Instant Genius - Dr Pete Etchells: Do video games encourage gambling behaviour?

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

This week on the Science Focus Podcast, we're joined by Dr Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology with a particular interest how video games affect our mood and behaviour. Pete is also the author of the book Lost in a Good Game which explores why we love video games, and what they do for us. Today we’re talking about the relationship between gambling and video games: what we know and what don’t. We want you to help us with the research, so if you want to get involved in a real-life scientific study that could shape the conversation around gaming and gambling, stayed tuned and listen in for details at the end. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription [this will open in a new window] Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Pete Etchells: Are video games good for us? Project Discovery: Could computer games help find a cure for COVID-19? The neuroscience of happiness – Dean Burnett Dr Julia Shaw: Why do we do bad things? Anthony David: Why is there still such stigma around mental health? Brendan Walker: Where is the best place to sit on a rollercoaster? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hi, welcome back to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Daniel Bennett, the editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. And today I'm joined by Dr. Pete Etchels, a professor of psychology with a particular interest in how video games affect our mood and behavior. Pete is also the author of The Brilliant Book Lost in a Good Game,

which explores why we love video games and what they can. can do for us. Today, we're talking about the relationship between gambling and video games, what we know and what we don't. And crucially, we want you to help us with the research. So, if you want to get involved in a real-life scientific study that could shape the conversation around gaming and gambling, stay tuned and listen in for details at the end. So, Pete, can you tell me why are you so interested in video games and behaviour? Well, because they're great, I guess. I mean, I've always been interested in video games.

I've played them all my life. My background as a scientist obviously wasn't in them to begin with. I started out life during my PhD doing work on vision science. So I was interested in how and why we move our eyes to moving things in the world around us and what that can tell us about how the brain generally makes decisions and things like that. And I can pinpoint when I got interested in this whole question around video games and behavior to going down to the pub around about 2011. We always used to go down to the pub on a Friday night, everybody in our department. And I think that day I'd read an article in a newspaper that shall not be named that said something like computer games leave kids with dementia warns top neurologist.

Is it easy? Yeah, I don't, I wasn't so much angry at that. I was just a bit dumbfounded because it seemed like such a bizarre claim to make. And I looked at the evidence behind it at the time and there was none. And we're nearly 10 years down the line from that particular headline. And there's still no research that suggests that playing video games causes dementia in kids. So I was having a big rant about this in the pub. and one of the professors in the department said,

you know, why don't you put him anywhere your mouth is basically and do some work on that? And that was kind of the first time that it ever really occurred to me that as a psychologist, this is something that I could actually interrogate from a research point of view, so I could bring together two things that I really love psychology and playing video games and try and answer some interesting scientific questions about them. And just hearing you say that,

given how many of us these days play video games. And if you just need evidence, you can just look at how quickly the PlayStation 5 keeps selling out. Am I right to say it's quite an understudied area in psychology? Yeah, in some ways. I mean, in some ways, there's tons and tons of research. From a psychological point of view, there's tons of research out there on video games. in another sense there is really not that much good stuff out there.

So for the past 30 years or so, I would say that psychology and the understanding of media effects and video games specifically has been really dominated by this question around whether playing violent video games causes aggression. And perhaps a little bit more recently, this idea of whether video games are addictive or not. Those are interesting questions in and of themselves, but there's a vast array of areas of study and avenues of research to do with video games that we've just not really touched because we've been so focused on these more negative questions. So what kind of areas are you thinking about? So the most basic and obvious one will be looking at potential positive effects of play.

