The gamification of everything
Gambling-like mechanics are becoming part of everyday digital life. Is our understanding and prevention of harm keeping pace?
People contacting GamCare’s National Gambling Helpline are increasingly describing harm that does not begin, or remain, within the traditional boundaries of gambling. The products may be labelled gaming, shopping or trading, but the design features described can feel strikingly familiar.
We’re talking about design features like variable rewards, near misses, streaks, leaderboards, artificial scarcity and prompts to chase what has just been lost. These now shape behaviour across gaming, retail and financial services, often available around the clock. This first edition of Signals asks whether prevention and consumer protection are keeping pace with that shift.
Drawing on nearly three decades’ experience, GamCare treats everyone who contacts us as an individual and offers support and treatment based on those individual needs and preferences. But looking across people’s experiences, recurring patterns often emerge.
The signal
This summer, GamCare analysed 2,536 anonymised webchat transcripts from 20 days of National Gambling Helpline activity. The analysis is not a measure of prevalence; it is an early signal of how gambling harm may be changing and the pathways through which that harm develops.
Three recurring pathways emerged from that analysis:
1
Early exposure through family, friends, sport or social occasions where risk taking was perceived to be a normal leisure activity.
2
Lower-intensity activity escalating beyond a person’s control to higher risk behaviour, such as higher value bets and increased frequency of risk taking.
3
Other exposures that sit outside regulated gambling, through the gamification of everyday life.
It is important to note that these pathways do not inevitably lead to harm, and most people exposed to them will never need GamCare’s support. They do, however, point to a gap that matters.
Prevention and protection remain organised primarily around gambling products, while harmful patterns of human behaviour are not bound by these legal definitions.
What do we mean by gamification?
Online choice architecture is the environment in which people make decisions, including how choices are presented and how interfaces are designed.
Gamification is one approach within that wider field: the use of game elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, challenges and rewards to encourage engagement.
It can be a positive experience. Studies in education have found that, when well designed, gamified approaches can improve learner engagement, participation and outcomes. Particularly where they provide timely feedback, visible progress and opportunities to learn from mistakes. The concern is not gamification itself, but the use of gambling-like mechanics (particularly chance-based rewards, urgency, loss-chasing and frictionless spending) in ways that may make risk harder to recognise or control.
Gamification is not the same as gambling
Gamification is not itself a legal category of gambling, although a particular product or mechanic may need to be assessed against the legal definitions of gaming, betting or a lottery. The law must continue to distinguish between products. But legal classification does not, by itself, describe how a person experiences risk, reward or loss.
From rewarding loyalty to engineering engagement
Over the past three decades, digital rewards have evolved from occasional promotions into continuous, personalised systems designed to sustain attention and spending. Loyalty points and competitions were joined by likes, badges and targeted offers… and then by virtual currencies, loot boxes, streaks, scarcity cues and real-time prompts.
Not every reward has become gambling, but gamification design features now shape behaviour across gaming, retail and financial services. Through examining recent stories, it is possible to deepen our understanding of how the design impacts upon those facing gambling harms.
The concern is not gamification itself, but the use of gambling-like mechanics in ways that may make risk harder to recognise or control
The loot box example
A loot box is a virtual item in a video game containing a random selection of digital goods. Players may pay money, directly or through an in-game currency, without knowing which item they will receive.
I think from being a kid I’ve always liked a “gamble”. As in even FIFA games, paying money for something and hoping it is good yet the majority of the time, it’s not. And from there I think it’s put into my head the phrase “play to win”. I'm now in a state of mind where I can say that's obviously false. But in the moment, I believe it.
People contacting GamCare have described spending far more on loot boxes than they intended. One person purchased packs to obtain stronger players and compete at the highest level, eventually spending £2,500 before recognising the true cost. Others described the excitement of receiving an unexpectedly valuable item.
Members of GamCare’s Youth Advisory Board have also described how virtual currencies can distance a purchase from real money. As one contributor put it: “In game currency, this intermediate stage dulls the risk-taking behaviour. Buying the loot box is then bought with something that doesn’t exist.”
Peer-reviewed published research has found an association between loot box spending and problem gambling, while more recent longitudinal evidence suggests that young adults who spend money on loot boxes may be at greater risk of later real-money gambling. The evidence does not mean that most players will experience harm, but it strengthens the case for earlier education about chance-based rewards and spending.
This is an opportunity for prevention. By teaching people to recognise the mechanism before a pattern of harm may become established, there is a greater chance of preventing harm from escalating.
Shopping and marketplaces
Shopping platforms also use countdowns, flash sales, live auctions, mystery purchases and pay-to-bid models to create urgency and repeat participation.
