This research was approved by the Cross-School Research Ethics Committee for the Schools of Art, Design & Computer Science; and Performance & Media Production at York St. John University

Design

We conducted an online survey with a sample of gamers aged 18 or older. Participants were recruited via an advertisement on Amazon Mechanical Turk order to answer a survey about their spending habits in games. In contrast to previous research, the recruitment message specifically did not mention loot boxes. Instead it read “We are conducting a survey about the different things that gamers spend money on, and how much they spend on each of these things.”.

Participants were screened before beginning the survey to ensure that they regularly played one of the 10 most globally popular games that feature loot boxes: Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Counter-Strike: GO, FIFA 18, Rocket League, DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. At the end of the study, for the purposes of screening, they were asked these questions again to ensure consistency in their responses

This study was designed to measure problem gambling and loot box spending in a sample of gamers from the USA. For extensibility to other studies, all measures of spending in this study relied on participants reporting spending in the currency of their home country. For example, if a participant listed their nationality as ‘Australian’ it would ask for their spending in Australian Dollars rather than USA Dollars. 2 participants that took part in the study were not from the USA, but rather from India and Australia. They therefore reported their spending in Indian rupees and Australian dollars respectively. However, both of these participants did not spend any money on either loot boxes or other microtransactions. Therefore, conversion into US dollars was not necessary as all measurements were essentially in US dollars already (i.e. 0 Indian rupees is the same as 0 US dollars, which is the same as 0 Australian dollars).

Loot box spend was measured by asking participants to state approximately how much money they had spent on loot boxes in the past month. In order to blind participants to the aims of the study, they were also asked a variety of other questions about their spending habits: How much money they spent on physical copies of video games; how much money they spent on virtual copies of video games; and how much money they spent on in-game items.

Problem gambling was measured using the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) [22]. The PGSI consists of a series of 9 questions which each ask the participant how frequently they engage in some behaviour that is related to problem gambling. For example, one question asks participants how often over the past month “Has your gambling caused any financial problems for you or your household?”. Each of these questions is answered on a 4-point scale, with the following scoring pattern: (0) Never; (1) Sometimes; (2) Most of the time; (3) Almost always. The sum of scores over all 9 questions gives a total PGSI score that ranges from 0 (i.e. all questions answered as ‘Never’) to 27 (i.e. all questions answered as ‘Almost always’).

Participants were presented with the 9 items from the PGSI within a larger series of questions which they were informed related to impulsiveness. Participants were then classified as either ‘non problem gamblers’ (Score: 0), ‘low-risk gamblers’ (Score: 1–4), ‘moderate-risk gamblers’ (Score: 5–7), or ‘problem gamblers’ (Score: 8+) using the revised scoring system for the PGSI [23]. This scoring scheme separates gamblers into classification bands on the basis of how extreme and frequent the problems are that their gambling has caused, rather than the absolute amount that they have spent. Thus, an individual who reports several gambling-related problems occurring frequently within their life might be classified as a problem gambler, whilst an individual who reported a lack of gambling-related problems would not, regardless of how much money each of these gamblers spent.

Each item was scored on a 4-point scale, giving a total score of 0–27.

At the conclusion of the survey, participants were asked what they thought the survey was about. Any participants who gave answers that contained both ‘loot boxes’ and ‘gambling’, or any variants of these words, were removed from the sample. This is in contrast to previous research, in which participants were aware that the study concerned both loot boxes and gambling.

The survey itself took an average time of 4 minutes and 38 seconds to complete. Participants were paid $0.60 for their time, equivalent to $7.80/hour.