Again, it's something that we've seen bits of research, on, but they tend to focus on things like, you know, do brain training games work or not? And again, the evidence there has been pretty much that they, they don't. But looking at really at how people play video games, that's another one, actually. We still don't really have a good handle on why people play them. We've got an understanding of the types of things that people do in games, but really trying to understand in a really detailed way why people pick up a game controller, day after work or on the weekend or at two o'clock in the morning, we're really only just scratching

the surface of that question. Okay, so we'll definitely look back to that, especially I'm particularly interested in the, as a science reporter, the kind of the stream of sort of moral panic that we have every so often around video games. But I just want to turn our attention to something that you're, you know, the reason why we're talking now, which is you're doing some new research on a particular gameplay mechanic that's sort of come into the spotlight in the last few months or last few years even and they're called loot boxes. So first off, just for somebody who might not know what a loopbox is, what are they and why are they of interest to you? My favourite way of explaining what loot boxes are is harking back to something that I used to do as a kid. So

when I was about 8, 9, 10, that sort of age, I always used to every year at the start of the Premier League buy a football sticker album and you get packs of stickers and in each pack there's like six cards and some of them you will get loads and loads of versions of and other ones, they were usually the shiny foil club logos and things like that.

They were really rare. And basically loopboxes are the digital equivalent of those sorts of packs. So when you play a game, you're given the opportunity to open a box, so literally a loop box, but in other games it can be things like opening a pack of cards or spinning a wheel or something like that. And you will have a random chance of getting a selection of items out of that box. And what those items do varies from game to game.

So some games it might give you things like an outfit or a costume for your character. So it doesn't actually have any impact on your ability to play the game itself. it just makes you look a bit cooler. In other games, you might get new power-ups, or so games like Harthstone, for instance, which is an online card game. It's a bit like Magic, The Gathering. You can get new packs of cards,

and the new cards do new things in-game, so they might give you an in-game advantage. But regardless of how it's implemented, the setup is basically the same across any sort of implementation of this, in that you will get a random selection of items. some of them you get quite a lot, and they're relatively low value.

They don't really do much. And because of those two things, they're not particularly desirable. Other items will be much, much rarer, and they might look cooler or have much more powerful in-game advantages, and therefore they become much more desirable. Now, the issue around loot boxes at the minute

is that you get some of them for free in most games, but most games also often. you the opportunity to buy them as well. And it's usually around about a pound to open one box or say 40 pounds to open 50 boxes and things like that. So the worry that a lot of scientists have, a lot of parents have, I think, as well, and increasingly policymakers have, is that this is something that's within a video game environment that seems to look like gambling, right? This looks like something that you might see on a slot machine. You know, this idea. that you pay a bit of money and you have a chance at winning something that you want

and it's sort of randomised and you don't know necessarily what the odds are. So that's why people are starting to get interested in loot boxes as a specific mechanism within games. Are they driving problematic gambling behaviours? Do they have any impacts on mental health and mental well-being? Or are we worrying about nothing? and that's that's sort of what I'm trying to look at with the research that I'm doing at the minute is to try and put those three areas together basically what's the relationship between the types of games you play the types of loop boxes that are implemented in them as well as your own

mental well-being whether you show any problematic gambling behaviors and things like that to see whether this is something that we need to be thinking a little bit more deeply about So it's not, so, so it's, it's, it's, it's, in one part, it's understanding how, how much does this look like gambling, but also regardless of this, does this mechanism, you know, is it healthy for our mental health? Because, um, I suppose if you're, if I, I remember, uh, there was always a kid in school who had, uh, the biggest pile of those football stickers. And I had a very small pile. Um, and, and, um, and, And perhaps if I had the money at my disposal that I do today back then, I could probably pour a lot of money into it, not only spend a lot of money, but also chances I'll be quite unhappy by the end of it. Yeah, I think there's the problem with it is that there's no upper limit, right? Because there's never 100% guarantee that even after you open a thousand boxes, you'll

get that one particular item that you want. you can therefore spend inordinate's amount of money on these boxes and there's not really anything stopping you there. So that's one potential issue. But I think this goes to a really interesting question here about, you know, what is it that we're worried about? What do we mean when we talk about potential harm, particularly in this context? So one aspect of that might be financial harm. You know, can you afford to do this? it might be the case that you spend a thousand pounds a month on loopboxes.

