Games Without Frontiers?

Front matter

palgrave macmillan

LEISURE STUDIES IN A GLOBAL ERA a E

Leisure Studies in a Global Era

Contents

Introduction References

The Gambling Permeation? Cultural, Social and Economic Intersections Between Games and Gambling

What Games Say About Us

Index

ASA BBC CS:GO DotA2 EA

MP NiP PEGI UEFA UIGEA USA WHO

ABBREVIATIONS

Advertising Standards Authority

British Broadcasting Corportion Counter Strike: Global Offensive Defense of the Ancients 2

Electronic Arts

Member of Parliament

Ninjas in Pyjamas

Pan European Game Information

Union of European Football Associations Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act United States of America

World Health Organisation xiii

Introduction

Abstract Recent academic and policy attention focuses on the “convergence” of gambling and games. Yet, looking at the social and historical context of gambling and games, we see they were always intertwined, with both reflecting broader social, economic and cultural conditions. Setting out the argument for this book, this chapter contends that what we see today, with phenomena like loot boxes, is an acceleration of this trend, amplified by the changing technologies which underpin both industries. Little attention has been paid to these broader social and historical processes, which limits our understanding of them and our anticipation of what might happen next. This book aims to act as a primer to place the “convergence” of gambling and gaming within its rightful historical context and encourages us to take a broader perspective when thinking about the impact of these developments.

Keywords Gambling . Gaming - Intersection - Convergence - Attention

I have a confession. I’m not a gamer. Or so I thought. I was having this conversation with a good colleague of mine, sat outside the train station in a surprisingly sunny Sheffield: “Really” he said, looking puzzled, “not That was the point I realised that perhaps I was a gamer after all, just a particular sort. The sort who has one or two favourite games on their

© The Author(s) 2021 1 H. Wardle, Games Without Frontiers?, Leisure Studies in a Global Era, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74910-1_1 phone and pulls them out when they are bored (I reached my highest score on one game on a particularly long and tedious flight). I was also, until the COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel, an avid puzzler— Sudoku being the poison of choice—timing myself on how quickly I could complete this on my commute home. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that games, especially digital games, were more of a feature of my life than I’d ever given them credit for. I remembered playing Space Invaders on my brother’s hand-me-down console; getting my first Donkey Kong handset for Christmas (both long before we ever had a computer in the house); sitting with my big brother and playing Sonic when he got his first Mega Drive or the long nights playing Mario Kart after a session at our college bar (another confession, not a lot of work went on at University). We got (and quickly discarded) a Nintendo Wii and had far too many nights embarrassing our kids playing SingStar. Maybe I was a gamer after all? But the gaming world, the serious digital gaming world, seemed different somehow. Titles like Counter Strike, League of Legends, Defence of the Ancients just weren’t part of my gaming repertoire. And their surrounding communities were certainly not something in which I was embedded: a community which has its own language, its own rules, norms and cultures. Somehow this seemed impenetrable to me and that sense of impenetrability hasn’t necessarily diminished in the course of researching this book.

I come, instead, to this topic as someone who spent years researching gambling behaviours, looking at who does what and why and thinking about the impact of all of this. It was through gambling that gaming, as an object of study, came onto my radar. I was possibly one of many gambling researchers who previously never gave much thought to issues of much where gaming stops and gambling begins, who perhaps originally saw hard and fast distinctions between these things. Games were something to be played with friends and family (because that was my experience). Gambling was different. It involved businesses, corporations and money. It was conducted in different spaces and places, in different spheres. It was distinct. Yet this, Pve come to realise, was lazy thinking on my behalf and increasingly the last couple of decades show that the boundaries of this distinction are breaking down, if they ever existed at all.

