Our passions can make us do some crazy things - including spending large sums of money. For some people it's Warhammer. Others collect stamps. For me, it was dropping around a grand on a silly dinosaur mobile game.
It didn't happen all at once. I hadn't consciously decided to spend that much money. Like many a bad habit, it was a slow burn. Until one day there was a gigantosaurus-sized hole in my bank account. So how did I get there?
Gotta catch 'em all
Growing up I was a dinosaur kid. While other primary school children were playing handball or trading Pokèmon cards there was a period where I was somewhere posted up with Home Reference Library’s Dinosaurs guide. Believe me, it’s no pocketbook. It’s a sizeable paperweight and still sits on my bedside bookshelf, well-worn cover just holding on.
What did I want to be when I grew up? A paleontologist. Favourite Christmas presents? Probably the mini-fossil kits my Great Uncle would get from National Geographic. First email address? A pun on my name and the Dilophosaurus. I was a kid who knew that dinosaurs poop, pee and reproduce all by the one mechanism - the cloaca, that’s your lesson for the day folks (and your sign you’ve spent too much time on the internet for the day).
Fast forward a decade or more to 2015. I’m at uni and old enough to make my own decisions and there’s a new mobile game out that ties in with the release of Jurassic World.
Jurassic World: The Game, which today has garnered over 50 million downloads on the Google Play store has a simple tagline "Hatch. Battle. Evolve." As a 20-year-old with a long commute to uni, I was hooked. The game vaguely follows the themes of the film and lets you unlock over 100 species of dinosaurs, place them in the park amongst other buildings and then battle your team of dinos against others. It's part 'collect 'em all', part fighter, part theme park builder. I don't recommend checking it on the App Store. It's still there though.
Like many such mobile games, there were all kinds of incentives to spend cold hold cash on your game of virtual dinosaurs.
One ticket to Jurassic Hell please
I can see myself so clearly I'm stressed thinking about it. The day I was sitting on my bed going through my Apple purchase history and started adding up the cost on pen and paper. So many transactions for Jurassic World: The Game.
Small amounts. A few bucks here. $20 here and there. And sure a few $50s too.
All sorts of apps feature "in-app purchases". Mobile games, but also health and fitness apps, social media apps, and more. In-app purchases are signposted in app stores before you download them but once you have it can be difficult to avoid making those kinds of purchases thanks to what's known as dark pattern design. These so-called "dark patterns" exist to take advantage of the user experience to get players to spend more time and more money on their apps.
They're not dissimilar from the methods casinos use to keep people playing. For example, a casino might remove all clocks from sight to prevent your from leaving, while an app uses temporal techniques to ensure you come back every day. This can include things like daily rewards offers and in-app countdowns until your next prize drop.
You can be incentivised to spend more money to skip hours-long wait times or purchase in-game resources you haven't unlocked yet. Playing Jurassic World: The Game had become part of my routine as many games do. Just as I might check social media after a class ended I might briefly hop in collect any rewards from missions and set it back down again.
A casino has chips so you're not playing with actual money while quite often in mobile games cash becomes credits, which become resources like food, DNA points and other abstracted fees.
There's also the sunk cost fallacy. The more time we invest in these games the less likely we are to simply put them down one day. We want to keep playing with this world we've built. What makes these types of games particularly addictive as well is that there's no real way to win and no real way to lose.
It's simply trying to keep up with the ever-growing collection. And you will, the game will facilitate that and ensure you're always steadily making progress but never enough to create a satisfying conclusion. So you keep showing up tomorrow, and the next day and on and on.
It's all well and good if you don't spend any money, but for many people - especially those with addictive personalities - that's not the case. There are no rules or regulations that prevent these types of games from existing, and very few guidelines as to how they can run.
The second mass extinction of the dinosaurs
When I realised this had become "a problem" I took swift action. Cold turkey. With a few quick taps my favourite dinos, the ones with cool designs, rare ones that I'd sunk hours of time to unlock were all gone. I was their meteor. I didn’t just delete the game off my iPhone, no, I set up a new iCloud account with a mature, non-dinosaur pun name and deleted the old one. I didn't trust myself to not spend any more money or fighting off the voice that whispered "just $5 more".
Today, it’s a “funny story”. I try not to worry about the money I lost to those digital dinos although it’d be handy to have $1,000 today during the cost of living crisis. I'm okay with it because I recognise that we all make silly mistakes. But I also recognise that thousands of other people experience the same issues. I hope that coming clean about my mistake I can help someone come clean or confront themself about theirs.
In the real world you have the power to exclude yourself from venues that offer gambling services, effectively choosing to ban yourself from those facilities. But short of disabling in-app purchases completely or handing over the reins to a partner or family member there isn't a straightforward way as of yet.
The best step is to speak to someone about it so you can break the cycle before it continues. There's no shame in speaking up and there are counselling services that will keep your circumstances confidential.
If this story has raised issues about your own or others gambling, please contact Gambling Help Online for free confidential counselling or call the Gambling Support Hotline on 1800 858 858.
Dylan Crismale
Digital Content Editor
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