Digital Gambling

Theorizing Gamble-Play Media

César Albarrán-Torres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138303850
• eBook ISBN: 9781351398213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Social Sciences

This book develops the concept of "gamble-play media", describing how some gambling and gambling-like practices are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Digital gambling brings gambling closer to the practices and features of videogames, as audio-visual simulations structure users' experiences. By studying digital gambling from media studies, videogame and cultural studies approaches, this book offers a new critical perspective on the issues raised by computer-mediated gambling, while expanding our perspective on what media and gambling are. In particular, it critically analyses terrestrial, mobile and online slot machines, online poker and stock trading apps through a selection of case studies.

Part I
Gamble-Play Theory

1 Towards a Theory of Gamble-Play

This chapter offers a description and theorisation of a new media and cultural form that I call ‘gamble-play’, a term central to this book, which helps explain changes in contemporary forms of digital gambling. This media and cultural form is the product of a shift that is taking place at the intersection of gambling, entertainment, social media and finance. Gamble-play is a set of media platforms and practices in which gambling situations are staged through digital means and chance events are produced through algorithms. Digital gamble-play privileges the ‘fun’ aspects of gambling over winning or losing, establishing new dynamics of seduction and control. Gamble-play consists of two related cultural tendencies. First, gambling practices become more gamelike. Second, gaming practices adopt the appearance of gambling.

In gamble-play, players acquire a gambling or gambling-like experience that may or may not involve the chance to win real money or tangible goods. In these transactions, players pay a mixture of money, labour, time and access to their digital social networks. Digital gamble-play is carried out in slot machines, desktop computers and mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. As a media practice, digital gamble-play has a ductile nature: its gameplay configurations flow across platforms, from the slot machine to the smartphone or tablet app to the desktop computer. Gamble-play dynamics influence other practices, such as stock trading through mobile apps, in which the procedures involved in financial transactions resemble games of chance.

I propose a conceptual framework that will help me explain digital gamble-play in the remainder of this book. This conceptual framework offers a “contingent system of interpretation” that allows me to make “certain empirical statements” and exclude “other forms of empirical statements” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 257) related to digital gambling.

As a lead-up to this discussion, I will first exemplify the media shift embodied by digital gamble-play, as well as its deriving practices, with three vignettes. The subjects of these vignettes are hypothetical and do not resemble actual events or people. However, their situations are indicative of some of the digital gamble-play practices identified in this book:

1. New York, 9 am. Samantha is waiting for the bus, which has already been delayed for 20 minutes. She is getting anxious as she has an important business meeting in half an hour. She takes out her Android smartphone and texts her colleague to say she is running late. Then, to pass the time before the bus arrives, she accesses Hit It Rich. She likes playing slots on her mobile, even though she is not making or spending real money. Samantha finds the cartoonish characters appealing and enjoys the vibrant graphics, encouraging messages and vigorous sounds, particularly the ones in the level themed after her favourite childhood movie The Wizard of Oz. As a financial advisor, she deals with risk all day long, so she enjoys gambling for nothing. Before her bus finally arrives, she has a big win (10,000 credits!) and shares it with her Facebook friends (this will give her a few more extra credits).
2. 2010. After a long day at his London office, Mike O’Reilly comes home and turns on his computer. He accesses PKR, the online casino in which he plays poker for real money. PKR is unlike other online casinos, however, as it is a sort of mix between the virtual environment Second Life and the professional poker tournaments he sometimes watches on ESPN. Before choosing a table, Mike buys virtual items for his avatar: a pair of flashy sunglasses and a gold chain. These items will help him bluff better – really disguise what he is up to. If he wins big, he plans to purchase a Sony PS4 digital game console in the PKR Shop, where he can directly exchange his in-game winnings for real-life items. (He can even donate to charities such as Ante Up for Africa using his PKR Points, which can also be changed for real money.)
3. Sydney, Australia. Kyle is out with friends in a pub. He has a couple of pints, and by 10 pm, he grows bored with the conversation (he is not really into sports and his ‘mates’ are involved in a never-ending argument about this or that rugby player). Kyle decides to play the pokies (slots). He walks into the VIP Lounge and inserts a $50 note into his favourite machine: Gypsy Moon, the slot machine or pokie on which he hit a small jackpot last month. He loses the $50 in the next 15 minutes, goes back to his mates and chats about the series finale of the TV show Game of Thrones.

Are these three individuals involved in the same sort of cultural and media practice? What are the similarities and differences in what they are doing? Are they playing or gambling? What place does real or simulated gambling have in their everyday media consumption habits? Moreover, are they all gambling? If so, what they are gambling with or for?

This chapter is divided into three sections. First, I explain the method of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in creating new concepts “as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 16). Second, I further develop the concept of ‘digital gamble-play’, situating it historically in the trajectory of gambling media. Finally, I explain how the digitisation of gambling produces significant departures from the experiences offered in analogue platforms across three domains: tactile engagement, movement across space and time.

‘Gamble-Play’: The Relevance of Concepts

Coining a concept is an act of provocation. As an umbrella term, ‘gamble-play’ might be judged by some as problematic as it encapsulates a series of dissimilar platforms and practices in which different things are at stake: real money in slot machines and some forms of online poker, and virtual currencies in social casino apps. The fact that different things are at stake has vastly dissimilar consequences in terms of regulation and problem gambling – or “gambling problems”, as psychologists Blaszczynski and Nower point out, arguing that individual circumstances should be analysed when treating gambling addiction (2002).

