Endless Thread - Loot Crates

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

Loot crates are virtual prize boxes available for purchase in video games, containing mystery items like customizations, powerful weapons, or rare gear. They are also the subject of the most downvoted Reddit comment of all-time, the crux of a debate about the definition of gambling, and a window into the history of human evolution.

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Emery, I'm going to play you two sounds. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. Sound one. Huh. Okay.

Sound two. They're like different settings, but they have similar vibes. There's almost like a similar underlying melody. in both of them. Yeah. And does the melody feel like almost like anticipatory? Like, oh. Or revelatory?

Maybe revelatory is the word? Yeah. I don't think I would have classified it as revelatory. But there's definitely something I'd classify it as like a little unsettling to me. Okay. I'll take unsettling. Okay. Sold.

Unsettling. All right. Any guesses of what these kind of similar sounds? are. They're scenes from video games. So one is the sound of the floor of a casino. Okay. Full of slot machines. You ever played a slot machine? You pull the lever? Yeah, I have. So the second sound is a lute crate. See, to me, these two sounds are pretty similar. They both have that kind of, ah, so the reason I'm asking you this is that there's this huge debate that has been playing out across the world over the last few years about weather,

loot crates are a form of... Gambling? Gambling. Because gambling is, for really good reasons, highly regulated. Lute crates inside video games are not. And they're found in games played by a lot of... Teenagers! Yeah!

A loot crate is, like, really defined as this thing that you buy in a video game that has inside it a bunch of digital goodies. And some of these goodies are just for fun. But some of them end up having real value for video game players, either by helping them do better in the game itself, like more powerful gear or whatever, or just being rare and cool enough to be traded or sold on a secondary black market to other gamers.

Remind me why I care about loot crates again? Trick question. You do not care about Luke crates, clearly. This is true. I do not care about Luke crates. But what if I told you that our loot crate story has a connection to Star Wars. I'm listening. And also a $50 billion jackpot for the video game industry. That's a lot of money. And also, Amory, what if I said that cracker jacks are involved? All right. I do like popcorn in all its forms. Also, what if I told you it had something to do with how us humans have evolved and survived? What if I brought you the science of Luke crates? You know, you've been talking about this for months. So I think you've

Finally get your loot crate episode, Ben. Congratulations. Yes. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sievertson. And you're listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.

Today's episode, Lute Crates. Okay, Amory, that lute crate sound I played for you at the top of the episode. Mm-hmm. So I recorded that lute crate sound with the help of a guy named Sahil Parik. Twitch name is Kanga underscore RU-R-U-X? Do you know what a Twitch streamer is? I do. They play games and talk to other people

while they're playing games on the Twitch forum. Yeah, well done. Thank you. Sahil basically broadcasts his gameplay and other people watch it and they all talk to each other about it. So Sehill sat down to buy a luke crate with me on his laptop, which is a laptop specifically designed for playing video games.

logging in. And also he has one of the games most famous or infamous for selling loot crates. It's called Overwatch. This is a game that even I have heard of. The last official count I saw said that Overwatch had 40 million players around the world. Amory, apparently you've heard of it, but you're not one of those players. Nope. And I'm also not one of those players, but Sahil is. Sahil sounds like the real deal, I got to say, but I hope you at least paid him back for the Lude crate. I did reimburse him. Sahil, I'm going to give you $10.

All right. And you can unmute your laptop if you... So choose. Okay. This is beautiful. Okay. So this is in the video game. Well, it's almost like next door to the lobby of the video game.

