Ruth, a 39-year old in London, cut off her credit lines. She told her bank to throw out her overdraft protection, and she’s wiped her phone clean of anything that might tempt her back.
When you’re a recovering gacha addict, she explains, you do what you can to insulate yourself from the anime chibis, shimmering doodads, and interminable stat grinds that prey on unsuspecting citizens browsing the app store. As far as Ruth is concerned, once a gacha game has its hooks in a player, they can quickly find themselves broke, depressed, and locked in a degenerative cycle. She was just the latest in a long line of victims; spinning that eternal wheel, without fully realizing what it was doing to her bank account – and her brain chemistry – before it was too late.
“It was becoming furtive,” she says. “It’s really easy in these games to lose track of what you’ve spent. There were times that I felt completely out of control. I’d be in the compulsive spiral, where I’d tell myself that if I just keep pushing, I’ll get what I want…The first time I told my husband about it, I had run up a sizable credit card bill.”
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For the uninitiated, the term “gacha” refers to the millions of plastic capsule machines that dot the many shopping centers of Japan. Plunk in about 300 yen (currently ~$2.75 USD), twist the knob, and a tiny plastic figure — one of potentially thousands of unique statues in a line — will fall down the chute. Those statues are usually themed off of characters from anime, manga, or video games, so unsurprisingly, gacha has taken on its own devout fandom across the Pacific. Hobbyists will often attempt to collect every figure in a specific machine, something that can only be achieved with a lot of money.
Perhaps it was inevitable that some game studios would attempt to export the pack-rat obsessiveness innate in physical gacha machines to digital territory. In a typical gacha digital game like Fate/Grand Order and Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle, players leverage in-game currency to chase the same high. This time, they’re cranking an algorithmic dial rather than a physical handle, in search of randomly distributed weapons, armor, and artifacts to outfit your humble warband as they trudge through the wilds or battlefields.
The vast majority of gacha games come from Japanese developers – Nintendo famously deployed the mechanic in Fire Emblem: Heroes – but recently, Western publishers have waded in the same waters. EA’s Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes introduced a gacha mechanic upon release in 2015, where players crack open holodecks in hopes of finding ewoks, snowtroopers, and blockade runners to thwart the Empire. Likewise, the games industry’s current fixation on blind loot boxes — which can be found in everything from Overwatch to FIFA — are a remarkably consistent ancillary to the gacha tradition. A pack of Ultimate Team players scratches the same itch that capsule machines started exploiting in the 60s.
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This was the root of Ruth’s sickness. When she came clean to her husband, she had already dumped a significant amount of money (she doesn’t get specific, but tells me it was more than four figures) into a variety of different gacha games. Despite that, Ruth says that she had a hard time comprehending her hobby as a toxic dependency. Gacha never felt like gambling. After all, these were just video games, right? The idea that she could become addicted to them came as an unfortunate surprise. Casinos are cached in all sorts of public policy and cultural baggage, but there were no warnings attached to Fate/Grand Order. All it took was a few taps, and her life hasn’t been the same since.
“The goalposts [in these games] constantly move, they’re constantly releasing new things,” Ruth says. “You get massive FOMO. If you’re just playing for pictures and other collectibles, you can rationalize it as something you can stop.” Ruth says things become more complicated when players have to deal with RPGs or strategy games. “The harder ones to deal with have an element of gameplay. As a result, you can enjoy the game on that level without touching the gacha, but of course everything is setting up to get you to play.”
Ruth eventually found the solidarity she needed on the internet. Browse subreddits like r/StopGaming and r/ProblemGambling and you’ll find countless stories from people just like her: normal gamers who’ve found themselves with a pathologic drain on their income, thanks to the apps on their phone.
These posts radiate with helplessness, largely due to a lack of available social support. There’s plenty of outreach and resources for people stricken with substance abuse, sex dependence, or a nasty sports-betting habit, but gambling addiction in the world of video games — especially in the loot box era — has gone almost entirely unstudied. In the absence of meaningful data that can help guide formal treatment programs, however, people like Ruth have created a loose support network; a way for others to know they’re not alone. [poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Gambling%20addiction%20in%20the%20world%20of%20video%20games%20–%20especially%20in%20the%20lootbox%20era%20–%20has%20gone%20almost%20entirely%20unstudied.”]
“So much of the stuff about addiction online is for more traditional forms of it. When they talk about ‘gaming addiction’ in the media, it’s usually focused on kids spending money on games,” Ruth says. ” Just because I’m not going to a casino doesn’t mean I’m not dealing with addiction. I think I’m the tip of a huge iceberg. I think there’s loads of people out there just like me, who haven’t put it into words.”