Several of my academic colleagues have highlighted the increasing convergence between digital games and gambling (c.f. Gainsbury, 2019; King et al., 2010). By this they mean that things that look and feel very much like gambling, that might be psychologically-akin to gambling, are

1 INTRODUCTION 3 an increasingly present feature within digital games (Drummond & Sauer, 2018). Loot boxes being the obvious example. Loot boxes are essentially treasure chests within games that you pay to open, with either real money or in-game money, which may or may not contain a high value prize. They look and feel a lot like gambling because the mechanics are really familiar to us—we lay down money (be it real or virtual) on the chance of obtaining a prize. But there is more too it than this, gambling-like features are threaded through the DNA of some games and whole new hybrid-industries have developed (social casino games, daily fantasy sports as obvious examples). Furthermore, games don’t just borrow gambling-like mechanics and turn them into things like loot boxes, some games now embed gambling within the heart and souls of their design. It’s the Diamond Resort and Casino which opened with much fanfare within Grand Theft Auto (GTA) V in 2019—where players can go and spend their hard-earned dollars (either real or GTA dollars) on the tables or the slots. It’s the wagering of tokens on the outcome of battles or spinning of roulette wheels to gain treasure that exist within games like DotA2 (Zanescu et al., 2020) or the slot-machine style function that is so central to games like Coin Master (whereby you have to spin a slot machine to perform an action within the game). This is big business and has, aptly, been called the “gambling turn” (Johnson & Brock, 2019) with researchers tracing how play has been monetised and the conditions that make this highly likely to continue (the cost of game production, the over-supply of the market, the changing nature and motivations of who is producing content, to name but a few).

Drawing on this, many excellent people have written on the structural similarities between gambling-like mechanics within games and “real” gambling, discussing the impact this might have on how people play both in the long term and short term (c.f. Drummond & Sauer, 2018; King et al., 2010). However, what I’m interested in are processes. When ruminating on this, I couldn’t help but wonder if by focusing on whether certain features of games (like loot boxes) are akin to gambling or not we may be missing some broader trends.! This, of course, does not mean that considering whether things like loot boxes are gambling or not is unimportant. It is, especially as so many children have access to and use these products. We regulate gambling for good reason and we naturally lI don’t profess to be the only person thinking about things in this way. Johnson and Brock’s essay, The Gambling Turn, is an excellent contribution on this, for example.

worry if it appears that new technologies are somehow circumventing these regulations (and governments are naturally interested in potential lost tax dollars along with other impacts). But, as someone interested in process and the sociological and historical context of developments, I found myself asking whether there was something more we should also be considering. How did we get into a situation where we (and by “we” I mean myself and academic colleagues along with regulators and policymakers) seem surprised to find that gaming and gambling are converging? Is this any different to what has gone before and, if so, in what ways? What are the processes of change that have led us to our current circumstances whereby whether a loot box is more akin to a lottery or a kinder egg is debated in the UK Parliament? I’m interested in the intersection between gaming and gambling, historically, conceptually and practically, understanding and tracing how these things have co-developed, have borrowed from and influenced each other and the ramifications this has for thinking about and understanding risk and harms. All of this requires attention to the broader social, cultural, political and economic forces at play.

This is what this book is about. I trace the origins of digital games and explore how viewing them as cultural artefacts, as something that has always taken inspiration from the societies, cultures and contexts in which they are embedded, makes the “gambling turn” less surprising, especially given the growing normalisation of gambling and tech-inspired boom that underpins both sectors (Chapter 2). I map out some of the key controversies and debates surrounding particular forms of gambling-like mechanics, like loot boxes, skin gambling, social casino, and trace some key themes, especially the roles and actions of corporations in promoting and cross-selling gaming and gambling products (Chapter 3). Pm not attempting to answer questions about whether loot boxes are gambling or not but do present new insight from children and young people themselves—who I had the pleasure of spending time with in the summer of 2019 (Chapter 4) and look at the implications of what they told me about what it means to play and how commodification of play complicates our understandings of it.

