Productive play: The shift from responsible consumption to responsible production

Abstract

Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and reconfigured by digital mediation. The case study of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) illustrates a contemporary challenge to rigid dichotomies between game/not game, skilled/unskilled play, and game/gambling game, demonstrating how regulation becomes deterritorialized as gambling moves out of state-regulated physical casinos and takes the form of networked, digital games. Our second case study of Pokémon Go approaches regulation from a different direction, complicating the rigid dichotomy between production/consumption in online networked play. We show how play is increasingly realized as productive in economic, social, physical, subjective and analytic registers, while at the same time, it is driven by gambling design imperatives, such as extending time-on-device. Pokémon Go exemplifies analytic productivity, a term we use to refer to the production of data flows that can be leveraged for a wide variety of purposes, including to predict, shape, and channel the behaviour of player populations, thereby generating multiple streams of revenue. Ultimately, both cases illustrate how digital games and gambling increasingly blur into each other, complicating the regulatory landscape.

Opening Pandora’s Loot Box: Weak Links Between Gambling and Loot Box Expenditure in China, and Player Opinions on Probability Disclosures and Pity-Timers

“…Pity-timer mechanics that change the probabilities of winning rare rewards as more loot boxes are purchased are present in more than half of top-grossing iPhone games available in the PRC . This added element of complexity may invalidate probability disclosures, confuse players, and encourage greater levels of loot box expenditure Whitson & French, 2021;, i.e., be elements of 'predatory monetisation' (King & Delfabbro, 2018).…”

“…[guarantee mechanic]' in Chinese, that causes the probabilities of obtaining rare rewards to change (in most cases, to increase) as the player purchases more loot boxes . Pity-timers are known to also be implemented in popular video games in Western countries, such as Hearthstone (Ballou et al, 2020;Whitson & French, 2021;Xiao & Henderson, 2019). Pity-timers represent a complex aspect of loot box design that players must learn and understand.…”

What are the odds? Lower compliance with Western loot box probability disclosure industry self-regulation than Chinese legal regulation

“…Pity-timers change the probabilities of obtaining randomised rewards as the player purchases more loot boxes: generally, the probabilities for obtaining the rarer and more valuable rewards are increased until the player eventually obtains such a reward, at which time the probabilities are reset, although one implementation of a 'detrimental' pity-timer that decreased the probabilities of obtaining rarer rewards has also been identified (3). Pity-timers are known to be implemented by video game companies in Western countries: however, some implementations have not been transparently disclosed to players and how they work had to be figured out by players through trial and error, e.g., in Hearthstone (66,67). Because pity-timers change the probabilities of obtaining randomised rewards, a comprehensive probability disclosure should disclose their implementation, as was done by many video game companies in the PRC, where 65.9% of games containing loot boxes disclosed pity-timer implementations (3).…”

Speculating on Steam: Consumption in the gamblified platform ecosystem

“…What is needed are new models like the one we have used to interrogate the increasingly nebulous rapport between consumers and platform holders. Valve's effective monopoly, and that of other platform holders in similar arrangements, must be analyzed in order to fully comprehend how their business is conducted, how it uses consumers to generate income, and how under their model, all consumption and play is repurposed as a value-generating activity (Whitson and French, 2021), a platformized and gamblified campaign to increase profits at all costs.…”