GamCare Says Gamification of Everyday Life Leads to More Gambling Addiction

GamCare, the UK’s leading charity raising awareness and supporting those affected by gambling harm, recently released the first edition of its quarterly Signals insight series. After analyzing more than 2,300 anonymized webchat transcripts from 20 days of helpline activity, the charity claimed that the gamification of everyday life can contribute a lot to the development of harmful gambling habits. GamCare Puts Sheds Light on Gamification According to GamCare CEO Victoria Corbishley, who noted that GamCare has nearly thirty years of experience supporting people affected by gambling, people can struggle with various forms of gambling, and these ways often change. She explained that the Signals insight series spotlights emerging trends the charity sees in its practice. Corbishley said that these issues often remain underreported, but are still something that needs to be studied to support people with gambling problems. Gamification is one of the ways a digital space is designed to help people make various decisions. The approach often includes elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, and rewards to encourage engagement across gaming, retail, and financial services While GameCare explains that sometimes these features can be a positive experience in fields such as education, where well-designed, gamified approaches can improve learner engagement, other times that approach can be implemented in ways that play a role in developing problematic gambling behavior. The charity explained that gambling-like mechanics, such as chance-based rewards, urgency, loss-chasing, and more, often make risk harder to recognize or control. How Gamification Leads to People Developing Harmful Gambling Habits One particular example that GamCare gave was loot boxes in video games. Loot boxes have long been a point of debate as some jurisdictions have sought to classify them as a form of gambling. For example, earlier this year, New York Attorney General Letitia James called out Valve, the large video game developer and owner of the platform Steam, saying the company’s products are essentially gambling GamCare has received multiple calls where people have said they had problems with loot boxes. For example, one caller describes losing GBP 500 (around $670) within 30 minutes on surprise sets purchased through a shopping and auction app, while also using their savings in the stock market “in a gambling fashion.” Corbishley emphasized that this did not mean classifying every game, purchase, or investment as gambling, noting that the law should continue to distinguish between different types of products. However, she cautioned that focusing solely on products legally defined as gambling could risk overlooking broader patterns of potentially harmful behavior. The charity also called for greater emphasis on prevention and professional training to help individuals recognise high-risk design features wherever they occur. It further advocated for research into how harmful patterns may transfer between different types of products, alongside the development of shared principles for responsible gamification. In other news about GamCare, the charity created a financial buffer to support its work as it prepares for the introduction of a statutory gambling harm levy in the UK.