So Overwatch is what's called a team-based first-person shooter game, Emory, which I know you play lots of these games. Lots of really fast-paced action. between players. But when you're not actually playing the game, you can buy loot crates. It's almost like going to the pro shop for tennis or golf or something. Does that make sense? Yeah. Or like if they can't seat you at a restaurant, they try to get you to spend extra money at the bar first. Except unlike a lot of other video game marketplace purchases where you've got lots of options for specific things you can buy, in the loot crates area of Overwatch, you can only buy one mysterious thing. It's like kind of like a

futuristic looking box with like glittery light shooting out of the cracks in the box. Yeah. And it says, it says open loop box and shop. That's what I'm hoping to hear. That extra sound there where that tells me I got it even more rare item. So you're buying a thing, but you can't see what's inside of it. You can't touch it. You can't engage with it in any way. why would you do this? Yeah, it's pretty risky, right? But loot crates or loot boxes aren't as far out as they might seem. They're based on this really very basic premise.

Rolling the dice, taking a chance on something. And in the late 1800s, for instance, you could get trading cards in your cigarette pack. It does kind of remind me of trading cards because you could buy a pack without knowing what you're getting. Yeah, and Sahil made the same point. I always compare it to baseball as just in the sense that you can sell baseball. basketball cards for quite a lot if you get the right rare cards. I sometimes get a $20 card, get a $50 card, get $100 card. I'd be like, hey, I just made $100.

This is where the Cracker Jacks come in, too. Because you're buying something and there's a mystery prize? Yeah. But that doesn't quite work, because I always know what I'm getting with Cracker Jacks. You know, I'm getting a snack. And I get this little prize or whatever on the side, but it's definitely not going to have a resale value of $100. But what if it did?

Value is in the eyes of the spender, right? Imagine a world where a whole bunch of people thought those crackerjack prizes were worth paying for. This is by design. This is why Luke crates are a huge part of how many video games make money now. Luke crates are a big business. We're talking a projected $50 billion in sales per year as part of the overall video game business by 2022. So this reminds me of a game I am familiar with, Fortnite, the huge global. video game phenomenon. The game is free, but people buy outfits and other things that

customize their avatar or their character in the game. And that game's revenue in 2018 was something like a billion dollars. A free game, $1 billion in revenue. Amazing. But perceived value can get you in a lot of trouble. So are we going to talk about some of the Reddit threads now? Oh yeah. So when I knew we were going to be talking about Luke crates, I went on Reddit and I found a lot of threads on this subject. People talking about being addicted to video games and talking about their challenges of being addicted to video games. That's a whole genre of Reddit posts.

There's one from six months ago titled, I have a gambling addiction. Loot boxes are very detrimental to me. It's from a user who says they spent $1,000 of real money on these digital loot boxes. Another user on Reddit said that back in 2017, they spent $10,000 on these types of. of in-game purchases.

Crazy. Yep. And just in case anyone is listening to this and thinking, hey, don't tell me about video game addiction when there are real

addiction problems in the world. I just want to underscore this is dead serious. People have lost jobs, partners, developed other addictions that they say came from their video game addiction.

South Korea, you may have heard, Amory, do you know about this? No. They enforce a national video game curfew between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.

for kids under 16. What? Yes, and that is because gaming addiction is an epidemic in South Korea. Gaming addiction may not be at that level here in the U.S., but the use of loot crates does potentially connect it to the national numbers on gambling addiction, which is estimated to be between 2 and 5 percent of the population, maybe more following a relaxation of gambling restrictions in states around the country. But you found a redditor right here in Boston who can speak to video.

video game addiction, a sympathetic narrator, if you will. I did. So I struggled with video game addiction myself in high school and in college, had less than a 2.0 GPA after two years of college and was really directionless. And I actually ended up going to India and staying at an ashram for one summer and decided to become a monk and studied kind of on that path for about seven years. Because video games? Originally, yeah. Spoiler, this guy is not a monk.

He ran into a little issue with that. That sort of didn't work out. I met my wife, and so the monk thing sort of went out of the window. I'm sorry for your loss. Yeah. And the joke that I made during my med school interviews is and she wanted to be married to a doctor, so here I am. Here, who is?

So my name is Allo Canoja. I'm a psychiatrist. I'm faculty at Harvard Medical School. I work at McLean Hospital. And most of what I do in my day job is actually addiction psychiatry and more recently, like, technology addiction psychiatry. The reason Al-Oak has made the transition from Monk to technology addiction psychiatrist is not just because of his own problems, or his partner wanting to marry a doctor.