“Recently I’ve been buying surprise sets on a shopping and auction app, the reason I’m here tonight is I just lost £500 in about 30 minutes and I feel awful”
The product is different, but the pattern is familiar: rapid decisions, uncertain outcomes, repeated spending and a strong urge to continue.
GamCare’s Youth Advisory Board is calling for broader education that goes beyond legal definitions of gambling and shows young people how digital products are designed to influence risk-taking, spending and continued engagement.
Regulators are beginning to confront the same issue. In February 2026, the European Commission opened formal proceedings against a large fashion retailer under the Digital Services Act, including scrutiny of points and rewards used to drive engagement. The investigation does not prejudge the outcome, but it shows that addictive design is becoming a consumer-protection issue beyond gambling.
When harmful patterns migrate into trading
Trading apps and crypto platforms can bring push notifications, points, prize draws, leaderboards, social comparison and volatile real-time feedback into financial decision-making. In research involving more than 9,000 consumers, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) found that some of these digital engagement practices increased trading frequency and investment risk.
Investment activity is not inherently gambling. Concern arises when some people describe using financial products in a gambling-like way. In evidence to the Commons Treasury Committee, the FCA warned that “crypto gambling addictions are rising and there are limited controls in place to protect vulnerable consumers.” The Committee concluded that consumer speculation in ‘unbacked’ crypto assets, which its report describes as those with no assets underpinning them, “more closely resembles gambling than…a financial service.”
“I used to go to the casino a lot and then it moved to online gambling and more recently I’ve been using my savings in the stock market in a gambling fashion and lost everything”
For some people who have brought their gambling under greater control, trading can become a substitute channel for the same pursuit of risk and reward. Across the transcripts analysed, people described moving from gambling into day trading or investing without initially connecting the behaviour to their previous experience of harm. On occasions, the language used moved from describing reckless gambling to poor investment choices whilst the behaviour patterns were not similarly changed.
One person described returning to harmful behaviour through day trading after receiving support for gambling harm in 2018. Another said that trading had come to consume all their wages. Gambling blocks and self-exclusion could restrict access to betting products, but not to trading platforms that felt, at first, like legitimate investment. Product-based protections remain incomplete when the behaviour can migrate beyond the product boundary.
Gambling harm is changing shape.
If we look only at products legally
defined as gambling we risk missing
the wider
pattern.
The gap that matters
The law will continue to draw boundaries between gambling, gaming, shopping and financial services. Human behaviour does not always respect them. That creates four practical risks for organisations such as GamCare that work in gambling harm support.
1
People may not recognise when a pattern is becoming harmful.
2
Gambling-specific blocks may not cover adjacent products.
3
Professionals may miss the connection between behaviours.
4
Information about risk and harm becomes fragmented when moving across regulators and sectors.
As GamCare’s Head of Helpline and Online, Sam Turton, explains:
“What begins as an occasional ‘bit of fun’ can become a search for the same feeling through games, shopping, online betting or trading. On a phone, in the privacy of someone’s home, that pattern can become increasingly isolated and difficult for others to see.”
Our case studies suggest two different movements: gambling-like mechanics may familiarise some people with chance-based spending as an entry point into more harmful behaviour, while others may move into new products after trying to control their gambling with blocks and self-exclusion. The same design features can therefore appear at different points in a person’s experience of harm.
Our 2026 YouGov survey points to a public-recognition gap. Parents were as concerned about gaming apps with gambling-like features as they were about gambling websites, yet fewer than half of respondents classified loot boxes as gambling. The important point is not whether respondents applied the legal label correctly; it is that similar behavioural risks can be harder to recognise when they appear in a different product.
What should change
If prevention remains organised only around the legal category of the product, it will continue to miss some of the people who need it. GamCare is ready to work with regulators, researchers, industry and people with lived experience to close that gap.
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Sources and data
- YouGov for GamCare: 3,717 UK adults, fieldwork 18 February to 6 March 2026, online, weighted and representative of UK adults. No figures based on fewer than 50 respondents.
- GamCare frontline analysis: 20 days of National Gambling Helpline webchats, 2,536 anonymised transcripts, summer 2026. An early signal, not a representative study.
- House of Commons Treasury Committee, Regulating Crypto (HC 615, May 2023), including FCA written evidence.
- Loot Boxes, Gambling, and Problem Gambling Among Young People: Results from a Cross-Sectional Online Survey - PMC
- https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/fca-research/research-note-digital-engagement-practices-trading-apps-experiment
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-choice-architecture-how-digital-design-can-harm-competition-and-consumers
- European Commission, Digital Services Act investigation announcement, February 2026.
- Li, Ma and Shi, Frontiers in Psychology meta-analysis, 2023: 41 gamification studies, 49 samples and 5,071+ participants; found a significant positive effect on student learning outcomes.