Ethical considerations of responsible gambling in metaverse

Background
Responsible gambling has been argued to be ethics washing by the gambling industry and service providers in order to maintain integrity and to protect their economic interests, and it has received a great deal of criticism. This has increased various stakeholders’ interest in attempts to improve the practices of responsible gambling for instance with the means of machine ethics. However, those measures, e.g. machine-based ethics advisors, still heavily rely on individuals’ being informed and rational decision makers that avoid excessive risk and harm. 
Methods
Empirically informed philosophical analysis, using conceptual tools of analytical philosophy and applied ethics.
Results
In this presentation, I consider gamblers from the perspective of predictive processing and argue that when the gamblers are considered as boundedly rational, the common harm prevention measures of this kind of responsible gambling may turn out to miss their targets. This issue becomes especially pronounced in the context of the metaverse, where the immersive nature of virtual environments allows for an unprecedented level of control and manipulation of user experience.
Online gambling has yet provided new challenges for societies to regulate and individuals to use in a controlled manner the gambling services. The technology is evolving and the current trend in virtual reality is to develop metaverse. According to the Finnish Metaverse Initiative, “the metaverse is a collective virtual shared space that encompasses and transcends physical, digital, and augmented realities.” This may provide further possibilities and means for the gambling industry to provide services that are even more immersive and entertaining for the individuals. This is likely to have an effect not only on regulation and control but also on ethical aspects for individuals who gamble in metaverse. 
Conclusions
Following the predictive processing perspective of understanding gamblers and the event of gambling in metaverse in which the gambling can be considered rational even when there are great risks or losses in play, I suggest that responsible gambling framework should be reconsidered and reframed. Providing the platform and the means for the immersive user experiences means that it is the service providers who carry more responsibility of risks and harms of gambling. Metaverse may allow more possibilities for the industry to develop addictive and harmful gambling but, at the same time, it provides possibilities for developing safeguards that do not rely on false control imposed on the gambler. The responsibility of developing safeguards and maintaining them lies on the industry and service providers, not on the people who experience the harms.