Children and young people's experiences and understandings of gambling-style systems in digital games: loot boxes, popular culture, and changing childhoods
Developing current geographical debates on children’s digital geographies and popular culture, this article examines children and young people’s experiences and understandings of gambling-style systems in digital games. Chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes are a growing feature of the global gaming industry. This article examines the space between gaming and gambling and provides new perspectives to this emerging field, drawing on empirical research from video ethnography game-play sessions with children and young people. This article uniquely foregrounds these accounts, giving room for their voices in a debate dominated by adults. We argue gambling-style systems must be understood within children’s everyday sociospatial experiences, including friendship, family, and curating collections. We provide a fuller picture of children and young people’s situatedness and negotiations around digital gaming through interviews with parents and game designers. We demonstrate the conceptually striking ways they narrate generational change, mobilizing powerful social constructions of childhood. We advance understandings of children’s popular culture and nostalgia in academic debates on digital childhoods, arguing that loot boxes are a new and important lens through which to view wider anxieties. Furthermore, we reveal potential risks associated with these systems and offer recommendations for a timely international policy debate.
Funding
Between Gaming and Gambling: investigating children and young people's experiences and understandings of gambling style systems in digital games
Economic and Social Research Council
Find out more...History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Annals of the American Association of GeographersVolume
114Issue
1Pages
200 - 217Publisher
Taylor & Francis Group, LLCVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2023-08-10Publication date
2023-10-12Copyright date
2023ISSN
2469-4452eISSN
2469-4460Publisher version
Language
- en