Ryan*, a 29-year old from Canada, is one of those people Ruth is talking about. He played a lot of Seven Knights, a well-established gacha game published by Netmarble, and says he began to feel the walls close in once his social life started to atrophy away. “I would spend at least eight to 10 hours a day just playing on my phone,” says Ryan. “My ex breaking up with me was when I realized I had a problem.”
When Ryan finally evaluated the damage, he found that he ultimately put about $15,000 into gacha games. He was horrified by the revelation, and resolved to seek treatment – but gacha games are a convoluted beast. Explaining their many nuances to a lifelong gamer is already difficult. Bringing that context to an addiction specialist completely disconnected from the culture is nearly impossible. In fact, out of the many doctors he consulted, Ryan said he only found one therapist who was able to frame his gacha dependency within addiction science. Because of those hangups, he resolved to speak about his recovery on the subreddits, as a way of creating some sort of foundation for anyone suffering the same affliction.
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“That post helped me to realize that I am not the only one going through this, and that others have gone down the same path I did,” says Ryan. “Some comments even said that after reading my post, they themselves realized they have a problem as well. This was extremely moving to me as I felt I made a difference in someone’s life. I am so fortunate to break the addiction before it affected my life in a permanent manner.”
Joseph, a 31-year old in Florida, generated his own treatment process, also cobbled together from the posts he read on gaming addiction subreddits. In total, he sunk about $1,300 into Fire Emblem Heroes and Dragalia Lost. Like many others interviewed for this story, those numbers repulsed him, and Joseph tried to retune his brain. Gacha games are structured around forward progress, but he forced himself to reconsider every spin he made as a step backwards. [poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Gacha%20games%20are%20structured%20around%20forward%20progress%2C%20but%20he%20forced%20himself%20to%20reconsider%20every%20spin%20he%20made%20as%20a%20step%20backwards.”]
“When the money spent resulted in positive developments, like pulling the unit I wanted, it was a sensation of satisfaction. In my mind, that money did not go to waste,” he says. “I didn’t realize I was spending $42 to pull just a single copy of this character. I kept telling myself it was worth it because I wanted it. Every single time was like that. I spent until I got the character. I think the shame didn’t hit me until I deleted the save data and the app.”
Some of what Joseph talks about is echoed in the few studies that have been focused on loot boxes. Luke Clark, the head of the University of British Columbia’s Gaming Research arm, tells me that there is plenty of evidence in behavioral neuroscience that leads researchers to believe that dopamine responses tend to react strongly to “uncertain reward” — which is the dynamic that the blind-box gambit preys upon.
“Dopamine cells fire on both the reward, but also the ‘cues’ that predict the reward – in this case, the loot box,” he says, noting that while there’s always more research needed, “I would expect these effects to generalize to gaming behavior.”
That dopamine response is potentially accentuated by the scarcity inherent in gacha mechanics, or any other randomized rewards with a few ultra-rare items amid the common, gray-item chaff. It’s not just about getting a legendary item after a few hundred spins, explains Clark, but also which of those legendary items a player might win.
“It seems likely that gamers might engage in a lot of ‘what if’ thinking, similar to how lottery players might spend time fantasizing about what they would do if they were to win,” Clark says. “This can also create another source of ‘near misses’: a gamer might actually win a decent item in a loot box, but they could still be disappointed if they missed the specific prize they were hoping for, and this could fuel further purchases.”
All of this complicates the science of recovery for anyone who finds themselves with an unscratchable microtransaction itch. It isn’t easy to identify the particular quirks of a gacha fixation — they cannot be lumped into a more generalized understanding of addiction scholarship — and if we are going to devise an ethically sound therapeutic for people like Ruth, that will require a genuine investment from the medical industry. Clark notes that last year, the World Health Organization officially recognized “gaming disorder” within their International Classification of Diseases. But he also notes that there remains so many states and countries that don’t even officially acknowledge the very real issue of problem gambling — much less a dependency to a Star Wars capsule game.
For now, those living with a gacha addiction rely on each other. They’ll keep talking. Until more funding is dedicated to researching potential treatments, that’s often the only chance they have to rehabilitate themselves.
Most just laugh at gacha game addiction. “I believe we need more than just the ‘contains in-app purchases; symbol on the App Store. There needs to be more of a distinction that sets these predatory elements and games apart from others,” finishes Joseph. “There’s so much that could and should be done.”
*Not his real first name
If you feel you may need assistance with gambling in any form, you can find resources at the National Council on Problem Gambling, which also operates a 24-hour confidential national helpline in the United States on 800-522-4700.
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Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.
