Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jamie Torrance, Lecturer and Researcher in Psychology, Swansea University

“Welcome bonus: get 150% up to £150 on your first deposit”. It’s the kind of offer that greets anyone who visits a British online betting site. What it doesn’t say is that if you decide to spend £50 on this offer, you’d need to stake an additional £750 of your own money before any winnings could be withdrawn.

Recent research by colleagues and I asked nearly 600 UK bettors to work out the true cost of exactly that kind of offer. Nearly everyone got it wrong, underestimating the real amount often by hundreds of pounds.

Financial inducements, “free” bets, deposit matches and welcome bonuses are a standard part of signing up with almost any UK operator. Their behavioural harms are well established. They encourage people to gamble more often, push bettors towards riskier wagers and are linked to chasing losses. The heaviest effects tend to fall on those already experiencing gambling harm.

But behaviour is only half the story. Harm can also stem from something more basic: not understanding what an offer actually requires of you in the first place. That’s where wagering requirements come in – the rules saying you have to bet the bonus amount a certain number of times over before any winnings attached to it can be withdrawn.

Until recently, these multipliers could be as high as 50 times the bonus. Since January 2026, the UK Gambling Commission has capped them at ten times and required operators to make their terms clearer. It’s a meaningful step. But it stops short of requiring operators to show consumers what that ten times multiplier actually means in pounds and pence, and that omission turns out to matter.

Our research

We ran an online experiment with 585 adults who had gambled in the past year. Each participant saw a realistic welcome bonus modelled on a real 2025 promotion, fully compliant with the 2026 rules. Half saw it in the standard industry format. The other half saw the same offer with one addition: a three-sentence example spelling out what the 10 times wagering requirement actually meant for a £50 deposit.

The correct answer was £750. The median estimate was £500. More than 90% of participants underestimated the true cost. Only around 5% got it right.

The £500 figure is telling. It is exactly what you would get if you applied the 10-times multiplier to the £50 deposit but ignored the 150% bonus on top. Most people understood part of the calculation but missed the compounding effect.

Matched bonuses combined with wagering multipliers are among the most common inducements in the UK. Together, they appear to obscure the true cost in a systematic way.

Crucially, this misunderstanding was not confined to any one group. People at low risk of gambling harm miscalculated at almost the same rate as those at high risk. The issue is not that some bettors are bad at maths. It is that the offer itself is structured to make the true cost hard to calculate.

When we added the worked example, attractiveness ratings dropped significantly. Once people could see what the offer required, they found it far less appealing.

What bettors told us

Participants’ responses revealed three consistent themes. Many described the offers as manipulative, using words such as “predatory” and “deceptive”. Others argued they were economically worthless, with one participant saying “99% of people will fail to benefit”. Many also called for stronger regulation.

Several made a comparison worth taking seriously: gambling inducements, they argued, should follow the same upfront disclosure rules as credit products. One 23-year-old said wagering requirements should be shown on the advert itself, “similar to how interest rates need to be shown clearly on sites offering loans”.

They may have a point. The Annual Percentage Rate was introduced in UK consumer credit precisely because people couldn’t compare loan products when costs were hidden behind different headline formats. Gambling inducements present an almost identical problem.

Read more:
Why people are watching livestreams of influencers gambling – and how it could be fuelling addiction

Capping wagering requirements at ten times is welcome. But it’s not the same as making costs visible. Even a reduced multiplier still requires a multi-step calculation, and an understanding of compounding that many people do not have.

A worked example, shown in the same print size as the headline offer, would take only a few lines. It would not ban anything or restrict choice. But our study suggests it would change how people evaluate these offers. Denmark already requires something similar. Australia, Spain, Belgium and Italy have gone further, banning inducements to new customers altogether.

Worked examples are not a complete solution. But as a low-cost addition to existing Gambling Commission rules, they could help consumers see these offers for what they are before deciding whether to take them up.

Jamie Torrance has received, in the last three years: (1) Open access publication funding from Gambling Research Exchange Ontario (GREO), (2) Conference travel and accommodation funding from the Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling (AFSG), (3) A minor exploratory research grant from the ASFG and GREO, (4) Seed Grant funding from the International Centre for Responsible Gambling (ICRG), (5) Studentship funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), (6) Rapid evidence review (RER) funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), (7) Policy Fellowship funding from UKRI, and (8) A Gambling Harms Research and Innovation Partnership (GHRIP) award from UKRI.