When I started this book, I thought it was mainly about the intersection between games and gambling. As I’ve written it, it’s become clear that it’s also, partly, about attention. Or rather our lack of it and what happens when we don’t take the time to understand the fuller processes of recent developments or to situate them within their historical contexts. Had we done so, we might have seen that games and gambling exist in a

1 INTRODUCTION 5 co-dependent way, with one borrowing and adapting from the other, and that processes we see today are a notable amplification of this. We may have noted that whenever communication technology develops, gambling adapts, capitalising upon new opportunities and that the gaming industry does the same. What we witness today is the exponential growth of those trends. And we may expand our focus beyond whether something is gambling or not gambling to instead ask about the conditions and context that make something more or less worrying, more or less harmful, and more or less in need of action.

Before I go further, some caveats. First, throughout this book, I tend to talk about digital games. Others may call them video games or computer games but as Aphra Kerr (2006) has cogently argued games exist across many platforms and the term digital games embraces arcade, computer, console and mobile games. I talk about all these different types of games throughout the following chapters and thus use digital games as an all-encompassing descriptor. And while we are on terminology, I use the terms gaming and gambling in distinct ways. In English, we are fortunate to have different terms to describe games and to describe gambling (broadly meaning betting or wagering). Other languages have no such distinction—in Swedish gambling may be described as hasardspel (games of chance; spel being the word for games) or in French as Le Jeux D’argent (games of money; jeux also being the word for games). Notably, the verb in these descriptions is that of games, potentially recognising the interplay between the two. But in English, these two terms have come to be viewed as discreet, despite repeated attempts by the “gambling” industry to reposition itself as a softer, more playful form of activity: The American Gaming Association is not the trade body for digital games or any other kind of games industry, but rather the trade body of the American casino industry. Put simply, when I talk about gaming, I do not mean gambling—that is the wagering of something of value on an uncertain outcome for a potential prize. Likewise, I tend to use the phrase gambling-like if we are talking about something that looks and feels very much like my working definition of gambling but that tends not to be regulated as a gambling activity.

Second, the contents of this book are intended to provoke thought, discussion and debate. I’m reminded of a quote from E. H. Carr, the eminent historian who said: “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them; it is he who decides to which facts to give to the floor, in what order and in what context” (Carr, 1961: 9). This book follows that approach, curating examples to highlight certain debates or themes. It is not, and should not be viewed, as exhaustive on each topic, but rather hopes to act as primer for broader debate, especially for those where this maybe their first engagement with the topic. To this end, where I’ve noted the actions of particular companies, or examples of particular games, these should not be viewed as the only companies or games displaying these kinds of behaviours but rather that they have been “given the floor” to exemplify a point. It is not my intention to single out particular corporations but rather to use certain case studies to illustrate broader actions in which many, many others also engage.

Third, as a British-based researcher, there is a notable British bias in the text. Where appropriate, I’ve made some cross-national comparisons, but these too are broadly limited to North America and Australia. I have little knowledge of gambling and gaming in other jurisdictions, notably Asia or Africa. Thus, there is a systematic bias towards Anglophone countries in my writing and thus in my arguments.

Fourth, I recognise that both the gambling and gaming “industries” are exceptionally diverse, encompassing a vast range of products and producers. They are massive, multi-billion pound industries, supporting and spawning further industries in a complex and growing ecosystem. The gambling industry is estimated to be worth over $440 billion per year and the gaming industry over $150 billion per year, with greater growth in percent terms forecast for the gaming industry in coming years. Beneath these figures lies a vast network of producers ranging from large-scale global providers to niche, small independent organisations and entrepreneurs, each with a different ethos and organising principles. In gambling, this ranges from society lotteries to global corporations like Entain (formerly GVC), the parent group for more than 30 different high-profile gambling corporations (like Ladbrokes, PartyPoker). Gaming is the same, ranging from small-scale independent producers (including talented amateurs) to the mega triple-A games from major studios (think Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty), supported by world-leading publishing houses. And of course, with such a diverse landscape, there are varying practices. Not all games include monetisation practices or loot boxes. Mobile games, some triple-A games, yes but others in the industry are actively disdainful of this practice. However, their inclusion in many of the most high-profile and popular games around increase their ubiquity. When I talk about gaming industries and their use of gambling-like

1 INTRODUCTION 7 practices, I’m talking about those producers who make use of these functions—it is not my intention to tar all with the same brush.

