It All Starts with a Name: Mapping the Terms Used by Researchers to Describe Gambling-Like Elements in Digital Games

This paper maps the terminology that researchers use to describe gambling-like elements in digital games, arguing that the lack of consistent naming hinders the field. The authors, a multidisciplinary team from KU Leuven, Ghent University, and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, contend that naming and defining these elements is never neutral, since a chosen term often signals whether a given design practice is viewed as socially acceptable and what regulatory treatment it warrants. They also suggest that local, cultural, and disciplinary differences, as well as the split between industry-funded and independently funded research, likely shape how these concepts are framed.

The study is designed in three parts: a cross-disciplinary literature review, an expert identification phase, and an electronic survey. The literature review produced an initial list of 313 terms, which was narrowed to 32 relevant expressions by grouping similar terms and removing overly narrow designations. Experts were to be recruited through strategic sampling by continent, language, research field, public or private funding, and seniority, combined with convenience sampling limited to scholars with at least passive English proficiency, and phased snowballing to identify further experts and clusters. The survey instrument, administered in English through Qualtrics, includes naming tasks using visual and textual stimuli, a familiarity rating of the 32 expressions, definition tasks, open questions inviting terms in other languages or from non-Western contexts, and a rating of respondents' attitudes toward these phenomena.

Because the paper reports a research design rather than completed results, its findings are prospective. The authors plan to analyze the responses qualitatively, using inductive computer-assisted category building for textual material and visual semiotics for comparing visual prompts with the names offered. The stated aim is to identify global, local, and peer-group trends in naming, defining, and evaluating gambling-like elements, reveal conceptual gaps within the scientific community, and encourage more interdisciplinary and intercultural understanding in this area of research.