Loot boxes are garnering increased attention in both the industry and media. One focal point of the discussion is whether loot boxes should be considered a form of gambling. While parallels can be drawn between loot boxes and random reward schedules, researchers have argued that the “glorification” aspect of loot boxes that have heightened player awareness (e.g., opening a box, a pack of cards, or spinning a wheel) of randomness is a relatively new trend in games. However, there is currently a dearth of empirical research on loot boxes. We make two contributions in this paper: 1) Infinite Loot Box, an open-source Unity platform for experimenting with loot boxes created from scratch; and 2) a 2 × 2 experiment (high/low visual effects × high/low audial effects; $N$ = 1235). We find that high audial effects significantly increase the number of loot boxes opened. Neither audial nor visual effects were found to significantly impact other variables. These contributions push forward our understanding of loot boxes and their contextual factors.

中文翻译：

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无限战利品盒：模拟电子游戏战利品盒的平台

战利品箱在行业和媒体中都引起了越来越多的关注。讨论的一个焦点是战利品箱是否应被视为一种赌博形式。虽然战利品箱和随机奖励计划之间存在相似之处，但研究人员认为，战利品箱的“美化”方面提高了玩家对随机性的意识（例如，打开一个盒子、一包纸牌或旋转轮子）是游戏中相对较新的趋势。然而，目前缺乏关于战利品箱的实证研究。我们在本文中有两个贡献：1) Infinite Loot Box，一个开源 Unity 平台，用于试验从头开始创建的战利品盒；2) 2 × 2 实验（高/低视觉效果 × 高/低听觉效果；$N$ = 1235）。我们发现高音效显着增加了打开的战利品箱的数量。没有发现听觉和视觉效果对其他变量有显着影响。这些贡献推动了我们对战利品盒及其背景因素的理解。