Digital Gaming/Gambling Harms and Students: Financial Literacy and the Transition to Adulthood

This paper outlines early-stage doctoral research examining how UK higher education students encounter and understand random reward mechanisms (RRMs) such as loot boxes and gacha systems, which blur the boundary between digital gaming and gambling. Its central argument is that older teenagers and university students remain significantly under-researched, despite the transition into higher education coinciding with new financial independence, reduced parental oversight, and cost-of-living pressures that may make RRM engagement especially consequential. The author notes that RRMs largely fall outside existing gambling regulation in most jurisdictions, leaving young people with fewer formal safeguards.

The research is situated within Student Geographies and Digital Geographies and is funded by the ESRC and partly by the Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust (Ygam). The planned study will use qualitative semi-structured interviews with UK students and university professional services staff to explore how RRMs are experienced within the everyday spaces, routines, and transitions of student life, and how young people develop or lack the financial and digital literacy needed to navigate them.

As an early-stage project, the paper reports no empirical findings. Its contribution at this stage is a review and mapping of scholarship on the convergence of gaming and gambling, alongside an emerging conceptual and methodological framework. It argues that geographical approaches offer a productive but underused lens for understanding RRMs through the social and spatial contexts in which they are encountered.

The work aims to inform financial and digital literacy, harm prevention, and student support, with the intention of producing evidence-based recommendations for Ygam's University and Student Engagement Programme to promote healthy digital engagement and student wellbeing.