Digital geographies of home: parenting practices in the space between gaming and gambling

ABSTRACT

This paper advances debates at the intersection of geographies of children, youth and families, digital geographies, and geographies of home. We argue that social, seasonal and limited time are vitally important for understanding the new landscape between gaming and gambling and have wider analytical purchase for geographers. This paper reveals parenting practices connected to the multi-billion-dollar industry of paid-for currency in digital games used to access gambling style systems and chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes. We use this timely example to develop new digital geographies of home from original interviews with families based in England on their everyday lived experiences of gambling-style systems in digital games as well as data from video ethnographies with children and young people and interviews with international game designers. This paper challenges current understandings by examining how parents make sense of gambling-related harms and demonstrates the spatial and temporal dynamics of purchasing decisions, rules, and associated conflicts in domestic space. We argue these systems in digital games shape and are shaped by family geographies. This paper concludes by outlining its relevance for the social and health sciences at a time of intense legislative interest in the increasingly blurred space between gaming and gambling.

KEYWORDS:

• Parenting
• families
• home
• digital geographies
• gaming
• gambling

Introduction

This paper proposes social, seasonal and limited time as new social scientific framings for understanding everyday digital geographies, demonstrating how paid reward systems in popular digital games have increasingly become part of everyday family life and children’s digital worlds. Advancing current geographical debates on digital geographies of home, this paper examines family purchasing decisions and tactics used by parents and children to navigate the space between gaming and gambling. To do so, this paper draws upon a three-year research project based in England that examined children, young people and families’ understandings and experiences of gambling-style systems in digital games. This paper importantly reveals how these systems shape the spatial and temporal dynamics of home and offers what we have termed social, seasonal and limited time in this context as ways to better understand everyday digital geographies of family life.

Globally, 230 million gamers are expected to purchase loot boxes by the year 2025 with a predicted revenue stream exceeding $20 billion (Hunt and Moar 2021), as part of a wider video gaming market expected to reach $321 billion by 2026 (PwC 2022). Loot boxes are ultimately games of chance for the opportunity to win a randomised selection of in-game items, usually without displayed odds, and these features and paid reward systems represent a wider blurring of the boundaries between gaming and gambling (Wardle 2021). For many children and families (predominantly, but not exclusively, within the global North), encounters with gambling style systems in digital games are increasing and pocket money is changing. The Wall Street Journal recently stated that ‘Kids don’t want cash anymore – they want Robux’, referring to the in-game currency of one popular digital game (Needleman and Donaldson 2022). This currency can often be purchased with real-world money and is used in many console and mobile games to buy chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes.

We use this example to make a series of arguments at the intersection of academic debates on the geographies of children, youth and families, digital geographies and geographies of home. But more broadly, this topic matters because international debates surrounding loot boxes continue to gather pace, posing national and international legislative dilemmas. For example, the UK Government offers parental guidance on chance-based mechanisms whereas other countries have attempted to regulate loot boxes or are drafting laws and bills at the time of writing (Xiao 2023) with companies facing urgent legal action, fines or complaints for breaching guidelines (i.e. Davies 2024). There is, therefore, a geography to this debate: we can literally map the shifting legal landscape as it attempts to keep up with this fast-growing market and a growing evidence base in gaming and gambling studies (for a review, see Jayemanne et al. 2021). However, there are also a series of social, cultural and digital geographies that are our primary focus. Our contention is that focusing on families’ everyday lives is vital for understanding these gambling-style systems in digital games. This paper demonstrates how these systems shape wider family geographies at home, primarily drawing on interview material with parents but supplemented with accounts from children, young people and game designers (on loot boxes and children’s popular culture, foregrounding their voices, experiences and emotions, see Mills, Ash, and Gordon 2024). This paper examines how tensions around loot boxes and in-game currency are negotiated in tandem with how parents understand gambling-related harms. In doing so, this paper aims to make the following contributions to current debates, refocusing them to capture new digital geographies of the home.

First, we offer an original study on family geographies in the digital era that goes beyond the amorphous and ubiquitous concept of ‘screentime’, concentrating academic attention on parenting practices related to specific digital features. We build on longstanding work in children’s geographies on parenting, home and technology (i.e. Holloway and Valentine 2001a; Holloway and Valentine 2001b; Mukherjee 2021, 2023; Willett 2017) but with a novel focus on the increasingly aggressive paid reward systems marketed to children and young people that mark the latest chapter in parenting fears surrounding technological change (Valentine and Holloway 2001). The distinctive context of gambling-style systems in digital games is noteworthy and urgent. In this paper, we demonstrate the specificities of loot boxes and in-game currency and importantly show how they can impact family life through household rules, regulations, rewards and pressured negotiations over pocket money and purchasing decisions. We develop a conceptual argument based on social, seasonal and limited time to emphasise the spatial and temporal dimensions of gaming/gambling that shape and are shaped by family geographies.