That's either a problem or it isn't, depending on your ability to afford that or not. And trying to interrogate that particular question in psychological research is often quite a difficult thing to do because we often rely on fairly subjective questionnaire-type measures, where we rely on people being honest with us about things like how much they're spending, how much they're earning, and things like that. that's not to say it's not an issue. There's a potential real harm there in that if you're spending beyond your means on this particular mechanism, that's going to cause all sorts of problems in your wider life.

There are also issues around mental well-being, like you said. So is it the case that regardless of your ability to be able to spend money on these sorts of mechanisms, of these sorts of items. When you do it, does it help you at all, or does it cause largely negative affect behavior? So does it lower your mood? And we've got mixed evidence on that at the minute. So there's a few studies out there that show that increases

in loopbox purchases and spending behaviors seems to be negatively correlated with mood. So the idea is if you spend more, on loop boxes, you also report that your moods lower as well. There are some studies out there, though, that show that correlation and at the same time show a correlation with positive moods as well. So at the same time, it's showing that there's reductions in mood. They also show that people who spend more on loopboxes also tend to be happier as well.

So we've got a real mix of findings at the minute, and it's difficult to tease these things apart. And that's why I think it's really important to do more work on this, because we're at the stage at the minute, certainly in the UK, where we're looking at potential regulation of these sorts of mechanics in games, and maybe even going so far as to revise and update the UK Gambling Act to take them into account. But we don't really have a clear idea on what their actual effects are at the minute. We have a load of studies out there that are good studies. They're done well, but they're all largely correlational in nature. So they show that if you spend more on loot boxes, you also report higher levels of problem gambling. But we don't know what the causal

direction there is. It might be that people who are already prone to problematic gambling behaviors are drawn to to games that have got loopboxes in them, or it might be that people are fine, then they start playing games with loop boxes in them, and that increases problematic gambling behavior later on. And it's the same with mental well-being. So it might be the case that for some people who are in difficult positions, they play these sorts of games and spend money on loopboxes, that lowers their mood, which is why we get those negative correlations. But for some people who can afford to do this and they enjoy playing games and getting more items in that game that they like playing is a fun thing to do, then that correlates with an increased mood.

So we need to figure out whether these are sort of bad across the board, in which case, you know, regulation is a good idea, or are there some cases in which it's bad for specific people, for specific groups of people, in which case we need to identify those people and figure out how best we can support them. But actually, for the gaming population at large, loopboxes offer a bit of a positive boost to mood, in which case, you know, we shouldn't get rid of them from games. so we're not at the stage where we can answer those sorts of questions yet with the research. And for anyone listening who maybe isn't, you know, wouldn't call themselves a gamer. I mean, this is pretty big, big stuff in reality, isn't it? Because, I mean, it's in some parts of Europe, the bat mechanic has been banned. Is it the Netherlands? Yeah, so Belgium was the particularly famous case.

a couple of years ago. So there was a big gambling commission investigation, and it covered three particular games. So I think it looked at Overwatch, which is like a first person shooter type game, FIFA 2018 and Counter Strike, which again is another first person shooter. And they found that in all three of those cases for each of those games, they were in violation of Belgium's gambling legislation. So basically, because they were argued to be

games of chance that involved this monetary wager in terms of selling loot boxes. They were therefore illegal. And I remember that as someone who dabbles in FIFA. I think it was around then that FIFA, which has a very similar presentation, I suppose, to the sticker packs and the card packs that we all so lovingly remember. although I know that EA games had to actually make it look significantly different to avoid the wrath of Panini who make those sticker boxes. They had to start publishing the odds, didn't they, of the chances of getting a certain promotional item within the pack.

