In Defense of Responsible Gaming

The gaming industry has always referred to our efforts to protect vulnerable gamblers as “responsible gaming.” Some have said it’s time to find a new way to frame this message, but Michael Soll and Travis Sztainert of the International Center for Responsible Gaming, believe that this term gets to the heart of the issue.

As Responsible Gaming Education Month approaches, the gambling field is again wrestling with a familiar question: Is “responsible gaming” still the right term?

It is a fair question. Language matters, particularly in a field concerned with stigma, consumer protection, health, individual agency, commercial interests, and public policy. Over the past several years, alternatives such as safer gambling, player protection, player health, positive play, sustainable gambling, and harm minimization have gained traction. We have even seen terms such as intentional gambling or intentional betting which may sometimes be more useful when communicating directly with people who gamble.

But we are not convinced that we should abandon responsible gaming.

That may sound predictable coming from the president of the International Center for Responsible Gaming, but the argument is more substantive than institutional branding. The problem, we would suggest, is not necessarily the term responsible gaming. It is what we have sometimes allowed it to mean.

The Problem With “Gamble Responsibly”

There is a legitimate criticism of messages such as “gamble responsibly.” For one thing, almost everyone considers themselves responsible. A message telling people to “be responsible” offers little guidance about what behavior should actually change.

Worse, it can create an implicit binary between the “responsible gambler” and the “irresponsible gambler,” with the latter carrying a moral judgment.

That is particularly problematic when someone is experiencing a gambling problem. Gambling disorder is not best understood as a failure of character or responsibility.

This is one reason we have been interested in language such as intentional gambling. Intentionality asks a different set of questions: Why are we gambling? How much are we willing to spend? How long do we want to play? What role does gambling have in my life? Are we still making the choices We intended to make?

Those are potentially more actionable questions than simply asking someone whether they are being responsible. But there is an important distinction here.

“Gamble responsibly” is a consumer message. “Responsible gaming” is, or at least should be, a system-level framework.

Conflating the two has created much of the current confusion.

Responsible Gaming Was Never Supposed To Mean “The Player Is Responsible”

The original Reno Model provides an important reminder of this distinction. Published by Alex Blaszczynski, Robert Ladouceur, and Howard Shaffer in 2004, the Reno Model described responsible gambling as a coordinated, science-based framework involving governments, operators, researchers, health and welfare services, community organizations, and consumers.

In the model, responsible gambling refers to programs developed by these stakeholders to meet their obligations to reduce gambling-related harm. That is considerably broader than “people should control themselves.”

The Reno Model certainly recognizes individual agency. Its two foundational ideas are that the decision to gamble ultimately resides with the individual and that people need the opportunity to make that decision on an informed basis.

That means, among other things, accurate information about products, truthful advertising, understandable probabilities, and meaningful access to protective tools. But the framework also explicitly places obligations on other actors.

Governments have responsibilities. Operators have responsibilities. Health systems have responsibilities. Researchers have responsibilities. Communities have responsibilities.

ICRG has previously described the Reno framework this way: responsibility is distributed among consumers, operators, health services, community groups, governments, and related agencies. It is not an all-or-nothing assignment of blame to the individual.

That concept deserves more attention today. Perhaps the most useful way to understand responsible gaming is not personal responsibility, but shared responsibility.

Shared Responsibility Changes The Question

If responsible gaming is understood as shared responsibility, the conversation becomes much more interesting. For the individual, responsibility might involve setting limits, understanding the game, noticing changes in one’s behavior, and seeking help when gambling is no longer going as intended.

For an operator, responsibility is different. It might mean designing and marketing products transparently, providing meaningful tools, identifying potential markers of harm, training employees, evaluating interventions, protecting minors and vulnerable consumers, and avoiding practices that undermine informed choice.

For regulators, responsibility may include establishing consumer protections, monitoring compliance, responding to emerging products, and ensuring that safeguards evolve alongside technology. For researchers, responsibility means producing independent evidence about what works, what does not, and where unintended consequences occur.

Treatment and prevention professionals have another responsibility, ensuring that people experiencing harm can access evidence-based support without stigma.

None of these responsibilities cancels the others. That is precisely why We think shared responsibility remains such a powerful concept. Gambling-related harm emerges from the interaction between people, products, environments, social conditions, policies, and systems.

A framework that focuses exclusively on any one of those levels will inevitably miss something.

Responsible Gaming And Public Health Are Not Opposites

One of the strongest criticisms of responsible gaming is that it is incompatible with a public health approach. We do not think that conclusion necessarily follows. Public health asks us to look beyond individual behavior and consider the broader conditions influencing health, including environments, social norms, regulation, availability, commercial practices, and population-level patterns.

It emphasizes prevention, surveillance, early intervention, risk reduction, and differential impacts across groups.

Those principles are entirely compatible with a robust conception of responsible gaming. In fact, Shaffer, Blaszczynski, and Ladouceur later addressed this argument directly.

