The effects of a mandatory play break on subsequent gambling among Norwegian video lottery terminal players

Auer, M, Hopfgartner, N and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2019. The effects of a mandatory play break on subsequent gambling among Norwegian video lottery terminal players. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 8 (3), pp. 522-529. ISSN 2062-5871

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Abstract

Background and aims: Responsible gambling (RG) tools and initiatives have been introduced by social RG operators as a means to help prevent problem gambling. One such initiative is the use of mandatory play breaks (i.e., forced session terminations). Recommendations by RG experts for gambling operators to implement mandatory play breaks appear to be intuitively sensible but are not evidence-based.

Methods: The present authors were given access by the Norwegian gambling operator Norsk Tipping to data from 7,190 video lottery terminal (VLT) players who gambled between January and March 2018. This generated 218,523 playing sessions for further analysis. Once a gambling session reaches a 1-hr play duration, a forced session termination of 90 s comes into effect. This study evaluated the effect of mandatory play breaks on subsequent gambling.

Results: Compared to similar sessions identified using a matched-pairs design, results demonstrated that there was no significant effect of the forced termination regarding the amount of money staked in the subsequent gambling session or on the time duration of the subsequent gambling session.

Conclusions: Although expenditure was higher in the subsequent 24 hr for terminated sessions, this is likely due to higher intensity gamblers being more likely to trigger mandatory breaks. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Behavioral Addictions
Creators:	Auer, M., Hopfgartner, N. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Akadémiai Kiadó
Date:	September 2019
Volume:	8
Number:	3
ISSN:	2062-5871
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1556/2006.8.2019.51 DOI 1119447 Other
Rights:	This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited, a link to the CC License is provided, and changes – if any – are indicated.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	25 Sep 2019 10:14
Last Modified:	24 Jan 2020 13:52
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37767

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