Finally, this book is time bound. One of the people who reviewed the original proposal noted how hard it is to look at a topic like this because it’s so fast paced, so fast moving. They were not wrong. When I first developed this proposal, it was mainly going to focus on social casinos, a new phenomena that many were then concerned about. Life got in the way and it took nearly five years to complete this book— by which point we were talking about skin gambling, esports and loot boxes. By the time this book is published we may well have moved onto the next thing (possibly cryptocurrencies or developments related to pending 5G networks—these things are already happening; as I write there is an industry conference happening on the benefits of blockchain for gambling). So, for complete transparency, the primary research on which this book draws was conducted in 2019, mainly over the summer, and main writing was undertaken in the summer of 2020. By the time it is published, it will likely be 2021 and regardless of COVID-related developments, we will almost certainly have new preoccupations with regard to gaming and gambling. My request is that we don’t forget the old ones.

Carr, E. H. (1961). What is history? Vintage.

Drummond, A., & Sauer, J. D. (2018). Video game loot boxes are psychologically akin to gambling. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 530-532.

Gainsbury, S. (2019). Gaming-gambling convergence: Research, regulation and reactions. Gaming Law Review, 23(2), 80-83.

Kerr, A. (2006). The business and culture of digital games: Gamework/gameplay. Sage.

Johnson, M., & Brock, T. (2019). The ‘gambling turn’ in digital game monetization. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, 12(2), 145-163.

King, D., Delfabbro, P., & Griffiths, M. (2010). The convergence of gambling and digital media: Implications for gambling in young people. Journal of Gambling Studies, 26, 175-187.

Zanescu, A., French, M., & LaJeunesse, M. (2020). Betting on DOTA 2’s battle pass: Gamblification and productivity in play. New Media and Society. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1461444820941381.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Chapter 2

The Gambling Permeation? Cultural, Social and Economic Intersections Between Games and Gambling

Abstract Games, digital or otherwise, have always taken inspiration from their broader social, cultural and economic surroundings. They have been used to attempt to teach moral values and changed to reflect new, more modern, ideals. Their recent development is contingent on changing technological infrastructure, giving rise to a multi-billion pound entertainment commodity. Developing concurrently, gambling commodities are also deeply tied to technology with ever changing modern gambling industries reflecting shifting normative values about the role and position of gambling in our lives. As gambling has become more acceptable, more “normal”, its visibility has vastly increased. Against this backdrop it, perhaps, feels increasingly obvious that gambling would increasingly permeate digital games: game designers look to mechanics which hook people into products; games reflect broader societal trends and there is a pressing need to make returns on investments, commoditising play at a hitherto unknown scale.

Keywords Gambling - Gaming - Technology - Board games - Casual games - Normalisation

© The Author(s) 2021 9 H. Wardle, Games Without Frontiers?, Leisure Studies in a Global Era, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74910-1_2

WHAT GAMES SAY ABOUT Us

It’s 10.30am on Good Friday, 2018. My daughter and I are diligently queueing at the British Science Museum with what feels like hundreds of other parents and their kids. What are we waiting for? Entry to the now annual Power UP event, an event so popular tickets must be booked months in advance. Power UP describes itself as a hands-on gaming extravaganza, an immersive journey through the history of games. It is, but it is so much more. For me it’s an opportunity to travel back in time and relive the wonder days of the Sega Mega Drive—to remember and reflect on those heady afternoons and evenings spent locked in the spare room with my brother getting Sonic to collect his gold rings (or Arnold Palmer to sink a hole in one!). The familial bonding the Mega Drive engendered was, for me, an important part of its appeal. It’s also a time to reflect both personally and collectively on our shared experiences and the evolution of digital games. For me, that ranges from playing the standalone space invaders console that was passed down to me from my brother, to the simple BBC consoles I first used in primary school with their black screens and green script, to the designs of 1990s biggest names (Goldeneye, anyone?) whose graphics now look positively primitive compared with digital games today. The Power UP event is an opportunity to re-engage with these games, from Pong to Halo. That it’s now an annual event is testimony to the affection that digital games hold for many but also the growing place and importance that digital games have in cultural life. Mainstream recognition of the cultural importance of games was further affirmed when the British Victoria and Albert Museum, which for over 150 years has been the custodians and arbiters of British cultural life, launched a major exhibition on video games in 2018, describing them as a vital medium (Hunt, 2018). This was some six years after the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York added 14 digital games to its permanent collection.

