They say you never stop learning. When it comes to responsible gaming in a fast-moving digital world, that may be an understatement. Keeping up with the pace of change is no mean feat, as the Responsible Gambling Council’s Tracy Parker knows well.

Parker is the RGC’s Senior Vice President of Accreditation, Advisory and Insights. In her five-and-a-half years with RGC and her six years with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) before that, she’s seen the landscape change significantly both at home and across borders.

Online gambling has long been available to Canadians. But since Canada legalized single-event sports betting in summer 2021 and Ontario opened its regulated market in April 2022, things have changed hugely. With every year that passes, both inside and outside Ontario, the industry evolves further, new gaming options emerge, and staying ahead of the curve requires nimble footwork and a deft hand. 

“New forms of gambling create new risks,” Parker told Canadian Gaming Business recently. “I do think there is a lag in RG awareness generally, and we work on keeping pace with the evolution of the industry as new forms of gambling emerge, whether it’s things like sports betting or access to a broader range of products and services. It’s a constant effort to keep up.”

Building on a strong base

It’s probably past time to stop calling regulated online gambling in Ontario new, given that we’re more than three years into a market that is embracing its own maturity and already drawing upon its own past experiences to iterate and refine itself.

What certainly is not new is gambling in Canada, nor the concept of protecting players and keeping the industry responsible and sustainable. The history of government involvement in gambling in Canada is decades long, and the focus on responsible gambling has been a constant thread of continuity.

“I think that foundation gave it a public interest slant from early on,” she reflects. “And I see a lot of that coming through in the continued investments in employee training and player education. The profit motive isn’t the be-all and end-all.”

Programs such as the British Columbia Lottery Corporation’s GameSense, established in 2009 and used under license by everyone from other Canadian lotteries to MGM Resorts and BetMGM to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, are often held up as examples of Canada’s leadership in responsible gambling. Parker notes there’s also a strong history in academic research around RG. “We’re lucky in Canada that there is still a collaborative relationship between research and industry,” she notes. “That’s not the case in all jurisdictions.”

That thoughtful history and dedicated groundwork gave Canada a solid research and evidence base for implementing responsible gambling programs and safeguards in an impactful way. The direct ties between government and regulated gambling before Ontario’s market opened helped to ensure that when the big shift of 2021-22 did arrive, there was a deep resource pool to draw from.

“I think when it has been a public entity, there is a natural inclination to engage the community around prevention education, treatment, and support services. And I think we see evidence of that across the country.”

Helping to steer the ship

The RGC plays a unique role in Ontario’s online market, in that its RG Check accreditation program has been embedded into the requirements for all private operators contracting with iGaming Ontario (iGO). That program was developed in 2010 and was already used by land-based casinos in Ontario before 2022. Parker stresses it is a mutually beneficial experience; RGC may be the accreditor, but the organization is constantly learning, too.

“As we’ve been processing all of those operators, we’ve been learning a lot and doing some work on an update to the accreditation program to make sure it’s keeping up,” she continues. “We’ve done stakeholder expert interviews, player surveys, public consultations, research and reviews, all with the aim of pulling together the evidence base that exists to make sure that the standards that we’re assessing operators against are meaningful and relevant and robust.”

“New forms of gambling and new levels of access necessitate leveling up conversations, and with different audiences.”

Like everything in Canadian gaming, RG Check has evolved with time. A big facet of a recent update to the program focused on stakeholder engagement. 

“We have found that we’ve needed to talk to more people,” Parker adds. “It really is about the collective understanding of impact and collaboration around solutions. And that’s not just operators. We need to be talking to manufacturers and marketing affiliates, payment solution providers, leagues, athletes, coaches, university campuses, the whole ecosystem. While there’s been some progress and diversification, I think new forms of gambling and new levels of access necessitate leveling up conversations, and with different audiences.”

Connecting with the digital-native player

Canadians have always been able to gamble. From retail casinos to government-operated online platforms and both regulated and grey market commercial websites, from the rise of mobile apps and the present-day gamification of so much that is accessible to so many, the options have never been greater.

And just as new products and delivery methods are always surfacing, so too are new players.

“There’s always youth coming of age and needing to gain some gambling literacy,” Parker adds. “So, that’s always been a key focus for us. When you get digital natives, they just interact with the product differently, there’s that exposure to the merging of gaming and gambling and the gamification of gambling.”

Does that necessitate a re-evaluation of what responsible gambling even means?

“Certainly, I would say something that’s coming into sharper focus is the connection between mental health, digital health, and gambling,” Parker explains. “We’re not looking at just gambling behaviour, but we’re looking at it in the context of a person’s overall well-being and how they use their phone or the internet, their digital well-being.”

To that end, Parker notes that algorithms and risk-monitoring detection software provide more insights and information than ever were previously available about when and how to interact with a player.

“The core practices and behaviours around safe habits are relatively similar. It’s just the form that changes.”

Real-time customized and contextualized interactions, she says, have proven to be the most impactful. That could look like a pop-up message noting that players in a certain user’s profile usually play for an average of a certain number of minutes, or that a break around a certain time is typical. 

“Providing messaging in context and personalizing it is really, really important. Talk to people in the moment or as close to the behaviour as possible. In our accreditation and operator training, we stress the importance of that touchpoint. It’s very complicated from an operational point of view, but it really is the most impactful.”

No time to stand still

The truth is that the work simply never stops. Responsible gambling means something different now than it did 20 years ago. In many ways, the core concerns are relatively static, but the context and the issues within it are constantly evolving. 

“That’s what RG is all about, really. “The core practices and behaviours around safe habits are relatively similar,” concludes Parker. “It’s just the form that changes. And it’s up to all of us to keep up.”