The ever-increasing reliance on loot boxes by the video game industry has attracted scrutiny from consumer groups and regulators. For example, this practice of selling random assortments of virtual items for a price has been criticized for its lack of transparency since, before purchasing a loot box, players do not necessarily know the possible items they can win and the associated probabilities. Even in the rare cases when the list of items and probabilities are available, there are no guarantees that a game is actually using that information when randomly drawing an item, which naturally results in a trust problem. We draw from decision theory to explain the transparency and trust issues faced by loot boxes, and from a recently proposed decision model by Pedersen et al. (2019) to motivate the use of blockchain technology in this context. Following the design science research framework (Peffers et al., 2007), we then explain how loot boxes can be coded as smart contracts running on a blockchain network, and why this solution effectively tackles the transparency and trust problems we mentioned above. We illustrate the use of the proposed smart contract by developing a decentralized application (DApp) that mimics the process of purchasing and opening a loot box. We carefully analyze our solution by considering its computational complexity, accuracy, security, and cost aspects. We further discuss topics related to governance and deployment so as to help the video game industry with a potential real-life implementation of our solution.

电子游戏行业对战利品盒的日益依赖吸引了消费群体和监管机构的审查。例如，这种以价格随机出售虚拟物品的做法因缺乏透明度而受到批评，因为在购买战利品盒之前，玩家不一定知道他们可以赢得的可能物品以及相关的概率。即使在极少数情况下可以使用物品和概率列表，也无法保证游戏在随机绘制物品时实际上正在使用该信息，这自然会导致信任问题。我们从决策理论出发，解释战利品箱所面临的透明性和信任问题，并从Pedersen等人最近提出的决策模型中进行解释。（2019）鼓励在这种情况下使用区块链技术。根据设计科学研究框架（Peffers等，2007），我们然后解释如何将战利品箱编码为在区块链网络上运行的智能合约，以及为什么该解决方案有效地解决了我们上面提到的透明性和信任问题。我们通过开发一个去中心化应用程序（DApp）来模拟拟议的智能合约的使用，该应用程序模仿了购买和打开战利品盒子的过程。我们通过考虑解决方案的计算复杂性，准确性，安全性和成本方面来仔细分析我们的解决方案。