And I think that was a little bit of an eye opener in the UK, I think, to some people who were, like myself, playing FIFA and realise, how low your chances were of actually getting it. I mean, you've sort of touched it there. The key thing is as well, and there's often the case with games. There's lots different mechanisms here, isn't there? You know, there are, and that's going to form part of your research, I believe. But, you know, there's the, here you can get something that makes your game, makes your performance potentially better, if you're good enough.

And then some of it's just silly, you know, outfits that you can. and where? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there is some work on this already in the sense that, so there was a study that came out actually in January this year that looked at or tried to kind of segregate loopbox games by the types of loopboxes that they're implemented. And generally, they found that it doesn't matter how it's implemented if you pay for them, there was a relationship with problem gambling. Not a massive one, but it's there. But the interesting thing from that study was that that effect becomes stronger or weaker depending on how the loopbox is implemented in that particular game. So for example, some games use what's

basically called a near-miss strategy. It's kind of what you see in slot machines in casinos. So you open a box or you spin a wheel is a classic one. So you spin a wheel and you can see all of the options that you can win on the wheel, but you don't get any of the ones you want. You get the rubbish one, basically. So you're shown what you just missed out. on, that seems to show the strongest effect, whereas games which I don't use that, or they give you items in-lutboxes that don't offer any in-game advantage. So they're just things like character outfits or stickers or things like that. The effect's much weaker.

What you also find as well is that if you play games where loot boxes, you can't pay for them at all, then you don't see these associations as well. And so that brings me on to my next question quite nicely. So clearly game designers are quite clever than when it comes to sort of our psychology. And I don't want to sound like they're malevolent, but sort of, you know, like a casino designer or, you know, like someone who designs a really great shopping center, they have to understand or know, know about our society. psychology. Is that something game designers are thinking of? I'm sure it is, but I don't necessarily know that they're thinking about it in the same way that we're talking about it here now. I think, you know, whenever you talk to industry and explain some of the scientific research behind how things like gambling work, they recognize it, but they don't know it for, you know, the technical terms that you've used. I suspect tends to happen instead is that you have a sort of period of trial and error where they try out different ways of doing things.

And we're talking about how you best monetize games at the minute because people don't really spend money as a one-off thing outright for the game at the start. Now, that's sort of a business model that died about 15, 20 years ago. So games developers need to find ways to make their products viable from a, from a price. point of view. And if you implement something in a game and release it out there into the wider world and you start getting loads of money for it, you might see that as a good thing without necessarily thinking about the psychological impact that that might have on your player base, because it's not necessarily the thing that you're thinking about when you implement it. So, yeah, there are psychologists that work at video games development companies. They tend to work

in things like user experience, and there are, you know, like in any walk of life, are some good ones, some bad ones, and some in the middle, really. But I hear this argument quite a lot that people think that games development companies are evil, basically, that they're doing these things deliberately. And, you know, like you said, it started, I wrote a book a couple of years ago about this stuff. And I got to interview some games developers at some big firms. And I never got that impression from them. These are people who love games and they looked out because they happened to get into a job

where they could do something that they could enjoy and was their hobby. A lot of them are parents as well. And they just came across as normal people, right? They're trying to do the best they can. There's no single driving evil force that's running. What happens in these companies is that you have fairly, kind of segregated groups of teams that are all working on little bits of a game, and then that all comes together as a final product at the end. So they're not always necessarily talking to

each other, certainly about psychology and the psychological impact of what they're doing. They'll just go within whatever their specific remit is. So I think we have to be really careful about how we have these conversations and not vilify games developers. Equally, I would say, that there have been some situations where games developers have said some really dumb things that have made them look super evil, but I'm sure that's a mistake as well. But not vilify them because, A, I think they're just people, they're just normal people. And B, particularly from my point of view as a scientist, they're the gatekeepers to the best data that we've got out there. So one thing that's a real struggle, not just about loopboxes, but about video games generally,

is that we often have to rely on, like I said earlier, these sort of subjective questionnaires and reports. So we're asking people, you know, how do you feel about this game, or what do you do in this game, or how long do you spend on this game? And even if you're being as super honest as you can be or as you think you can be in answering those questions, it turns out people aren't very good at these sorts of self-report measures. There's a growing line of research that's looking at this in the particular context of screen time. So most studies out there on screen time will involve asking people, how much of your day do you spend on Instagram or on your smartphone or on TV.