A year ago, he posted on Reddit offering to answer people's questions as a psychiatrist interested in video game addiction. He got a massive response. His post hit the front page. People in Saudi Arabia were calling the hospital he worked at asking for, for him because their kids are addicted to video games. So started getting requests from like South Korea, like the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and then quickly realized after I got probably over 1,000 requests for help in 24 hours,

that is an individual clinician, there's no way that I can just help all these people. Like, I just can't do it. Alok and his wife started a service called Healthy Gamer. It's meant to help people with video gaming addiction. and it employs people who know video gaming in the hopes of bridging the gap to families and kids who are struggling with video game overload. But not necessarily to kick video games cold turkey.

We sort of learn about addictions, like we have a good sense of addictions, but most of those addictions are substance use disorders, right? We think about heroin or cocaine or alcohol. And heroin and cocaine and alcohol are biological molecules that travel to one part of our brain and then affect it in a very specific way. Whereas video games engage us on so many different levels. Video games give us a sense of accomplishment.

They give us a sense of identity. They give us a sense of community. You know, I work with gamers who say, I can't stop playing a video game. I have no control over my life. I want to kill myself. And I also hear gamers say, my parents are abusive.

You know, one of my parents is an alcoholic. I get bullied at school. And if it weren't for you guys, his gamer friends, I would have killed myself a year ago. So I think the reason that video games are so addicting is because they satisfy basic psychological needs that we have. You know, envision a 15-year-old who's got acne and is a little bit overweight and gets bullied at school.

But on the internet, he can be whatever he wants to. He can be a god of war, so to speak. Yeah, right. Interesting. And people don't judge him for the way he looks. Right. So one of the big challenges that I have is in explaining to parents that when you take away a child's video game,

like what are you taking away from them? Are you taking away their friends? Are you taking away their community? Are you taking away their sense of self? So it sounds to me like you're advocating for making that relationship with video games more healthy, not necessarily ending the relationship. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's why we founded HealthyGerman.

for that reason. Alloak startup offers courses, remedies, coaching. Some of the company's offerings are free, but others come at a price. He is a real doctor, after all. But it's not a loot box. Healthy gamer tells you what you're getting. Loot boxes have really evolved over the last decade or so to be central to modern video games.

But the idea of winning a mystery prize in a video game goes way back. Amory, do you remember Super Mario Brothers? That is their theme, right? Yes. Yes. The game that launched Nintendo and home video games into our collective consciousness.

And those boxes that Mario would like jump and punch to get mushrooms that upgraded his character? Oh, they had a question mark on them. Yes. So it's kind of like an OG loot crate. Yes. Also, didn't Nintendo start out as a playing card company in like the 1800s, playing cards that were, I imagine, used in gambling?

The plot thickens. It does thicken, because you're right. People were using these cards to gamble illegally in Japan. And Amory, get this. A loose translation of the Japanese word Nintendo, supposedly, sort of calls back to that angelic lute crate sound we heard at the beginning. Translated, it's leave luck to heaven. So the history of video game lute crates is pretty much tied forever to the history of gambling.

But we don't know for sure whether they're the same thing or not. Well, let's not leave that to heaven. Let's decide right here on Earth in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more. than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics.

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at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So we're trying to answer the question of whether loot crates are gambling or not. Right. And I got the help of a woman who is a video game player and a gambling expert, but she claims not a gambler herself. I'm not a dopamine rush kind of girl. I'm way too cautious and nerdy and numbers oriented for that. Nerdery evidence. Lea Nauer runs the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. The Center Studies Gambling, its intersection with the Internet and video game technology,

and how to treat people who develop gambling addiction. You know, I did my dissertation years ago on kids that develop gambling problems, and what we found was that a significant proportion had a parent who gambled at problematic levels. So in New Jersey, we have a lot of racetracks, and they have family day, picnic this, picnic that, so you trundle along at five years old with your dad, your grandpa, everybody's having so much fun, then you go back. And pretty soon, you're sort of immersed in that culture and it becomes what you perceive to be a harmless family activity.

