Day 1 of the Canadian Gaming Summit on Tuesday revolved around player safety, featuring a Player Protection Symposium, then wrapping up the afternoon’s discussions with a panel discussion covering responsible gaming initiatives across Canada’s provinces.
“One of the biggest things I think we’re going have to deal with is we’re in the age of digital addiction,” said Paul Burns, president and CEO of the Canadian Gaming Association. “In a broader sense, we’re a product of that. And we’re one of the million products on the internet that can cause problems for some people in various ways. But engaging in and contextualizing that conversation is important for us as an industry.
“A lot of people will point and say, it’s your product’s fault. I don’t know if that is the case…with teenagers spending hours on TikTok or Instagram, but then trying a gambling site.”
Tuesday’s panel included Burns; Ryan McCarthy, Director of Player Health for the British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC); Catherine Jarmain, Director, Industry Programs and Monitoring at iGaming Ontario; and Tracy Parker, Vice-President, Policy, Standards and Accreditation at the Responsible Gambling Council.
Consumer choice and player protection were the two primary objectives for the Ontario market, which hit its two-year anniversary in April. More support for regulated marketplaces leads to targeting addiction challenges, and raises the bar overall, Burns added.
Across Canada different regions approach player protection differently, although there is still an underlying commitment coast to coast, said Burns. Despite being a country of different regions and different approaches, when it comes to online betting and gaming, there are commonalities when talking responsible gambling (RG) solutions.
“Canada, from coast to coast, has a strong RG culture, and that has to do with the unique history in the country,” said Parker. “There was RG before there was regulation. The conversations that started happening around RG were about what I should do, what we could do, what is possible, as opposed to what we had to do. That created a strong culture as private operators started to get involved, where that ethos of compliance and strategy combined.”
That RG culture is embedded in the DNA of the industry, Burns said. The understanding for new operators coming into Ontario, under the direction of iGaming Ontario, is the operator needs to embrace this. Everyone wants to do the right thing for the player. Burns said that commitment to RG across the country is what makes the Canadian market stand out internationally.
BCLC is an interesting case study in terms of RG, talking about different channels, different nuances, and reaching a fragmented market, a process that is quite complex, said McCarthy.
“One of the things that’s really important too, is that at a provincial level, we actually measure stuff,” he said. “So, we use the problem gambling severity index…really measuring people’s higher risk behaviors engaging with gambling products.”
BCLC also measures how the rest of its players are engaging safely with their products and how that can be improved.
“I think that we take the overall approaches and principles that we talked about from an RG perspective and start to really drill down at a population level. What does that mean, for example, for someone who’s in our casinos on a slot machine? What does that mean for someone who’s on PlayNow.com and interacting with a slot machine online? And so all those generalized kind of RG principles that we all live by and work by, I think the provincial operators have a really interesting role in terms of figuring out how to operationalize them, so that we can report back on what they look like in action.”
Despite the commitment being consistent from coast to coast, are there localized quirks that separate the regions? Distinctions come in targeting different types of players, for example if the player base in a region is older, younger, urban, rural, or from varying ethnic or cultural communities, Parker said.
GameSense is available in 36 facilities across British Columbia, hitting many different demographics as well as online and lottery, but the demand of player interactions in the virtual space is a whole other level, McCarthy said. Interactions with players around RG in the virtual space have gone up 75 per cent.
“We can barely keep up with the demand. The nature of conversations we are having in the virtual space is so different,” he said. “The majority of people that are reaching out virtually are talking about problem gambling and seeking help… That has been a real challenge for us because that means new training development for GameSense. You are always trying to strategize. Who are you trying to reach? How are you trying to reach them? Are you reaching them with the right message?
“What I’m really heartened to see in the industry is that we’re talking about these more targeted approaches. The way people behave in a venue is not necessarily the way they behave online. The more we pull up those nuances, the more we can target our approaches.”
What’s the most exciting development in player protection that each of the panelists is seeing?
Technology, McCarthy said, that shines even more of a spotlight on how players are playing online, and how their behavior differs, so operators can better tailor their approaches.
The technical capability around a national self-exclusion program, tapping into best practices everywhere, is “way off”, said Jarmain, but still a development she would like to see come about.
