ESRB's and PEGI's Self-Regulatory 'Includes Random Items' Labels Fail to Ensure Consumer Protection.

Rare loot box rewards trigger larger arousal and reward responses, and greater urge to open more loot boxes. To the Editor: The potential harms of loot boxes and similarly randomised monetisation methods in video games (hereinafter, random reward mechanisms (RRMs) (Nielsen and Grabarczyk [16])), and the relationship between RRMs and gambling have been identified and established in the literature to a limited extent (Brooks and Clark [3]; Drummond and Sauer [5]; King and Delfabbro [11], [12]; Kristiansen and Severin [13]; Larche et al. [14]; Li et al. [15]; Nielsen and Grabarczyk [16]; Xiao and Henderson [27]; Zendle et al. [31]; Zendle et al. [30]; Zendle and Cairns [28], [29]). ESRB's and PEGI's Self-Regulatory "Includes Random Items" Labels Fail to Ensure Consumer Protection The use of the more inclusive terminology of "Random Items", rather than "loot boxes", correctly recognised that loot boxes represent only one particular implementation of RRMs (Nielsen and Grabarczyk [16]). [Extracted from the article]