Is ‘‘pop-up’’ messaging in online slot machine gambling effective as a responsible gambling strategy? Michael Auer, 1 Doris Malischnig, 2 & Mark Griffiths 3 1 neccton, Vienna, Austria 2 O ¨ sterreichische Lotterien GmbH, Vienna, Austria 3 Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK Abstract Certain gambling operators now provide social responsibility tools to help players gamble more responsibly. One such innovation is the use of pop-up messages that aim to give feedback to the players about the time and money they have thus far spent gambling. Most studies of this innovation have been conducted in laboratory settings, and although controlled studies are indeed more reliable than real-world studies, the non-ecological validity of laboratory studies is still an issue. This study investigated the effects of a slot machine pop-up message in a real gambling environment by comparing the behavioural tracking data of two representative random samples of 400,000 gambling sessions before and after the pop-up message was introduced. The study comprised approximately 200,000 gamblers. The results indicated that, following the viewing of a pop-up message after 1000 consecutive gambles on an online slot machine game, nine times more gamblers ceased their gambling session than did those gamblers who had not viewed the message. The data suggest that pop-up messages can influence a small number of gamblers to cease their playing session, and that pop-ups appear to be another potentially helpful social responsibility tool in reducing excessive play within session. Re ´sume ´ Certains ope ´rateurs de jeu proposent aujourd’hui des ressources visant a ` inciter les usagers a ` jouer de fac ¸on plus responsable. Parmi les innovations, on compte les messages flash destine ´s a ` indiquer le temps passe ´a ` jouer ou l’argent qu’on a de ´pense ´. La plupart des recherches sur le sujet ont e ´te ´ re ´alise ´es en laboratoire; me ˆme si elles sont plus fiables que les e ´tudes mene ´es sur le terrain, leur validite ´e ´cologique reste a ` de ´terminer. Nous avons e ´tudie ´ l’effet d’un message flash sur une machine a ` sous dans un environnement de jeu re ´el. Nous avons compare ´ les donne ´es sur le comportement recueillies avant et apre `s l’apparition du message a ` l’e ´cran, aupre `s de deux e ´chantillons repre ´sentatifs ale ´atoires totalisant 400 000 se ´ances de jeu (environ Journal of Gambling Issues Issue 29, Month 2014 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4309/jgi.2014.29.3 http://igi.camh.net/doi/pdf/10.4309/jgi.2014.29.3 1