Now, when you look at the data that people provide versus the data that you can grab off their smartphones with things like the ScreenTime app, they're completely off the mark. people are really bad at estimating time in that sense. And that makes sense in a way for video games in particular, because the whole point of playing video games is that you immerse yourself in a fantastical world for a bit just to zone out. So you're not going to be keeping an eye on the clock, really, when you're doing that. So we're really bad at those sorts of things.

Games companies have that data. They have the real objective data of how much people are spending, what they're spending it on, what time they're spending in the game, who they're engaging with, all of those sorts of things that would be a treasure trove for scientists like me to get the hands on. And so to go back to your research then, so at the moment you're investigating all those things that we've just talked about. I just wondered, are we also looking at here at sort of randomness in games in general? Because it occurred to me while I was reading up on this

that I suppose for quite a long time, some version of this has been in games before, I suppose we coined the term loopbox. I think back to my days playing Warcraft, where we would do a raid, showing my sight bias here and my passion for games. But you would go into a dungeon with a group of friends, you kill the boss,

and then some element of luck would just, determine your reward. Are you interested in how similar these things look and feel to the end user, the gamer? I think that's a really important question to ask, actually, because it's not the case that random chance mechanisms are unique to loot boxes. Pretty much every video game over the past 40, nearly 50 years,

have those sorts of chance mechanisms in them that form part of things like, like you say, determining the challenge level in a raid in Warcraft or determining what piece of armour you happen to get and things like that. And you're not paying for that. So it's not the case that in a Warcraft raid, when you beat the boss, you then have to pay 50p and a chance of getting the bit of armour that you want. Could you imagine the up pro? You get, oh, it'd be a nightmare.

But yeah, you just get it or you don't. nobody's worried about that really. I think there's probably going to be some people who disagree with me in that in that one argument could make is that if we're worried about these chance elements in the context of finance and monetization and loopboxes and that we're saying that these sorts of things might have an effect on people, it's not that much of a step to say, well, if this is pervasive in all aspects of the game, maybe that's what makes games addictive.

I'm fairly ambivalent about that really and that I think fundamentally that's just part of what games are that you go around and you get a chance at getting something and if you don't get it, oh well, you can always try again next time. But I think there's an important question, if you do decide to go down that route, there's an important question about where do you draw the line because you can argue that there's random chance elements

in terms of things like, so let's carry on with, with Warcraft. So let's say that there's a quest that you've got to do where you've got to earn 100 gold from killing boars, right? And each bore drops a random amount of money. So there's a random chance element there. You might get one gold from killing one

or you might get 20 gold, right? So if you're worried that that random chance mechanism might draw people into playing the game more, what do you do about it? How do you change it? I'm not sure how you can. And actually, it probably doesn't even matter because, you know, player one might have to kill 100 balls because they were really unlucky.

Player two might have to kill five balls because they were really lucky. But at the end of that, for both of them, they've finished the quest and they've moved on to something else. So there's, you know, there's an end point for that chance mechanism to have its impact. So it's, you know, when you start thinking about it in those sorts of terms, it becomes really difficult to think about how you would assess that in, an experiment really quickly. And this is one of the major problems that we've had with video games research,

not just looking at addiction or loopboxes, but in any question around psychological effects over the past 30 years. How do you define video games and how do you operationalize your variables? So you can be sure that that thing that you're changing from condition A to condition B really A is meaningful. And B is the thing that you think it is. it becomes a very difficult question to answer very quickly. We've not really got a good handle on that yet.

