Smith Elke, Poth Yannik, Sohns Kara S Z, Kaspar Kai, Peters Jan
Department of Psychology, Biological Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Social and Media Psychology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2025 May 15;15(1):16833. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-01482-5.
Video games frequently contain loot boxes, i.e. virtual in-game items sharing structural similarities with gambling. On YouTube, there are multi-million subscriber channels prominently featuring loot box-related content. A gamblification of digital games may increase player engagement, and we tested if user engagement on YouTube is linked to loot box content. We extracted aggregate user engagement measures from more than 22 thousand YouTube gaming videos with and without focused display of loot boxes. Principal component analysis was used to reduce dimensionality and derive components reflecting overall and sustained, and relative user engagement, respectively. Confirming our pre-registered hypothesis (see https://osf.io/nh7zr ), a significant effect of loot box content on the first principal component was found, reflecting higher overall and sustained user engagement for videos featuring loot box content. This increased engagement may be linked to the gambling-like properties of the reward structure conveyed by loot boxes. Publicly available user data may serve as an early indicator of potential changes in problematic internet use and gambling-related behaviour.
电子游戏中经常包含开箱玩法，即与赌博在结构上有相似之处的游戏内虚拟物品。在YouTube上，有一些拥有数百万订阅者的频道，显著地展示与开箱相关的内容。数字游戏的游戏化可能会提高玩家参与度，我们测试了YouTube上的用户参与度是否与开箱内容有关。我们从2.2万多个有或没有重点展示开箱内容的YouTube游戏视频中提取了总体用户参与度指标。主成分分析用于降维，并分别得出反映总体和持续的用户参与度以及相对用户参与度的成分。证实了我们预先登记的假设（见https://osf.io/nh7zr），发现开箱内容对第一主成分有显著影响，这反映出展示开箱内容的视频有更高的总体和持续用户参与度。这种增加的参与度可能与开箱所传达的奖励结构的类似赌博性质有关。公开可用的用户数据可以作为有问题的互联网使用和赌博相关行为潜在变化的早期指标。
