Enabling Responsible Online Gambling by Real-time Persuasive Technologies

Abstract

Online gambling, unlike other offline addiction forms, provides unprecedented opportunities for monitoring users' behaviour in real-time, along with the ability to adapt persuasive interactions and messages that would match the gamblers usage and personal context. Online gambling industry usually offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are mainly intended to allow third-party applications to interact with their services and enhance user's experience. In this article, we claim that such API's can also be utilised to retrieve gamblers' online data, such as browsing and betting history and other available offers, and use it to build more proactive and intelligent responsible gambling systems. We report on our experience in this field and make the argument that the available data for persuasive marketing and usability should, under certain usage conditions, also be made available for responsible online gambling services. We discuss the psychological foundations of our proposed approach and the risks and challenges typically identified when building such a software-assisted intervention, persuasion and emotion regulation technology. We also explain the potential impact of corporate social responsibility and data protection prospects. Furthermore, we explore the required principles that should be followed by the gambling industry for enabling responsible online gambling. We finally propose a conceptual architecture to show our vision and explain how it can be implemented. In the broader context, the article is intended to provide insights on building behavioural awareness and regulation information systems related to problematic digital media usage.

Concept, Possibilities and Pilot-Testing of a New Smartphone Application for the Social and Life Sciences to Study Human Behavior Including Validation Data from Personality Psychology

“…Analyzing individuals' behavior on smartphones has immense potential for several research areas and also for clinical practice, given that, for example, digital phenotyping has been considered a key future research area in the field of understanding excessive and uncontrolled or problematic usage of the Internet [40,41]. Please note that other similar platforms have been designed, e.g., to foster responsible gaming [42] and/or use mobile sensing in the social sciences [43,44]. We also want to point to the interesting AWARE framework (http://www.awareframework.com) and the Beiwe framework (https://www.beiwe.org/).…”

Development and validation of a prediction model for online gambling problems based on players' account data

“…Rapidly identifying individuals who are at risk for future and/or more severe gambling problems would allow to the development of tailored graduated interventions. Regarding operational issues, Drosatos et al (2018) proposed a conceptual architecture for a responsible gambling information system, including a “predict behavior” component.…”

“…As a consequence, it allows identifying four levels of gambling severity (non-problem, low-risk, moderate-risk, and problem gambling) in the general population, thus covering the whole continuum of gambling problems, including subthreshold forms of problem gambling (Drosatos, Arden-Close, Bolat, & Ali, 2020). It has been well validated in several independent samples and with several statistical approaches (Currie et al, 2009;Drosatos et al, 2018Drosatos et al, , 2020 and was developed to identify gamblers at risk for developing problem gambling (Drosatos et al, 2020). As such, it is particularly adapted to serve as a gold standard for the prediction of gambling problems.…”

Transparency in persuasive technology, immersive technology, and online marketing: Facilitating users’ informed decision making and practical implications

“…These concepts have been applied to online environments extensively to capture users' attention, facilitate interaction between users and the digital world and can be a source of online harms. For example, persuasive technologies can be used to increase exposure for online game players via leader boards and badges as compensation for perceived failure and low self-esteem in the real world (Drosatos et al, 2018). Meanwhile, if used appropriately, persuasive design has the potential to moderate against problematic gambling behavior via real-time tracking of user data and persuasive interventions, such as pop-up messages and warning labels to facilitate time and monetary limit adherence (Drosatos et al, 2018;Wohl et al, 2014).…”

“…For example, persuasive technologies can be used to increase exposure for online game players via leader boards and badges as compensation for perceived failure and low self-esteem in the real world (Drosatos et al, 2018). Meanwhile, if used appropriately, persuasive design has the potential to moderate against problematic gambling behavior via real-time tracking of user data and persuasive interventions, such as pop-up messages and warning labels to facilitate time and monetary limit adherence (Drosatos et al, 2018;Wohl et al, 2014). Immersive technology users have been found to experience harms such as bullying and harassment.…”