Gaming my way to recovery: Understanding how to integrate serious video games into youth mental health services

---

Ferrari Manuela McIlwaine Sarah Reynolds Jennifer Archie Suzanne Boydell Katherine Lal Shalini Shah Jai Henderson Joanna Alvarez-Jimenez Mario Andersson Neil Aarseth Espen Lundedal Nielsen Rune Kristian Iyer Srividya
2019 DiGRA '19 - Abstract Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

 

Contextualizing Pathological Gaming – A Proof-of-Concept Study

---

Boonen Casper S. Christiansen Mikkel V. Ilsøe Agnete W. Staunstrup Marie M. Lundedal Nielsen Rune Kristian
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

In 2013, “Internet Gaming Disorder” (IGD) was proposed as a formal disorder, by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). We present the results of a qualitative interview study wherein we apply a screening tool to “gaming professionals”. We compare our subjects’ perception of their own gaming habits, with how they are scored by a questionnaire and discuss where and how they differ or overlap. Our results indicate that screening tools designed to measure game addiction may not measure what they are intended to measure. Questionnaire items that are not properly contextualized may over-pathologize otherwise healthy players without appropriate context. The context of the individual’s everyday life is crucial to understanding and evaluating their relationship to gaming. We argue, that de-contextualized questionnaire items are insufficient to gauge whether a given behaviour is problematic and if those problems are best understood as an addiction or something else.

 

Are Loot Boxes Gambling? Random reward mechanisms in video games

---

Lundedal Nielsen Rune Kristian Grabarczyk Paweł
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

In this paper we investigate the phenomenon colloquially known as “loot boxes” or “loot crates”. Loot boxes became a hot topic towards the end of 2017 when several legislative bodies proposed that they were essentially gambling mechanisms and should therefore be legislated as such. We argue that the term “loot box” and the phenomena it covers are not sufficiently precise for academic use and instead introduce the notion of “random reward mechanisms” (RRMs). We offer a categorization of RRMs, which distinguishes between RRMs that are either “isolated” from real world economies or “embedded” in them. This distinction will be useful in discussion about loot boxes in general, but specifically when it comes to the question of whether or not they represent instances of gambling. We argue that all classes of RRMs have gambling-like features, but that only one class can be considered to be genuine gambling.