– ref. Gamblers don’t understand ‘free bets’ – and the costs can be huge – https://theconversation.com/gamblers-dont-understand-free-bets-and-the-costs-can-be-huge-279873

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alan Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Games Development, University of Portsmouth

When thinking back to the gaming experiences of your youth, it’s easy to get misty-eyed. Depending on your generation, you might yearn for Dizzy on the Commodore 64, marathon GoldenEye sessions with friends or your first Minecraft world.

And games publishers know this. Recognising the nostalgic appeal of games, there has been a recent slew of re-releases of beloved classics. Tomb Raider Remastered (2024), Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (2025) and System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster (2025) all show publishers know how to capitalise on nostalgia.

Our research into player engagement frequently encounters nostalgia as a key driver of player satisfaction. Nostalgia is both potent and delicate: powerful when done right, disappointing when not. So, why do some games nail nostalgia while others fail?

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym has argued that two different types of nostalgia exist: restorative and reflective.
Restorative nostalgia is about conquering the past – a belief that what was lost can, once again, be found, with enough effort. Whatever your political views, there’s no denying that the slogan “Make America Great Again” is a clear encapsulation of a restorative nostalgic philosophy.

The Blizzard Arcade Collection (2021) is a good example of a game design underpinned by this restorative philosophy. Here, players can experience original versions of Blizzard’s early work with visual effects applied that mimic the effect of playing the games on old, grainy televisions from the 1990s.

By contrast, reflective nostalgia is less interested in accurately recreating the past and keener, instead, on recapturing a remembered feeling. For instance, instead of yearning for the specific place in which they grew up, a reflective nostalgic may realise it’s the sense of carelessness they felt as a kid they yearn for – not their actual hometown.

Shovel Knight’s (2014) design adheres to this philosophy wonderfully. Synergising a smorgasbord of inspirations from original NES games – a world map akin to Super Mario Bros 3’s (1988), themed bosses like those seen in Mega Man (1987) – it feels less like a specific game a millennial might’ve played as a child and more like their fragmented memories of playing games in the late 1980s.

Shovel Knight has sold well since its release and, as of 2026, has made an estimated US$12.5m (£9.3m) in revenue. This shows there’s a hunger for nostalgic content among players. But, this being the case, why aren’t all re-releases cash cows? The answer relates to the above nostalgic philosophies.

Nostalgic inconsistency in remasters

If Blizzard Arcade Collection and Shovel Knight represent a strict adherence to their respective nostalgic philosophical underpinnings, then Croc: Legend of the Gobbos Remastered (2025) serves as the antithesis. Croc is certainly not a bad attempt at a remaster, but its nostalgic inconsistency dampens its emotional impact.

Take the art direction. By dropping Croc’s original pixelated textures, the remake signals that it isn’t aiming for perfect authenticity. Instead, it reflects a nostalgic approach that priorities reinterpretation over faithful recreation. Some critics even argued that the new textures look flatter, losing the illusion of depth that the original textures created.

At other times the game adheres rigidly to the original source material, aligning it with a restorative nostalgic philosophy in ways that feel incredibly dated. The anticlimactic pause screens that appear upon defeating a boss – who seems remarkably unaffected by the beating it just took – is one such example. So, too, is the lack of level scenery – indefensible in an era of high-powered PCs capable of rendering vastly more complex environments.

Personally, we’d have enjoyed a re-release of Croc that more wholeheartedly committed to the reflective philosophy – updating textures, sure, but also level scenery and boss animations. Doing so might have helped to better capture the joy we felt when playing the original even if it meant deviating more widely from the source material.

It’s true that dissatisfaction at the choices made when updating beloved cultural artefacts is nothing new though. Indeed, Boym cites the restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes as a potent symbol of this. In preserving Michaelangelo’s original work, the restoration team were lambasted for removing aspects that made the original artwork so special.

It’s likely you’ll always disappoint some when restoring a historical relic. But if more developers commit wholeheartedly to a nostalgic philosophy when remaking their games, we’d argue they’d more effectively nail nostalgia and, in turn, leave players more satisfied.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Video game nostalgia is powerful – but it only works if developers understand the psychology behind it – https://theconversation.com/video-game-nostalgia-is-powerful-but-it-only-works-if-developers-understand-the-psychology-behind-it-277421

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kevin Burke, Associate Professor in Statistics, University of Limerick

Recently, a cheerful 100-year-old message in a bottle was found on the south-west coast of Australia. In it, a world war one soldier proclaimed to be “as happy as Larry”.

If you’re a betting person, you probably wouldn’t expect great odds of this happening. A bottle cast into the ocean could end up absolutely anywhere.

If it floats to a remote location, there is little chance of somebody stumbling upon it. And if it lands somewhere more favourable where people could potentially find it, there are other issues. The message itself will deteriorate over time as light degrades it. If the bottle fills with water, it will sink and almost certainly never be found.