Second, our research develops a much-needed focus on home and parenting in wider academic scholarship on digital geographies. Whilst there has been vibrant work by geographers on ‘the digital’ in recent years as the field has developed, notably on smart cities and a range of other settings (i.e. Ash, Kitchen, and Leszczynski 2018; Leszczynski 2021), domestic space remains comparatively understudied. There are exceptions (i.e. Dodge and Kitchin 2009; Rose 2010; Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2024), yet this paper importantly centres home space (Blunt and Dowling 2022; Brickell 2012), in dialogue with everyday geographies of family life (Holt 2010; Tarrant and Hall 2020, noting the diversity of families and familial relations). We demonstrate how digital loot boxes and microtransactions of in-game currency have changed domestic time–space, drawing wider inspiration from geographical scholarship on commercial gambling at home (i.e. Valentine and Hughes 2012; Waitt, Cahill, and Gordon 2022). Crucially, we show how paid reward systems alter time for families, responding to Lui’s (2021) overall call for more research on timescapes of home in geography and enriching work on time in family and leisure studies (i.e. Brannen 2005; Daly 2001; Karsten, Kamphuis and Remeijnse, 2015) through this novel empirical focus and geographical approach. This paper shows how the dynamics of home are crucial for understanding paid reward systems and their affects, an important contribution to knowledge that brings home space more firmly into view within digital geographies. Overall, we argue that examining the regulation of digital and material space by parents is key to understanding new digital geographies of home.

Geographies of home, digital parenting and gambling-related harms

Geographers have been central to advancing ideas that spatial environments such as the home and school are important in shaping children and young people’s everyday lives but that these spaces are also sites of contestation and negotiation. These spaces are infused with adult–child power relations and many researchers have shown that home in particular is crucial to understanding everyday geographies of family life, parenting practices and popular culture in the global North and global South (i.e. Christensen, James, and Jenks 2000; Evans et al. 2019; Holloway and Valentine 2001a; Horton 2010). In this paper, we contend that children’s and parents’ socio-spatial interactions at home are vital for understanding gaming/gambling, shaping wider geographies of parenting (Holloway 1998; Jupp and Gallagher 2013), family geographies (Holt 2010; Tarrant and Hall 2020) and reproducing ideas of home and childhood. Indeed, approaches from the geographies of children, youth and families underpin our discussion, enriching understandings across the social sciences of how digital parenting is navigated at home and within families (Beckman and Mazmanian 2020; Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020). We understand ‘digital parenting’ as complex, but it is usefully defined as referring:

both to how parents are increasingly engaged in regulating their children’s relationships with digital media (parental mediation), and how parents themselves incorporate digital media in their daily activities and parenting practices, and, in so doing, develop emergent forms of parenting. (Mascheroni, Ponte, and Jorge 2018, 9)

Specifically, we draw inspiration from geographical research that has demonstrated how children’s and parents’ lives at home can be shaped by technological change (Holloway and Valentine 2001a, 2001b). This study with British families in the late 1990s was set against the context of parenting fears about the internet and Information Communication Technologies (ICT) (Valentine and Holloway 2001). The research importantly showed how children’s use of ICT, primarily in educational contexts but also leisure use, reshaped the home environment (Holloway and Valentine 2001a), contributing to wider feminist and interdisciplinary work on parenting practices and ‘home rules’ (Wood & Beck 1994). Over 20 years on, whilst we have found aspects of continuity in the domestication of technology, there has been a dramatic change in the leisure-based growth of video games during that period (Ash and Gallacher 2022; Blackman 2022), and crucially, there has been an increased use of techniques from regulated gambling within digital games. The specificities of in-game currency and loot boxes mean that longstanding debates on parenting practices and technology at home require fresh attention.

Our paper also adds nuance to emerging debates in children’s geographies on ‘screentime’ (Mukherjee 2021). This is a pervasive and amorphous term, widely recognised as the increased number of hours that children, young people and adults spend on digital devices (Livingstone and Blum-Ross 2020). We offer a specific focus on paid reward systems that form just one aspect of time spent on screens and push these debates forward by developing ideas on social, seasonal and limited time. This contribution, and the focus on gambling style systems, distinguishes our paper from a small but inspiring vein of work in children’s geographies that has captured video game practices at home (i.e. Willett 2017; Woodyer 2008; see also Aarsand and Aronsson 2009 in childhood studies).

More broadly, there are important yet isolated studies at the interface of geographies of children, youth and families, digital geographies, and geographies of home (i.e. Bonner-Thompson and McDowell 2021; Longhurst, 2016). There has also been advocacy for feminist digital geographies (Elwood and Leszczynski 2018) with studies on spaces of digital work (Richardson 2018) and gender in online gaming (Woods 2021). Yet the wider field of digital geographies (for a review, see Ash, Kitchen, and Leszczynski 2018) has tended to pay less attention to domestic space in comparison to urban or public space. There have been isolated exceptions, for example, on (digital) family photography at home (Rose 2010), coded appliances and digital living (Dodge and Kitchin 2009) and digital housekeeping and smart homes (Aagaard 2023; Sadowski, Strengers, and Kennedy 2024). Yet this work is primarily focused on the gendered implications of technology and design at home, rather than children and parents’ digital encounters and negotiations. A focus on digital parenting in the context of gaming/gambling offers scope for a productive investigation into new digital geographies of the home. Not least, for a better understanding of the financial and emotional implications of paid reward systems, how they are experienced by families through household interactions (as per Collins 2015) as well as the role of time and temporalities in domestic space (Lui 2021).

