REPSONSIBLE GAMING
The behavioral scientist Ryan McCarthy, Director Player Health at the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC) in Canada. He shares how his study of behavioral science has been applied in his work.
vulnerable, they can actually have big operational impacts across all our players. So we need get evidence to make sure that it’s actually hitting the target that we want. In terms of borrowing from other areas, my background is in Implementation Science, so I’m always looking at what’s happening in public health research. Whether that’s alcohol use, substance use, or other harmful products, there’s been a lot of research as to how to market and communicate about harm. We don’t necessarily have the evidence base from gambling yet in some of those areas, but we use behavioral economics or nudge theory in the work that we do. When we’re developing messages to players, we think about how to address heuristics or the mental shortcuts we take. That research hasn’t come from gambling but we use it in our marketing. Every time we do an RG advertisement, it doesn’t say you’re going to lose your house, your life, your wife, whatever. We want to show players that they can have fun and do so in a safe way. We’ve really focused in on that with sports betting, for example, with young men ages 19 to 30, to get them to understand concepts like taking a break and setting limits. I’m director of player health which is a term we’ve used for about six years at BCLC. We want to move away from the term Responsible Gambling, because it has some stigma attached to it. It can also indicate that it’s the players responsibility, and we actually see it as our responsibility to also address risk. So we have a comprehensive Player Health Assessment Program for any new marketing or products that go to market, where we actually look for risk and figure out how to communicate that risk to players in the safest way possible. It’s really taking a person centered health based approach. The whole player health strategy is built from a health perspective and not a gambling perspective. It’s looking at gambling as a health behavior and not just as a gambling behavior. As part of the strategy, we’re developing player health strategies for each channel of business. That means we’ll have a player health strategy for online, for land based and for lottery. We recognize people behave differently in different environments, and so just taking a one size fits all approach is not really
Having worked in public health policy for a number of decades, I’ve often joked about what I call decision-based evidence making versus evidence-based decision making. It’s really important that you ground yourself in whatever evidence you do have available. It doesn’t just have to be Responsible Gambling or player health related research: I’m a big fan of stealing from other disciplines. We’ve built a really collaborative relationship with our regulator. When they’re thinking about a regulation or a directive they’re very receptive to talking to us about what we know about the evidence. We’ve developed a center of excellence in our company around Player Health, so we have a really good handle on what the research evidence can tell us and what’s happening in other jurisdictions. And we have those active conversations, because we worry about the unintended consequences that regulations can have. Even though they’re meant to protect the most
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IMGL MAGAZINE | DECEMBER 2024
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