The precise origins of digital games are contested but many give attribution to William Higinbotham, affectionately nicknamed the “grandfather of video games” (Stanton, 2015). In 1958 Higinbotham was the head of the instrumentation division at Brookhaven National Laboratory—a government-owned national laboratory specialising in nuclear physics. Each year Brookhaven hosted an annual open house, where the general public could visit the institute though it was often felt that the “Average Jo” failed to engage with (or understand the value of) the

2 THE GAMBLING PERMEATION: ... ll machines they encountered. What Higinbotham needed was an interactive way of demonstrating the work they were doing; an early example of what academics now call “public engagement”. The result was “Tennis for Two” the first interactive game where two players knocked a ball back and forth across a net (Stanton, 2015). The game was an extension of the institute’s work on plotting missile trajectories using their custombuilt analogue computer which had also, fortuitously, been programmed to calculate trajectories of bouncing balls. Based on this, the “Tennis for Two” game was born. At the open house in October of that year, it was a hit. People (teenagers mainly) queued to have a go, as one commentator noted “you couldnt pull them away from it!” (Stanton, 2015: 20). A particularly prescient comment given ongoing debates about the “addictiveness” of digital games.

These early digital games tended to take “real” life activities and games and attempt to replicate them within the digital environment. Tennis, ping pong and football were all early prototype digital games, as was Alan Turing’s early attempts to programme a chess game (Stanton, 2015). Ina time when game developers were computer scientists seeking to use games to explore and demonstrate the power of computers, the natural inspiration was the familiar. As a tool to exemplify the power and possibilities of these new machines, replicating the familiar was a sound strategy—the object was not necessarily the game play itself, but rather to showcase the possible. As digital games developed, and the objective became game play itself, the range of cultural references developers drew on expanded. Yet, there was still a tie to the familiar or the current. In the early 1960s the next wave of games often drew heavily on themes of space (Kerr, 2006). This is not surprising. The 1960s were the height of the “space race”, with Russia and the USA competing for superiority, and some early game developers were embedded within military and space research programmes (Kerr, 2006). Themes of space were replicated in other cultural domains. It’s no coincidence that the 1960s also saw the launch of seminal TV programmes like Star Trek or Lost in Space. Science Fiction was increasingly popular and many game designers, as Sci-Fi fans, reflected this in their games (Kerr, 2006; Williams & Kahn, 2013). There is a clear theme of cultural producers, including early games designers, drawing inspiration from the preoccupations of current life. It was, as one of the co-developers of the 1961 game, Spacewar!, described, the “obvious thing to do” (Stanton, 2015: 33).

Of course, borrowing from real-world games and transferring them to emerging digital environments remained popular, as can clearly be seen with games like Pong. Released as an arcade game in 1972, Pong became one of the first games to gain widespread recognition and popularity. Its simple premise, replicating features of tennis, and short game cycle made it the perfect game to be played in bars and arcades with and against friends. Pong was a social experience, though you could play against the machine—the fun was to play against other people. As the 1970s developed, the computer game industry expanded rapidly and game developers took inspiration from a number of sources. Some games, such as maze chasing game Gotcha, don’t fare well when viewed from modern perspectives. Its aim was to chase a player around a maze and attempt to “kiss” them. The marketing was suggestive, with the box clearly showing a man chasing scantily clad women and the now-infamous controllers made to replicate breasts (though these were removed on release) (Stanton, 2015). Yet, when viewed in context of the period in which they were developed, this marketing and content has clear similarities with many popular, yet bawdy, films and television series of the era, which included Benny Hill’s TV show, featuring Hill chasing scantily clad women, or soft porn films. Arguably, following the increasing popularity of films featuring more explicit sexual content, like Emmanuelle or Last Tango in Paris, some developers felt that people didn’t want games to just shoot down spaceships and a whole series of controversial and semi-pornographic games emerged (Kaser, 2020). One of the most notorious was Custer’s Revenge, which featured a naked General Custer having sex with a Native American Woman. Others included Beat ‘em and eat ‘em—in which the object of the game was to make naked women catch and eat male ejaculate. Controversy about sexual content within digital games continues to this day.