It is in this zone of indeterminacy, however, that my argument gathers strength and currency, and that my contribution to gambling and media studies is situated. Digital gamble-play refers to an emerging set of cultural practices that blur the distinction between digital games and gambling.

As a concept, ‘digital gamble-play’ alludes to the developing – but incomplete – consolidation of these markets. Other researchers have already identified the erosion of boundaries in different spheres of life. It is this ‘wear and tear’ that the term ‘digital gamble-play’ speaks to. Media theorist and gambling researcher Joyce Goggin, for instance, writes about “the destabilization of binaries that has, if only conceptually, blurred the perceived line that was once thought to divide work from play, and finance from fun” (2012, p. 442). A feature of digital gamble-play is the “destabilization of binaries” (Goggin, 2012, p. 442). Gamble-play reveals a negotiation between user agency driven by enjoyment (gaming) and industry calculation driven by profit (gambling). Gamble-play moves towards the exploitation of compulsive play and compulsive communication.

In What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari write about the liberating power of concepts and their use in the consolidation of meanings and the creation of philosophical apparatuses. They contend that concepts are created “as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 16).

Deleuze and Guattari argue that a concept

is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 16)

Concepts allow us to escape chaos, to identify and contain components, and to analyse them: in the case of contemporary gambling, these components are images, platforms, practices and the interrelation between different media forms (gambling media, digital games, film, television).

‘Digital gamble-play’ is a “fragmentary whole” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 16) in the sense that it describes a set of media changes and cultural practices that are distinct. Yet these share a fundamental characteristic: they sprout from the staging of a chance event and involve an economy of danger, enjoyment and quantifiable success. Digital gamble-play is also fragmentary in that it contains an unfathomable number of elements: users, platforms, stakeholders and infrastructural components that are joined by volatile connections. Yet, as happens with other all-encompassing terms, such as, say, “ethnic media” (Deuze, 2006), ‘digital gamble-play’ is a point of departure for understanding a palpable reality and its cultural manifestations.

However, digital gamble-play is not so much a philosophical concept as a concept situated within a particular cultural history of media.

Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari recognise that concepts respond to particular histories and borrow from other concepts to make sense of reality:

every concept always has a history, even though this history zigzags, though it passes, if need be, through other problems or onto different planes. In any concept there are usually bits or components that come from other concepts, which corresponded to other problems and presupposed other planes. This is inevitable because each concept carries out a new cutting-out, takes on new contours, and must be reactivated or recut.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 18)

‘Gamble-play’ is gambling plus play: gambling that is increasingly more like play. This concept borrows from these two media forms and effectively “takes on new contours” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 18). The following section deals with the zigzagging history of gambling and the ways in which the digitisation of processes and the subsequent cultural ramifications of gambling are taking place across different planes.

The Cultural Innovation of Gamble-Play

Regulated gambling, understood as the commercialisation of controlled and relatively safe experiences of risk, is a widespread cultural phenomenon around the world. Its manifold moral, legal, economic and even philosophical implications call for a variety of definitions. Common in these descriptions, however, is the constant negotiation between risk, skill and luck, and the reproduction of these as the defining elements of the gambling equation. As a cultural practice, gambling has inspired the creation of cities in previously deserted landscapes (such as Reno or Las Vegas in Nevada; see Dombrink & Thompson, 1990; Fox, 2007), the formation of satellite economies (for instance, card rooms across California, sites in Indian reservations in the United States and Canada or online casinos), numerous literary and audiovisual explorations (novels in the vein of Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler (2010) or Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1990); films including Hill’s The Sting (1973) or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight (1996) and various scenes in the James Bond franchise; and TV’s Celebrity Poker Showdown or The National Heads-Up Poker Championship) and technological artefacts (miniature cameras for the broadcasting of poker tournaments, logistics software, surveillance equipment, mobile apps).

Even though gamble-play practices move away from the dominant cultural notions of ‘gambling’, it is important to recognise that digital gamble-play does not supplant traditional forms of gambling. The gambling industry is a vast financial and informational network that produces gigantic profits that amount to more than USD $391 billion per year (Morgan Stanley, 2012). This is evidenced by the construction of important casino venues in cities including Sydney and the exponential growth of nascent gambling markets, such as Macau, which is bound to become the next gambling mecca. In this book, I do not argue that digital forms of game delivery will supplant analogue or land-based gambling but rather that gambling cultures are in a constant state of flux and that this has to do in part with technological change.

Gambling theorists have debated the definition of gambling. When trying to enunciate what exactly is being acquired in gambling, Bjerg goes as far as to say that the gambler “does not buy a thing, but nothingness itself” (2009, p. 54). This explanation counters the notion that the gambler is “buying a commodity in the form of entertainment and excitement” from the casino (Bjerg, 2009, p. 54). For Bjerg, gambling takes money out of circulation on the symbolic apparatus of capitalism as it leads it “astray into a universe of chance” (2009, pp. 47–48). Bjerg’s notion of the “nothingness” of the gambler’s purchase can be extrapolated to the consumption of gambling-like products (social gambling apps, such as Hit It Rich, as described in my opening vignette) in which money is ‘fake’, an in-game representation of wealth. Here, this “nothingness” acquires an even deeper dimension. His observation resonating with the notion of the immateriality of money in gaming, Harvie Ferguson points out that gambling is “simply the exchange of money itself; exchange liberated from the viscous medium of objects” and that in this process, “money gains the digni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Preface: The VIP Lounge
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Digital Gambling as Media
• Part I: Gamble-Play Theory
• Part II: Gamble-Play Platforms
• Postface: Gamble-Play in the Societies of Control
• Index