Given this topic, engagement with recent scholarship by geographers on commercial online gambling is important. Waitt et al.’s (2023) review of the everyday and relational geographies of gambling identifies three central approaches in how geographers have understood space and (adult-focused) gambling harms: first, the lens of cultural political economy (Young, Markham, and Doran 2012); second, assemblage thinking to reveal how gambling harms are often hidden by social norms and hierarchies, including place and gender (Waitt, Cahill, and Gordon 2022); and finally, an approach that positions gambling harm as embodied, emotional and situated (Valentine and Hughes 2012). These studies have shown the value of a geographical approach for highlighting the spatial and temporal dynamics of gambling, especially its online forms. Valentine and Hughes’ (2012) study on disclosures of problem gambling by adults is striking for its focus on the home, demonstrating the impact of addiction on rupturing domestic life and intimacy. We build on this recent (yet still isolated) work on gambling harms in geography, recognising the differences between our focus and that of regulated or problem gambling by adults. We pursue new directions including critical attention to the emerging space ‘between’ gaming and gambling and centring children and young people’s engagements and related parenting practices. In the remainder of this section, we provide more context on loot boxes and map existing literature within gambling, gaming and legal studies.

Loot boxes are digital chance-based mechanisms and have many different names across game franchises, including mystery boxes, card packs, eggs, chests, wishes and spins. Their randomised risk versus reward system is designed to encourage repeat purchases as players try to secure digital items such as new characters and objects to advance gameplay or costumes (called ‘skins’) for customisation. If successfully revealed, these in-game items are retained by the player to become either prized collectible possessions, items to re-sell or purchases of regret (Mills, Ash, and Gordon 2024). This ‘follow-on’ revenue stream of loot boxes within the digital games industry is particularly popular in the free-to-play digital games market and its use of monetisation. It is important to clarify at this point that to purchase loot boxes or other in-game items, many digital games convert financial transactions from real-world money into in-game currency such as coins, gems or a unique name specific to the game. This currency can sometimes be earned through game achievements but is increasingly purchased with real money transactions or via gift cards. We argue that this paid-for in-game currency obscures the true cost of items, disassociating the in-game transactions from their actual monetary value. The ‘predatory’ systems (Griffiths and King 2015; King and Delfabbro 2018) surrounding loot boxes and other chance-based mechanisms manufactures rarity to incentivise in-game purchases. More broadly, paid reward systems can also utilise gambling style techniques, for example, auditory and design features such as spinning wheels, building anticipation into reveals or showing near misses. We argue that these features of some popular digital games expose and normalise gambling-style systems to children and young people. As highlighted earlier, the international legislative landscape on loot boxes is complex (Xiao 2023) with a growing evidence base on links to problem gambling (Garea et al. 2021; Hodge et al. 2022; Nicklin et al. 2021; Wardle and Zendle 2021). In the UK, the focus of our study, loot boxes are currently not classified as gambling or betting (regulated to over 18s only) due to the digital items won, which are seen as not ‘money or money’s worth’. The UK Government’s recent Gambling White Paper (2023) stated that there were no plans to include loot boxes within gambling legislation but instead encouraged industry self-regulation and best practice guidelines (Ukie 2023).

Methodology

Our research project undertook original qualitative research between 2019 and 2022 and had three phases. First, 42 families from the North East of England were recruited from a range of socio-economic class backgrounds and a mix of single-child and multi-sibling households to participate in video ethnography sessions. Despite diverse recruitment efforts, participants were predominantly from White British families. This first phase of data collection involved over 100 hours of video ethnography focused on home-based gameplay with 52 children and young people in total (46 boys and 6 girls), aged between 5 and 17. Over multiple sessions, footage of children and young people playing digital games and the spatial arrangements in 42 family homes was recorded, whilst the researcher discussed and observed gaming experiences with the participants. The structure of the gameplay sessions was participant-led, with participants showing the researcher a range of games, with the main condition being that they play games that included paid reward systems, chance-based mechanisms and/or paid-for in-game currencies they already played prior to the study. Many of these video ethnography sessions took place in-person with either single or multi-camera recording devices set up to film the home gaming environment within a room and the gamer playing from different angles (i.e. close-ups of hand-controller movements), plus an Elgato capture card and associated software,¹ which was used to directly record gameplay footage from the console or platform itself. This multi-camera method enabled the researchers to compare children’s descriptions and conversations around game features to their actual embodied responses, reactions and emotions to these features. However, later in the project, due to the restrictions on physical home visits associated with the global COVID-19 pandemic, these gameplay sessions were held and recorded online via video conferencing software. This first phase of research with children and young people centred on observations and discussions of their live gameplay and previous purchasing decisions within their favourite console, PC and smartphone games. These games included, but were not limited to: Apex Legends, Brawl Stars, Call of Duty, Coin Master, Cookie Run: Kingdom, CS:GO, FIFA, For Honour, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, Jurassic World Alive, Roblox, Rocket League, and WWE Supercard. Although these are games predominantly produced and consumed in the global North, we wish to stress that they are globally popular franchises and that clearly, mobile gaming is part of some children’s lives in the global South (Penix-Tadsen 2019).

The second phase of fieldwork and data collection was 20 semi-structured interviews with parents (15 mothers and 5 fathers²). Parents were interviewed about their understandings and experiences of paid reward systems and aimed to capture attitudes and parenting practices, directly supporting this paper’s analysis and argument. The adult participants were recruited to represent a broad spectrum of parental engagement with digital games, ranging from gamers themselves to no engagement at all. Interviewees were predominantly recruited from the families engaged in the above video ethnography sessions and later supplemented by further recruitment in the North East to capture more experiences from fathers via advertisements within employer networks and social media posts.