They proposed that public health and the Reno Model can be viewed as complementary rather than competing frameworks. Public health provides the broader strategic perspective, while responsible gaming provides mechanisms through which stakeholders can act.

Their formulation is useful because the distinction between strategy and tactics matters. A public health goal might be to reduce gambling-related harm across a population. Responsible gaming asks how different actors contribute to that goal. That could include regulation, product design, education, limit-setting tools, treatment access, early identification, employee training, data monitoring, restrictions on youth access, community interventions, and evaluation. That sounds remarkably holistic to me.

And importantly, public health does not require us to pretend that individual agency does not exist. A genuine public health model can consider the individual, the environment, and the interaction between them.

The 2019 discussion of the Reno and public health models similarly stresses that public health broadens attention to social, cultural, and economic forces without eliminating the importance of individual experience.

The question should therefore not be, “Is the individual responsible, or is the system responsible?”

It should be, “What responsibility belongs to whom?”

What About “Safer Gambling”?

Safer gambling emerged partly as an attempt to move the emphasis away from individual responsibility and toward environments, products, and operator safeguards. Recent literature describes this distinction, while also noting that responsible gambling and safer gambling continue to overlap considerably in practice. We understand the appeal. But We also find safer gambling imperfect.

The word safer is comparative. Safer than what? How safe is safer? And when translated into marketing language, there is a risk that consumers hear something stronger than intended, that gambling itself can somehow be rendered “safe.”

Gambling always involves uncertainty and risk. That does not mean all gambling is harmful, nor does it mean that risk cannot be reduced. It simply means that we should be cautious about language that implies an achievable state of safety.

“Responsible gaming,” by contrast, does not have to make a claim about how safe gambling is. It can describe how a system manages an activity that contains risk. That distinction matters.

Player Protection And Player Health

We are much more enthusiastic about terms such as player protection and player health. Player protection is particularly valuable because it draws from a broader consumer protection tradition. It naturally raises questions about transparency, product design, advertising, informed consent, data use, fairness, duty of care, and regulatory standards.

Player health has a different advantage. It positions gambling along a continuum rather than dividing people into “healthy gamblers” and “problem gamblers.” It invites us to think about well-being, patterns of behavior, social connection, financial health, and changes over time.

These terms may be preferable in particular contexts. But we are not sure they replace responsible gaming. They may instead describe important components of it.

Responsible gaming can be the umbrella. Player protection, player health, prevention, treatment, informed choice, and harm reduction can sit underneath it. The field does not necessarily need one phrase to do every job.

Maybe The Problem Is The Verb, Not The Noun

This is where we think some of our language debates become unnecessarily binary.

We can acknowledge that “gamble responsibly” is often a weak consumer-facing message without concluding that “responsible gaming” is a failed framework. Those are different propositions. For public communications, intentional gambling, know your play, stay within your plan, or other behaviorally specific language may prove more effective than simply saying “be responsible.”

For regulatory policy, player protection may be the clearest framing. For health systems, gambling-related harm or player health may work better. And for the larger ecosystem of obligations shared among individuals, governments, industry, researchers, treatment providers, and communities, responsible gaming may still be precisely the right term. Language should serve the purpose.

Responsible Does Not Have To Mean Blame

The strongest argument against the term is ultimately about stigma. If responsibility means that a person harmed by gambling should simply have exercised greater self-control, then we agree that we should reject that framing. But responsibility does not have to mean blame.

A pharmaceutical company has responsibilities. A physician has responsibilities. A regulator has responsibilities. A patient has responsibilities. A transportation system has responsibilities. A driver has responsibilities. We routinely accept shared responsibility in public health and safety without assuming that every negative outcome reflects an individual’s moral failure.

Gambling should be no different. In fact, abandoning the language of responsibility altogether may obscure an important question: Who is accountable for doing what? A responsible gambling ecosystem should make those obligations explicit, measurable, and evidence-based.

That is a much higher standard than putting a “gamble responsibly” logo at the bottom of an advertisement.

Responsible Gaming Education Month is an Opportunity to Reclaim the Term

Perhaps Responsible Gaming Education Month should therefore be about more than teaching consumers how to gamble. It can also be an opportunity to ask what responsible gaming requires from all of us.

• What does responsible product design look like?
• What constitutes responsible advertising?
• What information do players need to make informed decisions?
• What responsibilities accompany the use of behavioral data and artificial intelligence?
• When should an operator intervene?
• What protections should regulators require?
• How should treatment and prevention systems respond?
• What evidence do we still need?
• And yes, what can individuals do to keep gambling within the role they intended it to have in their lives?

Those are public health questions. They are consumer protection questions. They are research questions. They are also responsible gaming questions. So we are not ready to retire the term. We would rather reclaim it. Responsible gaming should not mean “If something goes wrong, the player is responsible.”

It should mean: Everyone who has the ability to reduce gambling-related harm has a responsibility to act.

That includes the person gambling. But it certainly does not end with them.

Michael Soll, President, International Center for Responsible Gaming & Travis Sztainert, Ph.D., Director of Research & Education ICRG