So, what are the chances of a message in a bottle being found and it being over 100? And what are your chances of finding this bottle?

Despite these many possibilities during a bottle’s lifetime, the probability we are after is a straightforward calculation. Just count up the number of bottles with messages that have been found and are over 100 years old, and divide by the number of messages that have been sent this way (assuming we know how many are sent):

Our diagram below shows a hypothetical situation where 20 bottles are sent in total, of which six are found (indicated in gold) and one of these is over 100 years old (indicated by the “100” stamp). So, one in 20 bottles are found and over 100 years old. (Note: This is only a hypothetical calculation, not the real data.)

Instead of calculating the probability directly, another way to do it is by breaking the problem into two parts: (A) a bottle with a message is found, and (B) the found bottle is over 100. These two probabilities can be calculated separately and multiplied together to get what we want:

This is known as the “multiplication rule” of probability, and we confirm from our hypothetical numbers that (6/20)×(1/6) = 1/20, as before.

Both approaches to calculating this probability are simple. However, the direct calculation requires knowing the total number of bottles sent out, which is very difficult to know in the real world.

The multiplication rule has the advantage that it breaks the calculation into two parts. We can tackle each separately, then bring the two results together to get the probability we want. This is useful in the real-world situation where we can draw information from different sources.

First, we’ll deal with the probability that a bottle with a message is found, irrespective of its age.

Experts from the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency of Germany suggest a one in ten chance that a message in a bottle will be found. This aligns broadly with various historical “drift bottle” experiments, where oceanographers released large numbers of bottles to understand ocean currents.

For example, studies from the 1960s and ’70s in the North Atlantic Ocean led to recovery rates of 14% from the Gulf of Mexico, 8% from the Caribbean Sea and 7% from the northern Brazilian coast. A more recent and more northerly study (between Canada and Greenland) from the 2000s led to a 5% recovery rate.

We would expect the results to vary naturally from different experiments in different parts of the world. But to keep things simple, we will stick with 1/10 as the probability that a bottle with a message is found.

Now for the second piece of the calculation: of the bottles that are found, what proportion are over 100 years old?

The table below summarises data from news articles collected on Wikipedia about very old bottles with messages that have been found. However, only data on bottles over 25 years old has been collected, presumably because older bottles are more newsworthy.

So, we needed to estimate the number of 0- to 25-year-old bottles with messages ourselves – here’s how we did this.

The table shows that fewer bottles with messages are found as they get older. Messages in bottles degrade over time, which means the bottles have an increased chance of breaking and sinking, or just getting covered in layers of sediment. Plotting this data in the graph below helped us see the trend in the ages of found bottles more clearly.

We drew a line to match this observed trend in the ages of found bottles. This red line in the graph corresponds to the equation:

This equation provides an estimate of how many bottles have been found for any specific age range (where 25 = 0-to-25, 50 = 25-to-50 and so on). We are interested in the the 0- to 25-year-old bottles, so the equation suggests 46 bottles have been found in this range.

Adding up this and all of the numbers in the table gives a total of 106 bottles found, of which 12 are over 100 years old, and 12/106 is about one in ten.

Recapping the above, we have that: (A) one in ten bottles with messages are found, of which (B) one in ten are over 100 years old. Bringing these results together using the multiplication rule, we estimate the chance of a message in a bottle being found and it being over 100 years old to be (1/10)×(1/10) = 1/100.

So, if there are 100,000 bottles with messages floating around the oceans waiting to be found, we’d expect 1,000 of these to be found and be 100 or more years old. Assuming anybody in the world is equally likely to find one of these, with 8 billion people currently, that’s about a one in 8 million chance of you finding one – pretty unlikely.

However, some people are more persistent at message-in-a-bottle hunting than others. Following the paths of ocean currents (known as gyres) could provide clues on where to look.

Specifically, peninsulas or islands intersecting with these gyres could be good spots. For this reason, it has been suggested the Caribbean islands are ideally placed for finding bottles as they lie on the path of the North Atlantic Gyre. Which seems like a great reason to travel to the Carribean!

But let’s also spare a thought for the poor soul stranded on their desert island, who surely won’t appreciate the low odds of their SOS being found.

Kevin Burke receives funding from Research Ireland.