And for most people, it is harmless, but it can be addictive. And Leah defines gambling like this. Gambling is basically betting money on an outcome of random chance. You're willing to put up money with the hope that you're going to win more, but you may lose all your money. This sounds a lot like what you're doing when you buy a loot crate. Random chance, spending money with the possibility of getting nothing of value in return. And while it's true that there's a really broad spectrum of loot crates in different video games,

and a broad spectrum of how players can or can't trade, sell, or resell what they get in a loot crate, generally speaking, loot crates are represented by video game companies as having value. Why else would you buy one? the mystery part that gets tricky. Leah and her colleague Vivian Anthony did a whole study on gambling and loot boxes. Forty-six percent of those who played video games also bought loot boxes. And among the loot box players, they were significantly more likely to also have gambling problems and or problems with video gaming. Leah says that what hasn't been established is whether or not loot crates are a gateway to gambling. There's a high level of correlation between the two, but we don't know

if one leads to the other. Also, the United States hasn't yet defined loot crates as a form of gambling. And Leah says scientists can't really do that work. It has to be done by the government. Take the analogy from daily fantasy sports. Those of us in the field think daily fantasy sports is gambling. But, you know, the higher courts say, no, it's not. You know, the legislation says, no, it's not.

So somebody in a position of regulatory or legislative authority has got to really clearly start to define these boundaries or not. Do you think that's going to happen? You know, I'm not sure. I think in some countries that have much more rigorous policing of anything that could be related to a gambling activity, yes. In countries like the United States where it's very market-driven and capitalistic in its orientation, it may be a ways off. Politicians in the U.S. are talking about regulation, though. People like Republican Senator of Missouri, Josh Hawley.

He's targeting gaming companies because he says loot boxes separate impressionable kids from their money. And they get the kids addicted to the game. This needs to stop. They need to be upfront about what their games are actually doing, and they need to stop practices that intentionally exploit children. Holly introduced legislation in May that would ban the sale of loot boxes to kids. It hasn't really gone anywhere yet, but it does have bipartisan support. And this, Amory, leads us to a global debate around video games and loot crates that has been happening around the world over the last two years.

Are you ready for an international trip? Oh, yeah. Okay, let's go to Belgium. I'll have five waffles, please. Coming right up, topped with a confi of regulation. Last year in Belgium, the Gambling Commission ruled against loot crates in three big games. Overwatch, FIFA 18, and Counterstrike Global Offensive. And the companies that make these games faced a penalty there of 800,000 euros and five years in prison if they kept including loot crates.

Yikes. Shall we hop over to Australia? Good night, might. You want to eat Aussie pie and play loot crate video games? You might soon need to be 18 because Luke crate video. games will be rated R. Regulation is also happening in Japan. And what's interesting here is that it's not just legislators who are getting frustrated with loot crates. Gamers are pissed, too.

Emery, we're going to do the Star Wars part now. Are you ready? Yes. All right, so this is a perfect example. Battlefront 2, the Star Wars game that came out in 2017, Emery, I'm sure you were all over it, was full of loot crates. But these were loot crates that you kind of had to buy, or at least could buy in order to really progress in the game.

Like, you could jump ahead by buying these loot crates because you'd get better gear and stuff. And this is something that people call pay to win. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah. Okay. Don't like it. Yeah.

Not happy a lot of these gamers were with this game company that makes Battlefront, Electronic Arts. And ever since that game came out, EA has had a bad rep with some video game players. You just said that just like Yoda been. Not happy these gamers. were. Not happy these gamers were. EA, you have sunk to a new low.

