Gaming industry workers get training on the concepts of responsible gaming and addiction |21 June 2019

Workers in the gaming industry in Seychelles are receiving training to help raise clients’ awareness on responsible gaming and gambling addiction.

The workshop follows the signing in May of a memorandum of understanding between the Seychelles Patients Association and GranKaz on the Responsible Gaming Framework project aimed at creating a better awareness within the gaming industry as well as among the general public on the concepts of responsible gaming and gaming addiction.

Around thirty gaming industry’s floor personnel comprising mainly dealers, cashiers, slots attendants and bartenders from GranKaz, Amusement Centre, Amazon Betting and Palla Games took part in the half-day training session of the phase one of the Responsible Gaming Framework project, which took place on Monday June 17 at the Sheikh Khalifa Diagnostic Centre at the Seychelles Hospital.

The training, which will continue on a monthly basis in the coming months, will be followed by a fifth higher level workshop for supervisors and senior staff on screening and provision of evidence based brief intervention.

They will be given training on how to approach a person who really has a gaming problem and to seek assistance through counselling or how to ban them from the casinos or others if they feel things are getting out of hand.

The workshop on Monday was facilitated by Annalisa Labiche, head of psychological services at the Mental Health Services.

At the end of the five training sessions, the participants are expected to better understand the concept of responsible gaming and gaming addiction, thus they will be able to recognise some of the signs and symptoms that could indicate that a client may have a gaming addiction problem.

Shama Amesbury, public relations and communications manager at GranKaz said that responsible gaming regulations exist in the gaming industry worldwide and the project here is basically to set up a more structured way in dealing with the problem as it is important for operators to have responsible gaming practices in place for the benefit of clients.

She further said that gaming operators can identify a person with the problem, speak to him or her on the matter but at the end of the day if the client refuses to acknowledge or accept that he or she has a gaming problem there is nothing much that can be done as it is a matter of choice for that person.

“We have a set of guidelines that we use at GranKaz to be able to address gaming addiction and a few of them are exclusion tactics. Somebody can self exclude where they can come to us and say they have a problem and not to let them come in anymore. They will sign a letter and we abide by their wishes. The second one is friends and families can also come up to us and say ‘my uncle, my niece, my husband or whoever, has a problem and we want them to be excluded and the third one is when we exclude them ourselves. But this one is sort of tricky as we are not one hundred percent trained to be able to say ‘yes, you have a problem’, which is also part of the raison d’être for the workshop. When we’ve have the necessary training, we will be able to exclude them ourselves,” Ms Amesbury said.