David O’Sullivan receives funding from Research Ireland

– ref. What is the chance of a message in a bottle being found? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-chance-of-a-message-in-a-bottle-being-found-272122

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Heidi McIlvenny, PhD Candidate, School of Biological Sciences, Queen’s University Belfast

I spent last summer wading through seagrass meadows across Northern Ireland, from the sheltered waters of Strangford Lough to the exposed coast at Waterfoot Bay. I was collecting seagrass leaves and testing them for nitrogen pollution. Every meadow I visited sits inside a marine protected area – a stretch of sea that’s been given legal protection to safeguard the wildlife living there. And every single one was polluted beyond the limit for healthy seagrass.

Seagrass meadows are among the most valuable habitats in our coastal waters. They store carbon, nurture young fish and shellfish, stabilise sediment and buffer shorelines from storms. They are also woven into the heritage of coastal communities who have fished and foraged around them for generations. But they are disappearing worldwide, and nitrogen pollution from farming, sewage and urban runoff is one of the biggest reasons why.

It’s easy to assume that designating an area as “protected” keeps the habitat inside it safe. My research shows that, for seagrass, this assumption is dangerously wrong. Physical protection from anchors and dredging means little when pollution flows freely across the boundary from the land.

What matters most for seagrass is not lines drawn on a map, but what happens on shore.

To understand how much nitrogen pollution seagrass is absorbing, we can measure nitrogen content in the leaves themselves. Seagrass continuously takes up nutrients from the surrounding water, so the chemistry of its tissue works like a long-term pollution record. And my results showed that every meadow in Northern Ireland exceeded the pollution limit.

But knowing the pollution level is only useful if you know how much is too much, and what it means for the health of the meadow. To answer that, we pulled together data from 13 countries across the northern hemisphere and found a clear pattern.

When nitrogen in the leaves rises above 1.8%, seagrass starts to suffer and loose plant growth. Above 2.8%, the decline accelerates rapidly, and in this danger zone small increases in pollution trigger disproportionately large plant losses. Think of it as a traffic light system: green is below 1.8% where meadows can cope; amber is between 1.8% and 2.8%, where managers should be watching closely and acting to reduce pollution; and red is above 2.8%, where urgent intervention is needed before the damage becomes irreversible.

The starkest example of a meadow in the red zone comes from Dundrum Bay, on the County Down coast. According to government assessments, it’s healthy. But my data tells a different story. Nitrogen levels here were nearly double the pollution limit of 1.8%. Surveys over the past decade paint an even bleaker picture: where lush meadows once thrived, dense mats of green algae now smother what little remains. This meadow has likely crossed a tipping point, and may never recover even if we clean up the pollution.

A few miles up the coast we see a very different picture. At Castle Espie, beside a wetland reserve in Strangford Lough, a seagrass meadow is thriving. The plants here belong to the same genetic population as struggling meadows elsewhere in the lough. But the difference is that the reserve’s reedbeds and willows act as natural filters, cleaning the water that runs from the land before it reaches the sea.

The same species with the same level of marine protection, but dramatically different outcomes. The difference is what happens on land. But current monitoring methods aren’t designed to spot this kind of trouble before it’s too late.

An early warning system

Current monitoring methods tend to measure how much seagrass is still there. But by the time a meadow visibly shrinks, the damage may already be done. The tissue chemistry approach we used picks up stress signals much earlier, while there is still time to act.

The nitrogen thresholds my research identifies could give environmental agencies a practical early warning system: meadows at or above 1.8% need closer watching, and those at or above 2.8% need urgent action to reduce nutrient pollution from catchments.

Seagrass meadows can recover but only if we tackle the pollution at its source. That means better management of urban and agricultural runoff, investment in sewage treatment and recognising that marine conservation cannot stop at the high tide mark. If we lose these meadows, we lose their carbon stores, their fish nurseries, the coastal protection they provide, along with a piece of our coastal heritage.

Heidi McIlvenny receives funding from the National Environment Research Council as part of the QUADRAT DTP. DAERA and Ulster Wildlife also part funded this PhD research.

Heidi McIlvenny is a member of Ulster Wildlife, RSPB and the National Trust, and Director of the Irish Ocean Literacy Network.

– ref. ‘Protected’ seagrass meadows aren’t necessarily healthy – because pollution doesn’t stop at the shoreline – https://theconversation.com/protected-seagrass-meadows-arent-necessarily-healthy-because-pollution-doesnt-stop-at-the-shoreline-279805

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Fitch, Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Comics and Architecture, University of Brighton

To coincide with the 250th anniversary of her birth, last year saw the publication of two graphic biographies of Jane Austen.

These books take different approaches to the novelist’s life. The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography, by Janine Barchas and Isabel Greenberg, is a slim volume in a cartoony style that begins in 1796. Kate Evans’ painterly book Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, meanwhile, starts with Austen’s birth. The latter also includes historic digressions to give her writing additional context.