Finally, the third phase of fieldwork comprised 10 semi-structured interviews with game producers and designers based in Europe and North America with technical experience in monetisation, as well as detailed analysis by the research team of the systems and techniques featured in many digital games. The interviews with professional practitioners were included in the wider project to enhance knowledge and understanding of paid reward systems in digital games, including those played by (or very similar to) the games children in the study played. The interviews not only focused on technical expertise and decision-making processes in game production and design but also explored professional insights on the effects of paid reward systems on players. Some of these interviewees were also parents. Game designers and producers were recruited via direct approaches through game companies of various sizes, professional network platforms such as LinkedIn, and snowballing via recommendations from other interviewees. Overall, the justification for a qualitative approach and these three different phases of fieldwork engaging with a wide-range of actors was to provide a rich, multi-layered and integrated approach to researching understandings and experiences of gambling style systems in digital games. Our primary methodological focus on home space and family life is noteworthy, especially for providing novel insights into this specific paper's focus on everyday digital geographies of home and ideas of social, seasonal and limited time.

Ethical considerations across the project’s research methods included processes of written informed consent, anonymity and restrictions on the video footage of children and young people in family homes for analysis purposes only and not publication. The video ethnography recordings were initially analysed separately and later through collaborative discussion as a research team, shaping and informing later interview stages. All interviews were transcribed in full, and data was thematically analysed by the team. Our own positionalities shaped the research programme, with the team including a mixture of parents of younger and older children as well as a non-parent (a less discussed aspect of positionality in children’s geographies). The team also had a range of personal experiences of gaming participation. More broadly, our identities as white British citizens and respective gendered and classed identities were reflexively considered in research design and practice (for a wider discussion on race and class in children’s digital leisure and parenting cultures, see Mukherjee 2023).

This paper’s detailed focus on interview material with parents, supplemented by relevant extracts from children, young people and game designers, enables a rich account of how paid reward systems in digital games ‘take place’ in family homes, to which we now turn.

Parents’ understandings of gambling-related harms in digital games

Our study found that children’s gaming is a conflicted reality for parents. They wrestle with feelings of wanting to safeguard their children from potential harm, yet they tolerate access to loot boxes and these systems as their children enjoy the games and consider this a ‘normal’ childhood activity:

You know that you’re being treated like a mug and your kids are … you can see what they’re doing [games companies], but you feel like you’re stuck and you can’t do anything about it. It’s frustrating … It is worrying, but again, I suppose every parent says this, but as long as it's within … certain parameters … but that's ridiculous, isn't it? It's like saying, ‘Oh, as long as he only smokes 10 cigarettes, it'll be fine and he's not having like three packets a week.’ It's not. (Interview with Mother of a 13-year-old son A)

Most parents considered loot boxes to be gambling products. They described the chance-based ‘reveals’ and hunts for rare collectibles as ‘a slippery slope’ that was ‘quite frightening’, with some sharing concerns about personality changes and emotional outbursts from their children and worries about potential future adulthoods:

I worry that it might give them a predilection for gambling, when he's older, but I'd like to think that we try to do enough to keep an eye on it … I could be very puritan and … say “You mustn’t have screen time … You mustn't do this”, but it’s not my generation. His generation is gaming and it's easy for me to say go out and play with your friends in the street, but it can't compete. (Interview with Mother of a 13-year-old son A)

Parents often understood chance-based mechanisms in digital games in the context of generational shifts in children’s play and popular culture (see Mills, Ash, and Gordon 2024). Levels of understanding about these systems varied between parents, with most expressing confusion about the systems and purchases. It is also clear from our research that loot boxes and in-game currency are regular discussion topics between parents with informal networks of support and advice:

I remember there being lots of conversations early doors, people saying, like other Mums saying, ‘Does [Child] play Roblox?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ So then there'd be lots of questions about, ‘Well, what is it and how does it work? Is it alright and what are the risks?’ (Interview with Mother of a 11-year-old son A)

Parents’ views on the worth and value of digital items from virtual shops, or secured via loot box wins, ranged from ‘exploitative’ and a ‘money-making racket’ to others who felt games companies were indeed ‘giving the kids something back’. Many parents in our study justified their decisions to facilitate in-game purchases due to the social benefits of digital friendships and creative possibilities. For some parents, these social aspects of gaming were reassuring and made the problematic associations with gambling behaviours more palatable. This was especially prominent in later stages of our project where access to friends was limited during periods of lockdown associated with the global COVID-19 pandemic. These findings chime with emerging research on pandemic geographies and COVID-19’s impact on home life (Andrews et al. 2021), as well as children and young people’s lives more broadly (Holt 2021). However, other parents in our study were concerned about potential harms, including incidents of bullying and peer pressure:

… it was the other people, probably having a go at him and saying, ‘Oh, your weapon’s rubbish, or whatever’, because he’s quite sensitive and he takes things to heart, so he would probably say, ‘Well, could I have £3?’ Just to like, probably make himself feel a little bit better. (Interview with Mother of a 11-year-old son B)

Overall, our study found that parents feel stuck in a vulnerable position. They have concerns about gambling-related harms now and in the future but they also understand the popularity of these digital games in their children’s lives. The next section provides a richer account of everyday parenting practices at home, and how households navigate dilemmas surrounding in-game currency and loot boxes. We focus on how seemingly ephemeral, fleeting moments of digital microtransactions have multiple impacts within family homes.

