An Australian university is leading the first full-blown study into the convergence of social media with gambling, including “whether there has been a transition between social casino game play” and its real-money counterpart.
Dr Sally Gainsbury, joint lead researcher for the project at the Centre for Gambling Education and Research at Southern Cross University (SCU), said there had thus far been “minimal research” into the effects of social media promotions and social casino games, adding it was “unclear” if these were stimulating problem gambling or encouraging “vulnerable” and “highly impressionable” demographics such as adolescents to gamble.
With Gainsbury highlighting that social casino games “replicate” popular games as slots, poker and blackjack, albeit without paying out real-money rewards, SCU said the study would identify “[w]hether there has been a transition between social casino game play and gambling”.
The study follows a month after Apple removed PokerStars and 888’s real-money apps from its Australian app store, after pressure from Senator Richard Di Natale for Stars’ app to be withdrawn for breaching the 2001 Interactive Gambling Act (IGA), which bans the offer of online gaming to Australian citizens. In January, Senator Nick Xenophon also pushed for the IGA to be amended so all social casino games could be categorised as gambling services, and banned.
Explaining the rationale behind the study, Gainsbury added that nearly half the Australian population now accessed social media on a daily basis via computers, smartphones and tablets, exposing “all ages” to promotions for real-money gambling products and allowing them to engage with operators through various social media channels such as Facebook fan pages and Twitter feeds.
The shifting uses of technology in promoting and making social casino and gambling opportunities available among Australians will also be considered by the study. As recently publicised by the likes of Sportingbet and William Hill, Australia has one of the highest smartphone penetration levels in the world.
The two-year project is supported by a AU$456,387 grant from Gambling Research Australia and also includes gambling experts from the University of Adelaide and Canada. Regular social media users and social casino game players will be among its subjects, with the academics conducting interviews, alongside audits of websites and social media. An online survey will also take place during 2014.
The findings of Gainsbury and her team are sure to be scrutinised by other national gambling regulators, such as the UK Gambling Commission, whose recent report into the known and understood risks of gambling-style social games on Facebook identified just two current studies into so-called social gambling, one by the Victorian Government and another by the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre, both in their early stages.
