This thesis focuses on the impact that video game design has on players and the extent to which existing Consumer Law protects gamers from harms caused by game design. Through the concept of "Consumer harm", UK Consumer Protection law regulates how much influence companies are allowed to exert over consumers' decision making through design choices, advertising and business practices. Consumer harm is the loss, damage or negative impacts experienced by a consumer as a result of a company’s intentional and/or inadvertent marketing and product design choices pushing them to make consumer decisions they did not want to make or otherwise would not have made.

The conceptualisation of consumer harm determines which business practices are considered critically by the law, which get regulated, and how they are regulated. Currently, UK consumer law only intervenes to protect consumers when design decisions implemented by a company push consumers to make an economic decision they do not want to make or otherwise would not make [ref 1].

However, many companies implement aggressive design decisions in video games that pressure gamers to play more than they were planning to or to give the company more data than they intended [ref 2]. Often gamers spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in a game after their initial purchase [ref 3]. These design decisions rely on the same tactics used to encourage consumer spending and arguably, interfere with consumer agency and autonomy as much as ones that inflict financial harm. This thesis will argue that many design decisions in video games which may cause consumer harm are not being critically examined by the law simply because they do not result in financial harm.

So far, attempts to reduce consumer harm in video games have centred on the identification of and potential to regulate individual problematic game mechanics [ref 4]. Current regulation relies on the assumption that there is a simple, clear-cut relationship between individual problematic game mechanics and the consumer harm players are experiencing and that therefore, removing the mechanic will eradicate the harm.

This research approaches video game harm through a more holistic lens that examines how elements such as immersion, interactivity, social and parasocial relationships, personalisation and targeting may work together to create an immersive gaming experience/space where companies can pressure players into spending as much time and money as possible in their games [ref 5]. The impact that these elements, which other media cannot harness so easily, have on consumer decision making is underexplored.

This thesis will address the following questions:

1. To what extent does existing UK consumer law protect gamers from consumer harm caused by video game mechanics and wider pressuring factors in the gaming ecosystem?
2. What steps could be taken to ameliorate this problem? Should the law step in to regulate certain elements of video games? If so, how?

This research will answer these questions through an interdisciplinary methodology that combines doctrinal legal analysis with empirical, qualitative, Human-computer interaction (HCI) methods. Doctrinal legal analysis will be conducted to ascertain how UK law currently conceptualises consumer harm and the policy objectives that underpin the consumer protection regime. Empirical HCI research methods will then be used to explore players' experiences of harm in online multiplayer games and how game mechanics and other design decisions in video games as well as factors in the surrounding gaming ecosystem impact players' consumer decision making. These findings will be used to evaluate whether UK consumer law is protecting the decision-making autonomy of consumers from unfair interference by video game companies. This work will also inform discussions about whether legal reform is needed and if so, what form it should take to ensure effective consumer protection for gamers.

References

[1] The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 SI2008/1277; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Measuring consumer detriment and the impact of consumer policy (2020) and the OECD Recommendation on Consumer Policy Decision Making (OECD, 2014)

[2] Torulf Jernström, ‘Let’s Go Whaling: Tricks for Monetising Mobile Game Players with Free-To-Play’ (Pocket Gamer Connects, Helsinki, 2016); Gao, Ziwei. Time-Based Addiction (CHI’23 1st Workshop on Behavioural Design in Video Games, Hamburg, April 2023)

[3] Kyle Faust & Judith Prochaska, ‘Internet gaming disorder: A sign of the times, or time for our attention?’ (2018) 77 Addictive Behaviors 272; Bryan Davies & Edwin Blake, ‘Evaluating existing strategies to limit video game playing time’ (2016) 36(2) IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 47

[4] Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Immersive and Addictive Technologies’ (HC 2017-19, HC 1846); Annette Cerulli-Harms et al, ‘Loot Boxes in Online Games and Their Effect on Consumers, in particular Young Consumers’ (2020) Publication for the committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection

[5] Eli Hodapp, ’“We own you” – confessions of an anonymous free to play producer’ (Toucharcade, 16 September 2015)