Gaming/gambling spaces at home: pocket money, rewards and rules

Gaming and gambling are both forms of embodied practice that take place in a variety of locations, including on-the-move during journeys via mobile devices. Nevertheless, in our study, home was the central space of gaming activity for participants. For families with younger children, consoles were often located in living rooms or other communal spaces, and as children became teenagers, they usually moved into bedrooms. As one parent shared:

It’s just part of our life, it’s just part of what [Child’s name] does and what his sister does, it’s part of our household. We have a console in the lounge, [Child’s name] has a console in his bedroom, and sometimes that’s then hooked up into our family room. So, it’s just integrated into everyday life really now. Some form of gaming, some form of screen. (Interview with Mother of 17-year-old son, in multi-sibling household)

There were a variety of spatial arrangements within family homes and levels of equipment ranging from mobile devices played on sofas through to a gaming chair, desk, two screens and headset in a kitchen. These microgeographies are often carefully managed, with most centring activity in communal spaces so, as one parent described it, ‘we can keep an eye on him’ (on these themes, see Aarsand and Aronsson 2009; Holloway and Valentine 2001a). However, our research found that this proximity to family members can intensify requests for in-game currency, explored shortly. Our video ethnography sessions reveal that different spaces are important to how children and young people engage with paid reward systems. One example of how space is not a passive backdrop includes the physical positioning of a game console and seating arrangement to enable opening and viewing loot box wins close together with siblings. It is also noteworthy how important an individual child’s own embodied repetitive handset motions and button sequences are to purchasing in-game currency, anticipating a loot box reveal, or consulting items won in digital inventories. Although these are digital microtransactions with digital visual and auditory features, their presence and material impacts within the home space are acutely felt. Most parents in this study had imposed rules as part of a regulation strategy, ranging from no consoles on school nights to daily time limits. The most notable conflicts in home space, however, were about purchasing decisions.

Parents and extended family members were crucial to both accessing funds to finance in-game purchases and to the authentication of linked payment methods. Our evidence suggests purchasing in-game currency happens in three central ways, the first and most popular of which is pocket money. Parents shared how in-game currency related to existing or new systems of pocket money within the family home:

… we had a system previously where he would tot up, it was like £1 for every job, I mean, I’d be lucky if I could get him to do two or three things in a week. So then it was like, ‘Right, you’ve got £3.’ And so then he’d be like, ‘Well, if I do a couple more, will you buy £5 worth of Robux for me?’ (Interview with Mother of a 11-year-old son A)

He’s got a savings account and he’s usually … he earns bits and pieces around the house by washing the car … . He does have a bank account and we pay money into that and then he blows it all on virtual crap. (Interview with Mother of a 13-year-old son A)

Pocket money and digital games were a source of conflict for many families, often revealing wider financial or values-based tensions between parents within a household. Second, in-game currency was sometimes gifted as a one-off reward:

… so if they’ve got a good school report or something like that. Or when they were getting upset with COVID having to isolate to cheer them up, they would get money to spend on the games. (Interview with Mother of two sons aged 12 and 15)

Finally, in-game currency was a popular present for Christmas and birthdays, purchased via physical and digital gift cards. Parents recalled ‘bizarre conversations’ explaining these vouchers to extended family members, especially grandparents. These gifts often led to conflicts performed and regulated within home space:

Somebody else had bought him the voucher and I was like ‘what did you spend it on’ and it was like virtual clothes or outfits, or skins they call them, isn’t it? … Yeah, that bugged me a bit. That was just like a kind of ‘get with the programme’ moment where he was like ‘Oh Mam’. Again, this is what everybody’s doing and I’m past it. It was because somebody else had bought him the present, I think … a family member had got him this voucher, it was £20 and he’d spent it all within a very short frame of time. I think it might have been his actual birthday on the day and it was all gone … he’d spent it on nothing. (Interview with Mother of a 13-year-old son A)

This example demonstrates how parent–child conflicts are connected to wider socio-spatial relations, in this case extending to other family members and households. These relational geographies can also be to friends’ homes where unboxing items together is a popular activity in-person or via smartphone technology. The above quote is also indicative of a wider trend in our data set about the speed at which microtransactions occur, particularly for younger children who had not yet developed understandings of money’s value. Parents’ awareness of this speed was often due to linked mobile technologies, revealing changing parenting practices:

I get the notification straight away, he spends it straight away, like literally, sometimes I get the emails saying the money's on and he's spent it before I've even had the email confirming that the money's on there … I feel I have to drip-feed that money to him, if that makes sense. (Interview with Mother of a 11-year-old son C)

For many families in our research, children regularly made requests for in-game currency beyond these three contexts. Many parents stated that requests were daily but that actual purchases were more commonly every week or month. Children shared that highlighting small amounts was often crucial to their success in securing funds:

She’ll [mother] probably say no on V-Bucks £7.99 [but] if you only ask for a little thing like 50p she’ll probably say yes. (9-year-old boy, during gameplay session of Fortnite)

Parents outlined other strategies used by their children, such as comparing requests for in-game currency to other one-off treat purchases by adults:

Yeah, they sort of put it down to … [Child 1] used to equate that, well, it’s only what, it’s only a … it’s a coffee that Mam would buy at Costa³ or something … (Interview with Father of a son aged 8, a daughter aged 10, and a son aged 12)

Another key finding for this section’s discussion, and our argument, is how these purchasing requests seep into other spaces within the home and beyond. As one parent explained:

Quite often, even if I’m at work, quite often I’ll get a text message, ‘Can I have some FIFA Points?’ ‘No!’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s a waste of money.’ ‘No, it’s not.’ … I sometimes get a WhatsApp, even if I’m in the house. ‘Can I get FIFA points?’ It’s normally quite blunt yeah … And as soon as parents evening is done, obviously parents evening has been virtual, the first thing is, ‘Do I get FIFA points?’ (Interview with Mother of two sons aged 12 and 15)

This example illustrates how parenting at home is mediated through smartphone technology between rooms, but also how these dynamics have filtered into other time spaces, in this case, employment. This quote also hints at the conflicts that can arise around in-game currency, explored more fully now in relation to overspending.