Both are handsome editions. The Novel Life of Jane Austen is slightly more approachable for the casual reader due to its brevity and smaller focus. But Patchwork may be more rewarding to graphic novel fans thanks to the painted artwork and a mixed-media collage approach that incorporates fabric cuttings into its pages.

Patchwork

Inspired by a patchwork coverlet sewn by Austen, her sister Cassandra and their mother, now displayed in Jane Austen’s House in Hampshire, Evans’ book shows how the bits and pieces of Austen’s life were recycled as material for her novels. Patchwork is an apt image for Austen, who “lopp’d and cropp’d” her prose as deftly as her cloth.

Some of Austen’s early biographers were fond of putting emphasis on the domestic tasks she undertook such as needlework, often deflecting attention from her desire to write and make money. As Austen researcher Kathryn Sutherland has recently observed in writing about Austen’s quilt: “Sewing, like letter writing, is not redundant work; it is necessary to social functioning.” It is apt that Evans’ includes this activity in her biography.

Evans also brings the bookish and close-knit Austen family vividly to life. The sense of the mischievousness and rebellion that brought Austen’s early work into being is present here. The comic strip renderings of her teenage skits and her spoof Plan of a Novel are wonderfully exuberant.

The texture of Austen’s life, and the threads that connect one life to others, is a distinct aspect of her approach. Evans’ shifts of focus add context to the author’s life. The material that Austen sews links ordinary domestic practice to the horrors of British colonialism which delivered cotton thread to Britain.

This incorporation of fabrics that Austen showed interest in during her life – with her family having to make do and mend during periods of impoverishment – is an continuing technique used by Evans in her graphic work. An earlier graphic novel by the artist – Threads: From the Refuges Crisis (2017) – included comic book documentation of interviews with women in the Calais “Jungle”. It embedded their embroidery and needlework in the book, made as a way of escaping the horror of their situation.

Patchwork uses the Austen family’s interest in fabric as a metaphor for their changing domestic experience in different decades and patchwork as a medium which gets added to over time. This works well as a visual leitmotif to accompany the narrative. It shows Evans’ continuing interest in depicting textiles alongside her artwork as a rich storytelling technique.

The Novel Life of Jane Austen

The structure of The Novel Life of Jane Austen echoes the typical triple volume publication of novels at the time. Budding Writer, Struggling Artist and Published Author indicate distinct phases of Austen’s writing life. They begin with a letter from August 1796 and end with Cassandra’s destruction of some of the correspondence in 1844 (the last pages acknowledge how her final house in Chawton has become a pilgrimage site for fans).

Barchas and Greenberg give a strong sense of Austen’s links with other writers, such as Shakespeare, whose “stunning literary celebrity” prefigures her own. For Evans, fictional influences can be seen in the presence on Austen’s bookshelf of those professional women authors (Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, for example) who did so much to set the stage for Austen’s success. However Samuel Richardson, whom Austen both revered and parodied, Henry Fielding, from whom she derived much of her facility with the burlesque and Samuel Johnson, an important influence on her sentence structure and tone, are either absent or fleetingly mentioned.

Like Evans, artist Isabel Greenberg uses a technique to contrast one aspect of Austen’s creative practice with another. While Evans contrasts Austen’s making patchwork fabrics with her writing, as two different but related creative pursuits, Greenberg uses different colour schemes to delineate ways that the author’s imagination operated at different times.

Most of the colour scheme is a combination of yellow and blue, including renditions of both Austen’s biography and performances of her novels. However, for scenes where the novelist enters a moment of reverie – imagining her characters’ inner lives – the colours used become red, purple and yellow. This signifies heightened feelings in contrast to the more muted emotions observed in her everyday life.

As with Evans’ mixed-media approach to graphic novel art, Greenberg’s use of heightened colour to separate everyday experience from imagination, is often found in the artist’s work. Her first two graphic novels The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013), and the recently adapted One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016) both contrast everyday experience in different historical time periods with characters’ storytelling activities.

Her previous project to illustrating The Novel Life of Jane Austen, was Glass Town (2020) which like the contrast between fantasy and reality in Austen’s life, took a similar approach to biography of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters.

Both of these Jane Austen graphic biographies are, in their different ways, reinvigorating guides. They emphasise different aspects of Austen’s life and times, using different visual techniques to bring the writer’s history vividly to life on the page. Most importantly, they both give prominence to the force of her imagination, and the innovative fiction it produced.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Jane Austen in pictures: two graphic biographies bring the novelist’s life to the page – https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-in-pictures-two-graphic-biographies-bring-the-novelists-life-to-the-page-278006