BETTER CHANGE
It’s a fallacy!
Gambling needs its stories; it’s part of what makes the industry so vibrant to work in and for the majority of its consumers, exciting to take part in. This month, Better Change’s engagement director, Rob Mabbett, explores the difference between harmless superstition and dangerous fallacies as well as how we can act to ensure that gambling stays fun, engaging and safe.
hen I fi rst began in gambling it was safe to say that there was an interesting reaction from family and friends when I explained to them what work I was in. Judgement, however, would be quickly replaced by curiosity and questions such as “what is the biggest win you’ve ever seen?” or “what is the most someone has lost?”. This fascination with gambling is ingrained in many cultures because it plays to our appetite for excitement and risk taking, but also because it poses the question “What if?”. Hope of something positive happening to us is an incredibly powerful thing. Without hope life can be pretty bleak, when going through hardship of any kind the notion of hope is often what gets us through. In gambling hope can manifest itself in a number of different ways, there is
W 22 JULY 2025
obviously the dream of winning big. You may have seen the recent news of an online slots player winning £11.5 million with their fi rst £1.50 play or the massive £200million+ plus Euromillions lottery draw (this had not been won at time of writing). Many of us have our “lucky numbers” and our stories of what we would do if we suddenly came into all that money. We know it is extremely unlikely and the slight hope we hold of it ever coming true is harmless, it’s just a nice thing to talk about. It doesn’t have to be so sensational as winning millions either. Many people hope that a gambling session they are entering into will perhaps end in a more modest fi nancial success or it may not be about the money at all, for some the gratifi cation of been proven right can often outweigh the fi nancial reward of a
successful bet or, it may just be the hope that the activity they are about to engage with will be a positive experience, after all that is the motivation for many things that we do. The anticipation and the thrill of the experience are just as (if not more) exciting than the actual outcome. This is why speed of play and near misses are such emotive elements of gambling and why we need to be aware of them in game design and how we facilitate play. This is because we do not want to offer our players false hope, we cannot guarantee a player success nor should we elude to it with messaging such as “tomorrow will be your lucky day” or “get rich by playing our new big jackpot slots game”. If a player’s hope is that gambling will get them out of trouble fi nancially or that because of the losing run they have been on,
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