Children and parents in our study struggled to keep track of in-game spending. Parents had a range of approaches to trust, usually using their own credit cards or linked debit cards designed for children, moving to independent accounts as they got older. In these cases, parents narrated their approach to digital games as life lessons in financial management:

I think he’s old enough to make his own decisions now [nearly 14] and also you know, he’s getting £15 a week pocket money and we allow him to spend that on whatever he wants in other contexts, so I don’t really see why we would then control him spending it in games, if he chooses to do so. He’s actually very responsible with his money. (Interview with Mother of 13-year-old son B)

Overall, though, most parents narrated struggles over control of purchasing decisions and making compromises. Many shared a growing realisation that their one-off purchase of a game had now become a longer-term financial commitment, with one franchise described as ‘the free game that costs you an absolute arm and a leg’. Most interviews included reference to an isolated incident of over-spending or a ‘wake-up call’ that prompted conversations and usually stricter controls. For example:

We sat down with him and listed every purchase he'd made. And it added up to sort of 200, 300 quid over a period of like 6, 7, 8 months. So it was getting to be quite a lot and when he kept saying, you know, ‘I don't want any more after this one, I don't want any more after this one.’ But he'd still want the one that he wanted … I think we were quite … surprised at how much it was. (Interview with Mother of a 15-year-old son)

These discoveries often led to a further tightening of existing rules within that household to regulate or discipline, which children and young people also referred to within their gameplay sessions. These more stringent rules included changing parental controls (if available), setting monthly limits or total bans:

… he just literally just presses the button constantly … We've just had another £200 and maybe £200 to £250 in the last two months … He's not allowed to make payments now and if he does, he loses the actual XBox, it comes out of his room. Yes, he's struggling. (Interview with Mother of a 14-year-old son)

Children themselves often regretted loot box purchases or described them as waste, particularly when they missed out on their favourite items via the chance-based mechanisms, reflecting our wider findings on potential harms (Ash, Gordon, and Mills 2023). Although some parents described that their children had ‘just got a bit carried away’, for others, these were serious incidents with clear impacts on family savings. One father outlined how chance-based in-game purchases had had ‘a negative effect on us as a family, for maybe two to three years.’

On the one hand, many parents expressed anger at game companies who utilised gambling-style techniques – explored fully in the next section – to drive repeat purchases. On the other hand, they expressed regret at their own parenting approaches, including the slippage of rules or forgetting to ask for devices before bedtime. The sense of exasperation was stark in many interviews:

I mean, in the past, we’ve tried egg timers, all of that, or a reward scheme when they were younger, and it didn’t last or didn’t work out that well, and I think looking back, maybe we should’ve persevered with that a bit more. I think just whatever works for the family, and yes, it’s a hard one … (Interview with Mother of two sons aged 14 and 17 years)

We believe there is a danger in the overall loot box debate – particularly in media and policy narratives – that parents are cast as the entire problem and solution to this issue. It is clear from our research that these systems are incredibly complex, and that parents from all backgrounds still need more support. First, there are complicated payment controls across games and platforms, which some participants had removed due to technical issues preventing legitimate transactions. Second, there was confusion over the worth of in-game currency, which as we hinted earlier, dissociates in-game transactions from their real-world monetary value. As a digital game designer explained when discussing a previous role:

There were techniques to obfuscate, to complicate the math, you would get lost in these details. Like with 24 bucks I would get 100 and something [in-game currency], which didn't quite add up exactly, just to complicate the math and complicate the process, just so people would say: ‘Ah never mind, I will just buy it’. (Interview with Digital Game Designer 1)

Children in this study sometimes displayed quite sophisticated understandings about currency conversion and wider questions of worth and value:

80 Robux would cost 90p … but you can also buy a premium membership, which is £10.99 a month … In Fortnite it’s like £7.99 for 1000 and then £16 for 2800? I think they must be making quite a lot of money … I do think those prices are maybe a bit too high … but then if it’s keeping the software running, then I guess it’s OK? But maybe instead of like £1 for 80 Robux, it should be 80 pence? (11-year-old girl, talking about Roblox and Fortnite during gameplay session)

However, when this same child confidently stated they could track their spending, they were not able to access this on their phone, laptop or game settings, and after a series of long pauses, were clearly confused about their billing history.

This section has examined how purchasing decisions ‘take place’ within the home and demonstrated that parenting practices around digital games are shaped within households and through wider socio-spatial relations. This supports our overall argument that capturing the lived experiences of families is crucial to understanding new digital geographies of home. The next section demonstrates how techniques from commercial gambling can sometimes be used to intensify the already challenging practices of digital parenting, developing our argumentation on social, seasonal and limited time.

Social, seasonal and limited time

Waitt, Cahill, and Gordon (2022) outline how with the advent of the internet and smartphone technologies, the previous spatial and crucially temporal limits of gambling have expanded with endless possibilities to participate at home (see also Valentine and Hughes 2012). There are key differences between commercial gambling for adults, and gambling style systems in digital games for children and young people, and yet the advent of loot boxes means it is important to unpack the techniques associated with paid reward systems, especially around time.

