SINGAPORE: You’re a teenager with S$50 to spare, and rather than clothes or gadgets for yourself, you decide to spend on your favourite online game — specifically, your character or avatar.
You could buy a fancy costume or sword. But you choose loot boxes instead, which contain random items of varying rarity depending on your luck.
You might get something worth, say, 10 times more than the few dollars you paid. But most boxes come up empty or contain common items — and you buy one after another, until finally you win something. Your screen explodes with virtual fireworks. It feels like winning the lottery.
So you do it again and again — hooked on the pursuit of big prizes. It’s an all-too-familiar scenario for gamers like Jasman Choo.
At 15, he started playing Team Fortress 2 every day. The game rewarded him with mystery…