This is like a whole genre of YouTube video. Gamers who are mad about video game companies using loot crates to make money. Electronic Arts, the video game company that made this Star Wars game, really got raked over the coals for this, because originally Battlefront 2 nudged players to not just spend $80 bucks on the game itself,

but a lot more money on loot box. that helped them progress in the game. Basically a pay-to-win scheme. When gamers called them out, EA put a bit of a non-apology on Reddit, and it is literally the most downvoted Reddit comment in history. Seriously, it's in the Guinness Book of World Records. Two things should be said about this, though.

Number one, a lot of people draw a distinction between loot crates that just drop cool items for customizing your character, and, of course, the loot crates that drop items that actually give you a leg up in the game. And two, video game companies have been changing the way they use loot crates. EA changed Battlefront 2 just because of the blowback it got. Gaming companies have changed their loot crate policies. They've made it more clear what you might get when you buy loot crates.

They've made it harder for kids to buy them. And in countries where they've been banned, video game makers have complied with regulators. But loot crates are still everywhere. People are still spending oodles of money on them. There's still lots of discussion on Reddit. Why? You have an answer to this question, right?

This is where you're going to bring the science? Yes. And this, to me, Emery, is maybe the most interesting part of all of this. All Oak, our ex-gaming addict, ex-munk, turned psychiatrist. He says that loopboxes and gambling in general connect to something fundamentally human, primal. So there are primitive circuits in our brain, which is like our dopamine circuitry. So there's like this thing called the mesolone. limbic circuit, which anytime we have kind of satisfaction and triumph activates.

Lute crates activate that same kind of part of our brain. Because the thing about the loot crate is it's not guaranteed success. So what makes it fun is that there's anticipation and then there's reward and sometimes there's denial of reward. So we see the same mechanic where when you deny reward, sometimes and you give it another time, that actually reinforces the behavior, right? Which is so weird because, like, mathematically, if you want to be consistently successful, you would avoid things that give you mixed success, right? Well, so if you think about it, so our brain evolved, like, if we think about mammals, right?

So if you think about a mammal that's looking for food, if the mammal that's going to be the most successful is the one who checks the berry bush today and then also checks it again a month from now, even if it didn't have berries. Huh. Right? So if we're thinking about, like, hunters. gatherers. Yep. Our reward circuitry here is very fine-tuned. Okay.

In terms of like, there has to be a reward some of the time. And the mammals that found the reward some of the time were the ones that were the most successful. Wow. Because they didn't give up after just trying once. Like, I'm going to go west of my town today and look like I'm going to forage. And some days I'll find something and some days that I won't. So are you saying that like loot crates in video games, they're like reinforcing a fundamental

mammalian evolutionary response or something? Absolutely. So I think if we look at why video games are addictive, like why are they fun? It's because they tap into things that evolution has selected to be like good for us. Humanity loved loot crates even before we knew we loved loot crates. And also the original loot crate was a berry bush

that our ancestors found some berries on. I still might not have any interest in playing video games, Ben, but I think I am coming around. to loot crates being worth our time. Right. But maybe not always worth the money. Cracker jacks, on the other hand. Let's go get a box and find out what's inside. Yes.

By the way, Sahil, our Twitch streamer, is now working for Alloaks organization, Healthy Gamer. And you can find a whole subreddit dedicated to helping gaming addicts. You can find that at Reddit.com R slash Stop Gaming. And if you're looking for gambling addiction help, give a call to 1-800-4.4. 522-470. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer who doesn't really play video games, but he does like going outside and watching animals doing stuff.

Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she recommends not gambling. It's just one of her. Life Pro Tips. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus, who hates curfews of all kinds. Why would anyone want to live in a boring? Distopia. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit and he loved Super Mario Bros, especially when he was drunk or a kid. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our interns are Magdea Lemaata. Maggie's fine. And Noah Boston. It's like Austin with a beat. On Reddit, we are endless

underscore thread if you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today. Hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Siebertson. I'm senior producer and co-host Ben Brock Johnson. That'll let myself out. Thank you.