Our research found that paid reward systems in digital games alter children and young people’s routines within households, for example around homework and bedtime. However, we suggest there is more nuance in how these systems operate and their associated impacts through what we have termed social time, seasonal time and limited time. These features enliven digital games with temporal rhythms to influence purchasing decisions and manipulate spending patterns.

First, there is social time that captures how social gaming is embedded in timed challenges and leaderboard competitions. Our research identified how some game designers, and those balancing in-game economies, can manipulate wins and losses, change the odds of winning chance-based items, and create illusions of real people competing to climb leaderboards. Furthermore, internet-connected games often involve synchronisation with live events, such as football games. A parent describes how:

Generally Thursdays, that’s … everything seems to happen at Thursday at 6 O’Clock, so that you’ve got to have it. Comes home from school, that’s the first thing they wanna do. Yeah, like I’ve seen the kids run back up the road from football training, or whatever it is, just to get there for six. (Interview with Mother of 13-year-old son C)

More significantly though, these features encourage children (and any gamer) to ‘be alert’ – an anticipatory state – ready for new features or items to ‘drop’. As participants shared, ‘every night they release them, but they don’t say when, so you’ve gotta be ready’ (15-year-old boy, talking about FIFA during gameplay session). These live social features hampered household management for parents, creating daily, weekly or monthly events in gameplay that disrupted the sequencing of other events at home or with extended family.

Second, seasonal time encourages individuals to play more often and anticipate other events on the horizon, such as the release of new game versions (on theorising events in this context, see Ash, Gordon, and Mills 2018). One parent shared how with a popular game franchise, players ‘stop spending at a certain point knowing that there’s a new one coming’. We therefore understand seasonal time, especially within live internet-connected digital games, as encouraging players to return to the continuous loops of gameplay that promote regular interactions through the release of new game items, modes and other features, ultimately to make further microtransactions. These dynamics present financial challenges for parents:

I still can’t quite get my head round this … but bearing in mind that he spent a fortune, he’s just started another team. And I went … ‘So everything that we’ve given you in vouchers, or you’ve spent on vouchers, or you’ve spent, is gone now?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ And that’s that. It’s like so blasé. And I’m like, ‘ … you don’t have any of it?’ And he said, ‘No. I’ve started again.’ And that’s that. End of conversation as far as he’s concerned. (Interview with Mother of a 13-year-old son, C)

Furthermore, and most powerfully for this paper’s argument, there is limited time. Parents referred to limited-time deals as causing pressures and heightened requests for in-game currency and loot box purchases. In an interview, one game producer acknowledged and narrated these pressures as a parent himself; indeed, these are not mutually exclusive identities:

I know my little boy was desperate to get the [specific character] skin. If you say, ‘Oh, Dad, can I have this?’, ‘Well, your birthday’s coming up. So maybe in a few weeks, few months, whatever’. But if it's ‘Dad, dad I need to have this, it's not going to be there anymore’, as the credit card holder you kind of get swept up in it a little bit, and you don't want to disappoint and it's an effective and quite a brutal way of getting people to think ‘I'm going to miss out on this’. (Interview with Digital Game Producer 1)

Another game designer narrates the same technique:

That time pressure has to happen because if it’s an unlimited time you have no pressure, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll do it some more.’ ‘I’ll come back the next day, I’ll do some more.’ No, you have three days now, this is it. It’s a fire stamp, let’s go. That’s how you stress people. Stress is a very, very important tool in my work. (Interview with Digital Game Designer 2)

Our research has identified how these techniques are directly shaping digital geographies of homes in new ways. We saw the impacts of these techniques on everyday family life, as this parent of two teenagers shared:

I suppose, just being lured in by this half-price deal only on for, I don’t know, three days or whatever it is, and things like that. So, yes, it’s a tricky one, and [the children] always seem to sort of catch me when I’m making tea or I’m rushing out to work and you haven’t really got the time … (Interview with Mother of two sons aged 14 and 17 years)

In other accounts, these new digital time-spaces of home impacted wider family geographies and intersected with notions of guilt (on maternal guilt, see Sutherland 2010). Take this detailed example of navigating family life, specifically around purchasing physical gift cards of in-game currency, narrated by a mother separated from her children’s father:

There was something [a deal] that was finishing at 4 O’clock on Friday, and this is Tuesday, and he was going to his Dad’s [house] on Wednesday. And I said, ‘Well okay, we’ve just about got enough time to go to Morrisons⁴ before we go and get your sister from her after-school club.’ And they didn’t have any cards in there, so it was the end of the world! … there's some kind of deal in a game that finished at a certain point. Because part of the conversation was, ‘Well, surely you could do this with Dad on Wednesday or Thursday night?’ And he had all the reasons why that wasn’t a possibility. I thought I’d play it to my advantage and just be like the Mum who was the hero, because I managed to sort it out … we went to Wilkos⁵ instead … [but] I had to shell out for bath bombs and stickers for his sister in order to make that work. (Interview with Mother of 11-year-old son A)

The above example demonstrates how purchasing decisions connected to digital games shape and are shaped by, family geographies. Overall, this section has shown that navigating digital parenting is more significant and complex than simply managing ‘screentime’ or bedtime. Instead, these systems and chance-based mechanisms are becoming ever-present in some children’s lives, recalibrating their sense of time. Social, seasonal and limited time draw on specific gambling style techniques and can disrupt family life. We argue that these features, alongside the inclusion of spinning wheels or showing near misses in some digital games, expose and normalise gambling style systems to children and young people. The impacts of these systems, and the wider blurring of gaming and gambling, are vitally important to recognise. Our concluding section turns to the wider contributions and relevance of this paper.