Though salacious and infamous, these games were certainly not mainstream. By the late 1970s and early 1980s game developers were also looking to films for inspiration and, in a sign of the rapid commercialisation of the industry, were signing licensing deals with film studios for the rights to produce games based on popular films. Film studios were also increasingly looking to digital games to expand their marketing and franchising of big-budget titles. Games were becoming part of global media landscapes (Albarran-Torres, 2018). In the late 1970s Warner Communications bought Atari, the most successful games producer to date, and saw distinct opportunities in developing and mass-producing games of some of their largest cinematic releases. It was the art of the cross-sell, of crosspromotion. But it back-fired, badly. In 1982, Atari released their “Raiders of the Lost Ark” game, replicating the film plot whereby Indiana Jones searches for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. It was broadly well received. Other ties ups ensued, though the one of legend is Atari’s E.T. game, based on Spielberg’s film of the same name. Rushed through development in order to be released for the Christmas market, Atari reputedly manufactured more E.T. games than it had sold consoles on which to play it. The game sold badly and led to one of gaming’s greatest urban myths: the Atari landfill dump in New Mexico in 1985, where it was reputed that millions of unsold E.T. cartridges were buried (an excavation in 2014 revealed it to be far fewer than the myth propounded, at just 700,000 games) (Stanton, 2015). But the cross over between films and games proceeded unbated. Game versions of Ghostbusters were produced in 1985, to support the film’s release. Like the film, this was a success and testimony to the enduring brand of Ghostbusters. Numerous Ghostbusters games have been reimagined and launched over the years, including as recently as 2009.

By the mid-1990s, the links between games and film were clear: one of the most successful was 1997s Goldeneye, based on the film of the same name that rebooted the James Bond franchise in 1995. However, the cultural impact and influence of games had grown, and no longer were games simply reflecting developments in other media—they were creating new icons of their own. Nintendo were the pioneers of this move, with their purposively designed child-friendly aesthetic and the creation of Super Mario (William & Kahn, 2013). As well as being key characters in their own games, the Super Mario Bros spawned a Top Ten hit single and had an entire album devoted to them (released in 1992); a movie (released in 1993) and a TV show (Super Mario Bros Super Show! First aired in 1989). One of the most famous character crossovers must be Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series. First released in 1996, movie executives quickly saw the appeal of a “female” Indiana Jones-style character. Rights for the movie production were secured by Paramount Pictures in 1998 and the first Lara Croft movie released in 2001. This was followed by a sequel in 2003 and a reboot in 2018. The success of the Tomb Raider games meant that Lara became and remains an iconic character. Yet, her development and characterisation were deeply situated within the social and cultural contexts of the nineties. Lara, as a strong female protagonist, is just one example of moves in the 1990s to place women at the centre of l4 H. WARDLE the action. The 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer attempted the same (followed by the TV series of the same name) and “girl power” was the idiom of the day. Lara, arguably, also was routed in and an exemplar of the “cool Britannia” wave that typified much of the mid-1990s. Finally, much was made of Lara’s physical proportions, with tiny waist and enlarged bust, yet this too reflected 1990’s icons such as Pamela Anderson and the hyper-sexualisation of women that was rife in the “lads mags” era. Lara herself appeared on the front page of “Loaded” magazine in January 2000 (pouting seductively at the reader, scantily clad with a pillow to cover her modesty). In short, the character and image of Lara Croft reflected the era in which she was conceived, and she became an enduring protagonist of those qualities.