Stuart Gordon Spicer

TL;DR: Loot boxes (LBs) are video game-related purchases with a chance-based outcome as discussed by the authors and due to similarities with gambling, they have come under increasing scrutiny from media, academics and policymakers.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used structured literature searches to identify surveys of gamers with open-access loot box data, and correlations between loot box expenditure, problem gambling and earnings investigated using Spearman's rho correlations.

TL;DR: This qualitative study investigated motivations for buying loot boxes, through in-depth interviews with 28 gamers from across the UK, finding that certain motivations were disproportionately endorsed by participants with symptoms of problematic gambling.

TL;DR: This article found that 19.87% of the sample self-reported either "gateway effects" (loot boxes causally influencing subsequent gambling) or reverse gateway effects (gambling causally affecting subsequent loot box engagement) and the majority of participants reporting gateway effects were under 18 when they first purchased loot boxes.

TL;DR: Three experiments were conducted to investigate a possible role for certainty in human causal learning, and participants appeared to attribute outcomes to cues with a comparatively uncertain causal status, in an apparent violation of prediction error.