Measuring Distress Against Loot Box Spend - Aaron Drummond and Jim Sauer | grokludo 9

Aaron Drummond and Jim Sauer are associate professors at the University of Tasmania, and recently released a paper looking at loot box spending measured against distress, when normalising for disposable income.

The two have studied a range of issues in games, such as the effects of violent games on aggression, and the impacts of gaming on learning. But when they started researching loot boxes, things were very different.

We already know that loot box purchasing is linked to problem gambling symptomatology, in what Drummond calls "one of the most replicable findings [he's] ever seen in psychology." More recent longitudinal research has also found that young people who purchase loot boxes are more likely six months later to engage in traditional gambling.

But as Jim Sauer notes in this interview, loot boxes are an interesting research subject in and of themselves, rather than purely as a potential gateway to traditional gambling. They can potentially cause psychological and financial harm regardless of whether the player moves on to traditional gambling or not.

In their recent paper, Drummond and Sauer looked at two existing datasets, examining if loot box spending was linked to distress, when normalising for disposable income. In one dataset, greater distress was found among those with higher loot box spend. In a second dataset, the correlation was not found.

Drummond and Sauer go into the nuances of why that might be in the below interview:

Whether sourcing the data from different regions caused cultural discrepancies, or if it was the six-point scale of distress as opposed to the ten-point scale, it's clear the topic warrants more research. But Drummond makes an argument for the ten-point scale being superior.

Normalising for disposable income is important in this instance because of the industry's notion of "whales" - a small group of high spenders who account for a vastly disproportionate amount of a game's microtransaction revenue.

In this interview, Drummond makes clear that these are not all people with unlimited amounts of money who can unthinkingly throw cash at a game's optional extras. Some participants self-reported spending more on loot boxes than their entire disposable income in a given period.

Sauer says he would argue that this is "quintessentially financial harm."

Drummond also quotes another study which shows that in each spending bracket, the highest spenders are those vulnerable to gambling related harm. That vulnerability is an even better predictor of loot box spending than income.

The lesson, he says, is that the carefree whale doesn't exist.

While I had Drummond and Sauer with me - who have both previously researched the effects of violent videogames on aggression - I took the opportunity to ask them about the current state of that research as well, which has once again become relevant after politicians like RFK Jr. mentioned videogames as a possible catalyst for the Charlie Kirk killing.

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