And it does remind me of my psychology undergrad degree, where we obviously learned, this is going to be bad if I get the term wrong. But essentially, it's a form of what psychologists call operant conditioning. Is that right? Yeah. So I'll let the psychologist explain. So really kind of what we're talking about here is that they're called variable ratio schedules.

So it's this idea that you might have, let's say, a one in ten chance of winning something. But it's not the case that you have nine goes and you lose every time and then on the 10th go, you win it. And then you have another nine goes and you don't win. And then on the 20th go, you win it. you get a kind of randomized pattern of wins and losses, right? And it averages out to a one in ten chance. But there's a couple of things that therefore work against you in those sorts of situations. So the first is that because you can't precisely predict when you're going to hit the jackpot

or get that thing that you want in the loopbox, it means that you're more likely to carry on playing until you do win it. The second is that you might win with just enough frequency. not to be put off by the number of times you lose. So, you know, if we go back to our World of Warcraft example, you know, if you have to kill a boss 100 times in order to get that one piece of armour that you really, really want, if you're like me and you're a bit lazy,

you're probably not going to do that, right? Yeah. Whereas if you only maybe need to kill them 10 times in order to get a chance of it, that sounds a little bit more appealing. It feels a bit more appealing. Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of, it's things like that.

It's all about, this ties into a sort of fundamental area of research and psychology around how we've learned things. And yeah, operant conditioning is one way in which that can happen. Okay. So yeah, I want to go back to this research. So just quickly, actually. So I was, when I was, again, reading into this, I wondered, is this, are we just talking about the Overwatch's and, and hearthstones and FIFAs of the world

I'm talking about big console titles or are these things appearing in things that are even more pervasive like mobile games which have I suppose just as big or sometimes even bigger user bases. It's a really good question. I think when we talk about maybe Loopbox is the wrong

term to use as well because it certainly in my mind it conjures a very specific image and basically whenever I think of Loopbox I think of Overwatch because it's literally a box that you open to get loot. But like I said earlier, these can take all sorts of different forms. It can be a spinning wheel, for example. So Mario Kart Tour on the mobile has a form of loot box in it,

which is you can fire off a pipe, a green pipe from Mario series, and you get a random chance at getting a new driver or a new cart or a new set of glider wings and things like that. So these things are certainly everywhere in games. We're not just talking about console and PC games. We are talking about mobile games as well. Sorry, go on. So the problem there is that loot boxes are a specific way of implementing a system in which you can get money out of people,

like what we call micro-transactions. So you're getting small amounts of money. but frequently from people. And they're one particularly well-known, particular focus at the minute. My worry with having too much of a focus on loot boxes, though, is that actually we're missing all sorts of other mechanisms that are being implemented in games,

particularly in mobile games, that have the potential to be much more insidious in terms of their effects. And this is the issue with things, thinking about legislation around loot boxes, if you define them in a specific way, you might be able to tick your box of saying we've regulated loot boxes, but you've missed all of this other stuff that actually is much more problematic and has much clearer links to gambling-like mechanisms.

And then we have to do the entire thing all over again, which will take another five years. And I suppose that brings me very nicely to what is so interesting and so exciting about this research that you're doing now is that it's, you're not just going to publish it in a paper, but this is a document that has the potential of informing future policy. Is that right? Yeah, hopefully. So the government's DCMS,

apart from Culture, Media and Sport, is looking at Lootboxes very specifically at the minute. They had a call for evidence that I think closed about a week or two ago. They're having lots of roundtable discussions at the minute that are with all sorts of people just trying to get a feel for what we do and do not know about loopboxes. My impression is that they're being really sensible about it and that they're trying to be evidence-based and evidence-led.

My worry at the minute is that our evidence-based isn't there yet. Like I said earlier, a lot of most, if not all of the studies out there on loopboxes are correlational in nature. That's not to disparage them. I think it's just part of the nature of how we go about doing this sort of research. And in fact, the study that I'm doing at the minute will largely be correlational in nature. It's just going to be to nerd out for a second. It's going to use Bayesian statistics to look at strength of evidence for the associations that we see in the literature.

