Virtual Vegas
Part 1
I remember my first experience with loot boxes. It was 2016 and I was in my freshman year of high school. I had just turned 15 years old and for my birthday, my parents had gotten me the game I’d been wanting for months: Overwatch. I’d been hearing about it everywhere, from my friends at school to the YouTubers I’d watch at home. When I first began playing the game, I loved it and was hooked immediately. Like many others, though, that’s not all I was hooked on.
Overwatch was a game that was famous for having loot boxes, a common form of microtransaction within online games in which players can earn or buy boxes to open, which contain randomized items. You could earn loot boxes by playing the game, but the fastest way to get them was to purchase them for real money. Shortly after I began playing, Overwatch had its first holiday season event, “Winter Wonderland”, featuring (at the time) exclusive winter-themed cosmetics. Filled with both excitement about what I was going to get and the fear of missing out, I purchased $20 worth of loot boxes over my winter break. I remember being slightly disappointed with the rewards I received and felt very tempted to buy more for a chance to get better items.
I was lucky to have my parents watch out for my spending and this did not become a habit for me, seldom purchasing loot boxes after this. With Overwatch’s profits totaling over $1 billion less than a year after release, this was not the case for many others. Overwatch has since removed its loot box system, but it is an outlier in that case. Many games still sell loot boxes in various forms and make millions in profit from it.
Activision Blizzard
It’s an issue that many are aware of, and I’m sure many others have had an experience like mine, whether they felt a strong temptation to buy loot boxes or pulled the trigger like I did. Loot boxes may not be as ubiquitous as they used to be, but they are still a predatory tactic used by the gaming industry to drain the wallets of millions of people worldwide.
It’s no secret that loot boxes are considered a form of gambling akin to slot machines by many people. You pull a lever, or in this case, push a button, and get a randomized outcome. With slot machines, there’s an overwhelming chance that you’ll get nothing. Loot boxes at least guarantee a prize, but most often result in low-tier prizes that are essentially worthless. Either way, if you want to get a good payout or prize, you are going to have to take a lot of spins or open a lot of boxes.
Loot boxes are not always just used for obtaining in-game items and cosmetics. Certain games, such as Counter-Strike 2 (formerly known as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), have virtual marketplaces where players can sell items they obtain from loot boxes (known as “crates”). Some extremely rare and desirable items can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Scenarios like this are more harmful than simply rolling the dice on in-game items because it incentivizes players to spend more money to try to get a big payout in the end.
Key differences between traditional gambling and in-game loot boxes are regulation and availability to children. Traditional gambling, the kind you would normally see in casinos, is regulated by federal and state governments. More could and should be done to protect people from gambling, but there are at the very least some protections in place.
Loot boxes, along with other forms of online gambling, are largely unregulated. The problems with this are that there are no protections in place for consumers, and more critically, it is available and easy to accessible by children.
Every once in a while, I see a news story online about a kid who spent thousands of dollars on loot boxes or other in-game purchases and financially ruined their families. This should not be possible, and there should be protections in place to prevent it from happening.
Despite the critical lack of a strong response by federal and state governments, there have been attempts in recent years to improve the situation. Somewhat famously, Belgium banned loot boxes from being sold by companies without gambling licenses in 2018. A report found that 82% of the top 100 highest-grossing games on the iPhone app store still utilized loot box mechanics.
Legislation that outright bans loot boxes will not be effective unless it is enforced, which has already proven to be difficult. The implementation of alternative methods to complete bans which are easier to enforce should be considered.
The priority of these smaller legislation should prioritize accomplishing two objectives. First, they should attempt to make customers more aware of the similarities between loot boxes and gambling. Second, they should make it much more difficult for children to access them and prevent unwanted spending and the formation of gambling habits.
An effective way of accomplishing these objectives is to force video game publishers to display disclaimers within their games to warn customers about loot boxes. The ESRB, the major game rating organization within the United States, started putting text on the age rating label that they place on games warning customers of in-game purchases.
This method of warning customers about loot boxes is a step in the right direction but ultimately fails in several ways. The warning only notifies customers of the presence of in-game purchases and does not specify whether they are loot boxes. Many people do not buy physical game discs anymore and are therefore much less likely to see the ESRB rating on the box. Finally, the ESRB does not rate mobile games, which are often some of the most egregiously monetized games.