Conclusions

This paper reveals important new knowledge on the digital geographies of homes and the spatial and temporal dynamics of parenting practices. It provides innovative insights into how chance-based mechanisms and gambling-related harms are understood and regulated within family households. The paper’s discussion demonstrates that to fully understand gaming and gambling as wider social, cultural and economic activities, we must foreground home space and socio-spatial interactions at home, especially in the context of digital parenting and the increasingly blurred boundaries of gaming and gambling. This paper powerfully illustrates how paid reward systems in digital games shape, and are shaped by, family geographies, advancing debates at the intersection of geographies of children, youth and families, digital geographies, and geographies of home. As such, this paper has implications for, and offers new possibilities to, academics working on families, digital life, home, gaming, and gambling beyond the specific context of loot boxes.

Digital childhoods and parenting are constantly changing with the arrival of new technologies and platforms, and there are always attempts to map the latest trends in children’s leisure, play and pocket money. However, this research makes a wider call that there is a fundamental and significant shift happening between the boundaries of gaming and gambling and that capturing the everyday lived experiences of children, young people and families in this context is vital for developing our understanding. Our paper has also diversified scholarship within digital geographies, re-centring home space and bringing fresh perspectives to the everyday practices of digital parenting. Furthermore, it has importantly moved debates beyond ‘screentime’, providing more nuance to how technological change is navigated at home and taking account of the specificities of children’s digital worlds. We push this focus forward in exciting new directions, developing the conceptual threads of social, seasonal and limited time to examine the multiple temporal rhythms associated with paid reward systems.

These ideas offer analytical purchase for researchers across a wide range of potential future investigations into different aspects of contemporary social, digital, and family life. One example ripe for further research is the growing use of digital rewards for children and young people within school-endorsed educational platforms and software, which often include time-limited features, special deals or leaderboard competitions. These emerging features and markets should interest children’s geographers, as well as economic geographers, given the potential ability of paid reward systems to shape leisure and education at home and in other settings. Given the international growth of digital learning platforms that include prize draws for example, and the increased popularity of child-friendly debit cards, geographers will need a conceptual and methodological toolkit to analyse these and other changing practices of digital family life.

Our paper’s findings are also significant for the social and health sciences, illustrating how a focus on both the spatial and temporal dimensions of paid reward systems can enrich ongoing interdisciplinary work on gaming/gambling. There is also a wider need for longitudinal research on the impacts of gambling style systems in digital games, and studies across different national contexts and home-based settings. This work matters now, and in the future, because of the social, financial, and health-related impacts of gambling-related harms, especially as the two global economic markets of gaming and gambling continue to expand at a rapid pace. The market size of online gambling alone is predicted to reach $153 billion by 2030, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 11.7% between 2023 and 2030 (Grand View Research 2023). We believe that relevant findings and approaches from human geography – alongside public health, gambling, and gaming studies – can inform international evidence-based policies that are urgently needed. For example, in relation to gambling style systems in digital games, we have recommended to the UK Government that loot boxes should be age-restricted products for over 18s only and all in-game currency that can be purchased with real-world money should be removed.

Our paper has shown the importance of capturing parents’ experiences in this debate, but it is important to critically reflect on how wider notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting are often used to craft powerful moral geographies about children’s use of technology. These narratives about parenting are often expressed in news stories about loot boxes, a tightrope that we have had to navigate ourselves given media interest and interviews related to this research. There is a danger that parents are unfairly castigated in media outlets and policy frameworks for their management of digital childhoods at home and (lack of) knowledge about complex, ever-changing systems. Instead, we suggest that critical attention should be directed towards the patchy consumer and regulatory landscape on loot boxes and wider safeguarding. We believe that a geographical approach attentive to the everyday lives of children, young people and parents adds a novel perspective to these timely debates and can enable policy change to support families more comprehensively as well as influence intellectual agendas.

Ethics statement

The project received institutional ethics approval from Newcastle University (HASS Ethics Committee; 2530) and Loughborough University (HPSC; C19-41). This included complying with both Universities’ policies regarding written informed participant consent, confidentiality and data management. Guidelines for working with those under the age of eighteen were followed rigorously, and all the project teams received enhanced DBS clearance before beginning fieldwork.

Acknowledgments

The authors extend sincere thanks to all the participants who supported this research project and the organisations that supported our activities, especially YGAM. Sarah wishes to thank Isha Karia for support with literature searches on gambling style systems, and to John Harrison, Sarah Holloway, Emily Holmes and Simi Kolajo for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The interview data that support the findings of this study are available via the UK Data Service at https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-856220

 Google Scholar

, reference number SN: 856220. Due to the nature of the research and ethical restrictions, supporting data from video ethnography are not available.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under grant number ES/S006877/1. Dr Ash (PI), Dr Mills (Co-I) and Dr Gordon (RA).

Notes

1 Elgato Capture Card Hardware and associated Software facilitate the recording of on-screen footage (i.e. real-time gameplay) including both visual and audio streams. This study used the Elgato HD60S capture card.

2 In the quoted interview material, participants are identified as the mother or father of a child or young person of a specific age. In some cases, ‘A’ and ‘B’ are utilised as affixes when two separate interviewees were mothers of a child of the same age. For example, ‘Mother of a 13-year-old son B’, in order to distinguish between families.

3 A popular coffee chain in the United Kingdom.

4 A popular supermarket in the United Kingdom.

5 A popular retail shop in the United Kingdom.