"It's a Real Con": Parent Attitudes Toward Children's Game Spending

This paper examines how parents in Australia perceive children's spending on in-game purchases, arguing that parental anxieties about game monetisation often reflect broader media panic tropes rather than evidence of child harm. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 18 parents and 22 children aged 7 to 13, across 16 families in Melbourne, the study situates its inquiry within debates over excessive screentime, gaming addiction, and gambling-like mechanisms. Most participating children (17 of 22) regularly played Roblox, a platform where, as of August 2024, 42% of its 380 million global users were under 13.

The findings reveal that parents commonly view game developers as manipulative "villains" who exploit naive child users, with lootboxes, virtual currencies, and algorithmic design singled out as particularly concerning. Family conflict, however, centred less on documented experiences of harm than on disagreement over the "value" of digital items. Many parents described virtual purchases as less "real" than physical goods and as a "waste of money," with cost-of-living pressures intensifying these views. Children, by contrast, articulated reasoned accounts of value tied to social belonging and self-esteem.

The authors conclude that while genuinely harmful features such as lootboxes and deceptive "dark patterns" warrant serious regulatory and research attention, policy should be grounded in children's actual play experiences rather than parental anxieties alone. Conflating legitimate concerns about gambling-style mechanics with parents' misunderstandings of the social worth of in-game purchases risks constraining children's digital play while failing to target the most significant harms.