So kind of an incremental step forward. But what we need really is good causal studies that use objective data. That's the sort of stuff that policy should be based on. And we're really not there with it yet. And that stuff from my brief experience in psychology does, you know, take some considerable design and time and candidates, and I suppose is a longer-term mission to complete. Yeah, definitely.

And I think part of the reason why I sit on the fence a little bit around thinking about whether loopboxes are generally bad or good or not, is that, you know, we've got all of this research that seems to be, pointing in the same direction. It's, you know, all this correlational stuff that says, doesn't matter how it's implemented. If you pay for it, there seems to be a relationship between that and problematic gambling behaviors.

And we've got enough studies that say that now that, you know, make you think, well, you know, yeah, it's not causal, but, you know, there's a lot there to suggest that there's something going on that we should be worried about. My concern with that is that if you look at what's happened in other research area, to do with video games. We've gone through these sort of similar cycles of lots and lots of studies showing that there is a clear negative effect, but they're all based on a particular way of doing things,

and a particular way of collecting the data. And then actually, when you get some real objective data from industry and you do a really robust, replicable open-sign study, you find the opposite effect, and it's somewhat counterintuitive. So my worry is, I don't know. don't necessarily know if that will happen with loopbox research because like I say, the work that's out there at the minute is good. It's pre-registered. All of the data are available out there for most of the studies that look at this. But if we've just not got the right research questions

yet, and we're not asking them in the right sort of way, I'm just cautious that we don't want to get to a point where three years down the line, we've regulated loopboxes because we've based it on the research that we've got now. And then actually we do the study that we wanted to do all along, and it turns out actually they're fine, in which case we've made a terrible mistake. So I'm trying to sit on the fence with it at the minute. Yeah, it's a common theme across psychology.

You feel suggested there, but, you know, I suppose it's a youngish subject, and we only have the means and the methods of study that we have to, you know, our hands. But often it is often, in the case that, you know, once we dig into things, especially when it comes to correlational studies, you know, the correlation sometimes missed the nuance of what's actually going on. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I guess it depends what sort of question you're asking,

and particularly in the context of loopboxes, there's the big, you know, why question. So that's the thing that we've really not got to grips with yet. So let's assume, a second that this correlation between buying loot boxes and poor mental health is real, you know, and there's a causal direction that we can assert from that. Actually, the important question is why, why is this happening? You know, what can we do about it? Yeah. In some ways, I think the why question needs to come first, really.

So you need a really good theoretical background, a theoretical rationale for doing the study that you want to do. And then that might lead you into getting the right methods. And that's not to say just finding out whether there's an association between one thing or another is a bad thing to do. It's not. It's very useful. But that why question is, I guess, the one that I'm really interested in.

So the next really exciting thing about this is people listening can get involved, can be. Yeah, absolutely. So it's basically, it's a 10 minutes. survey. So it's got all the problems that I was talking about before. But all the stats will be really good. So don't worry about that side of things. But yeah, so if people are over the age of 18, and if they've played a game that contains some sort of loopbox like mechanic over the past month or so, I'd love them to take part in the survey. We need a lot of people. We need about

5,000 participants for it to do justice, basically. So the more the merit of the merit of the yeah. Brilliant. Thanks, Pete. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. Now, if you want to take part in Dr. Etchell's research and you've got 10 minutes to spare,

head over to bit. Dotley forward slash loot box research. This link will take you to Bath Spa University's website where you'll find the survey we've mentioned. Once again, that's bit. so B-I-T-L-O-O-T-L-O-T, Box, B-O-X, Research, R-E-S-E-A-R-E-A-R-C-H. And do keep an eye out on ScienceFocus.com, where we'll be writing more about Pete's work and indeed about the psychology of gaming in general. Also, if you've enjoyed this episode, please do check out the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine.

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