are often accessible to kids.

And within, you know, desktop games, they're, you know, often, yeah, accessible.

A lot of us kind of reckon, you know, I don't know if you play video games, but, you know, Video games have age ratings, but those age ratings are really just guidance intended for parents.

They're quite different from age restrictions that you really can't get into a casino and gamble until you're 19 plus in BC.

And that age limit is legal and strictly enforced.

The age ratings in video games are largely sort of parental recommendations.

One sometimes wonders if teenagers are drawn to the more mature content, right? So yes, a lot of countries have looked at what to do about loot boxes.

Do they meet the legal definition of gambling? And I suppose some countries like the UK, I think, decided that they did not meet the legal definition of gambling because in the vast majority of games, these prizes cannot be turned back into money.

So this is like a money's worth definition of gambling.

Um, some other countries, uh, Belgium, uh, notably did decide that they fell under their gambling laws and effectively banned, um, Specific games that included the ability to turn them back into cash And I think you know there is a general issue here as well That Gambling regulators in most countries are to suddenly make that gambling regulator responsible for the whole video game sector as well as the gambling sector is actually a very complicated undertaking.

That's a big responsibility.

Gambling is a big sector, but the video game sector is huge.

So there are also just capacity issues with how that would be enforced as well.

So I would say it's still, you know, in a lot of countries, a bit of a kind of moving target a few years on.

And it has clinical implications as well, because it means that people who are experiencing problems around video gaming, one of the ways that that can get expressed is basically financial consequences from overspending on the in-game payments.

You can find many news stories of people young gamers who have spent thousands of dollars on a parent's credit card buying loot boxes.

And that changes the profile of gaming addiction where we start to see more financial consequences and debt.