A potential solution to this issue is to force developers to display a warning about loot boxes whenever a customer boots up the game. It would also be beneficial if the same warning was displayed on the loot box purchase page or any sort of in-game shop that contains them within the game. This would dramatically increase the visibility of the warnings and likely dissuade some people from purchasing loot boxes.
Preventing children from purchasing loot boxes is another priority and several other methods could be taken to accomplish this. An in-game purchase lock could be required whenever attempting to purchase loot boxes, thereby preventing children from buying them without knowing a password set by their parents.
Laws require that you must be over the age of 18 to participate in Traditional gambling, but no such law exists for loot boxes. All games that involve loot boxes or gambling of some sort should be classified as 18+ games by the ESRB or other regulatory agencies. A parent might hesitate to buy their child a game with a rating intended for adults.
The implementation of these smaller-scale regulations would be steps in the right direction and would ideally ultimately lead to an enforceable ban on loot boxes. Unfortunately, it seems like lawmakers are moving slowly in response to loot boxes, and more and more people fall into the trap of giving them money. The more awareness is raised about this issue and the more public outcry that is generated, the more likely that lawmakers will act on it. The well-being of people who enjoy playing video games, especially children, would be drastically improved if the virtual slot machines that currently plague them were removed.
Part 2
I chose to write this project in the style of a blog entry. I chose it because of the formatting conventions, audience reach, and casual nature of writing. Blogs are typically a non-formal way of writing that allow the author to speak directly to the audience, including personal anecdotes. This was the most prominent reason I chose the format.
I was originally going to choose another genre, such as an open letter to game developers or some sort of briefing for policymakers. I thought that this would be the best way to reach people who would have the power to make changes and enact regulations, either governmental or self-imposed. What changed my mind was what my group members said to me during the WP3 workshop.
I expressed to them my concerns and uncertainty about choosing a genre that will be able to reach people and maybe make a change for the better. To my surprise, they both recommended that I go with my third and least-favored option: a blog post. They recommended that I use the genre because of my personal experiences with the subject matter and that I should try to use those experiences to reach an audience with a similar background to mine, who might want to be more informed on the issue. My group members also highlighted potential issues with my other genres and their ability to affect any change.
Blogs are typically a more casual approach to writing. In many of the blogs that I have read, the first person is used somewhat frequently by the author. The format of the writing often consists of short paragraphs, typically only a few sentences each. The casual nature of the writing can also express itself in the formatting, with atypical sentence structure.
Unlike a lot of the academic writing I have done in the past, a blog post allows for a more relaxed form of citations. Instead of having to formally cite a specific page or section of a source, writing in the blog format allows me to hyperlink relevant text. This helps maintain the genre’s style of short, concise sentences and paragraphs that keep the reader moving quickly through the text.
Another convention of blog posts that isn’t common in other forms of writing is the inclusion of images within the text. It’s useful to show the readers relevant images to supplement their reading and can serve as a nice break in the text.
Before this assignment, I had very limited experience with writing blogs. I had done it once for a class in high school and in some of my foreign language classes, but that experience was different altogether. Writing the blog, I tried to follow the genre conventions I’ve observed in other blogs I’ve read. I wasn’t very comfortable with writing one or two-sentence paragraphs that can be seen in some blogs, but compared to my usual academic writing, I attempted to keep my paragraphs on the shorter side.
I utilized the in-text hyperlink citations that I’ve seen in many blogs before and really enjoyed doing so. It was much easier to do than the formal MLA citations I’m used to using and makes utilizing and linking news articles more accessible. I’ve always thought it was cool in blogs and other casual genres how you can click on a hyperlink to learn more about a specific part of a post.
As a genre, blogs span many topics. Typically, they seem to be used to address casual audiences who are already interested in a topic. Cooking blogs, for example, are addressed to people who are interested in cooking and learning new recipes. There are exceptions, with formal and academic blogs existing, but the majority seem aimed at a casual audience.
The audience I wanted to address in my blog post was people who were casually familiar with and interested in gaming. That audience almost certainly would have been exposed to loot boxes at some point and I wanted my anecdote at the start of my blog to be potentially familiar to them and to hook them into reading more. While writing to an audience that doesn’t have the direct ability to create regulations might not have the same immediate effect as a letter to a congressperson might have, for example, it seems like it is much more likely to be read and acknowledged. Representatives likely receive hundreds of letters every day about hundreds of different issues, and it’s unlikely that all of them get read and actioned on. If enough people read blog posts like mine, a larger conversation about loot boxes and their legality might get started, which is much more likely to get noticed by those in power and make a change for the better.