Gambling in Everyday Life

Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment

Fiona Nicoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317679035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The book adopts a critical cultural studies lens to explore the entanglement of government and gambling in everyday life. Its qualitative approach to gambling creates a new theoretical framework for understanding the most urgent questions raised by research and policy on gambling.

In the past two decades, gambling industries have experienced exponential growth with annual global expenditure worth approximately 300 billion dollars. Yet most academic research on gambling is concentrated on problem gambling and conducted within the psychological sciences. Nicoll considers gambling at a moment when its integration within everyday cultural spaces, moments, and products is unprecedented. This is the first interdisciplinary cultural study of gambling in everyday life and develops critical and empirical methods that capture the ubiquitous presence of gambling in work, investment and play. This book also contributes to the growing cultural studies literature on video and mobile gaming. In addition to original case studies of gambling moments and spaces, in-depth interviews and participant observations provide readers with an insider's view of gambling.

Advanced students of sociology, cultural theory, and political science, academic researchers in the field of gambling studies will find this an original and useful text for understanding the cultural and political work of gambling industries in liberal societies.

1
This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling

Enjoyment Beyond the Figure of the Problem Gambler

Introduction

Gambling is usually defined as the exchange of money for an opportunity to win money, often provided by a business operator. When this exchange happens in contexts and ways that are accepted or even celebrated, gambling is accepted as an ordinary practice of leisure, entertainment, or recreation. When it happens in ways or with intensities that leave gamblers and those close to them unhappy and bereft, gambling becomes an individual and social “problem.” Whether we are choosing a product to finance our retirement, picking a number on a roulette wheel, or playing against a friend in a social game of online poker, each decision, move, or play involves some kind of stake and brings the risk of loss and the chance of large or small wins. A focus on everyday life unsettles implicit and explicit distinctions between “unhappy problem gamblers” and “happy recreational gamblers” on which gambling’s governance currently depends. And it highlights the ethical issues that arise when the corporate and regulatory structures enabling these decisions, moves, or plays not only fail to protect individuals and communities from harms arising from their engagement with gambling but create spaces, moments, and products that promote harms. This makes it impossible to conduct research on gambling in everyday life without considering the individual and social problems that can accompany it. So, this is a book that is simultaneously about and not about problem gambling (Foucault, 1983, pp. 32–33). My wager is that diversifying the disciplinary, political, and epistemological frameworks through which we approach gambling will also address some of the social and individual harms related to the rapid growth of commercial gambling industries.

To frame the arguments of this chapter, I present some examples of the way gambling appears in media and popular culture. The first example is a regular segment in The Wedge, an Australian television sketch comedy about everyday life in the suburbs titled “Pokie Girls.” Depicting its two female characters as ridiculous, superstitious, and ignorant, the segment also invokes child neglect, referring to actual, tragic cases of babies dying in the carpark of casinos while their mothers were distracted by gambling. In a more compassionate register, an Australian pop song titled “Blow Up the Pokies,” by The Whitlams, relates the suicide of a bandmate who became addicted to EGMs after this gambling technology displaced live music as the main form of entertainment offered in hotels (Nicoll, 2011). In the genre of television news, we see a New Zealand public health researcher warning of the hidden dangers of pokie areas within hotels where people gather to socialize over the Christmas holiday period (Sharp, 8 December 2016). In Australia, newspaper headlines similar to the following one in Brisbane’s Courier Mail, as well as “exposés” on television current affairs programmes, are commonplace: “At-risk punter levels surge. Almost a quarter of a million Queenslanders gamble so often they are at risk of becoming dependent on it” (Wenham, 2006). Concerns about gambling usually include reference to scientific expertise. An article published in the Australian Readers Digest titled “The Psychology of Pokies” asks, “Why are poker machines so addictive?” and reassures us that “Science is providing some answers.” The article is structured around the experiences of a “problem gambler.” Before launching into the latest psychological and biochemical explanations of her addiction to pokies, we are informed—in the 12-step tradition of anonymity—that this is “not her real name.” A list of contact numbers for help is provided as part of the article, and readers are invited at the end of the piece to take a self-test on the Readers Digest website to determine “What sort of pokies player are you?” (Australian Readers Digest, 2003, pp. 84–91). These examples illustrate how an image of the problem gambler is produced through representations in popular culture and tabloid and public broadcasting media, which is in turn reproduced in everyday social conversations about gambling. In this way, “vernacular knowledge” (Escoffier, 1998) about gambling as a topic requiring scientific inquiry and solutions is formed.

Given gambling’s rapid normalization as part of the everyday life of citizens in liberal societies, what are we to make of all this talk about problem gambling? At the time of writing, most academic research on gambling is concentrated on problem gambling and conducted within the psy-sciences, a term encompassing disciplines of psychology, medicine, biology, and neuroscience. Foucault poses a series of questions to help tease out the implications of this narrow disciplinary focus:

What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say that you are a science? What speaking subject … what subject of knowledge and experience are you trying to minorize when you begin to say: “I speak this discourse, I am speaking a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist?” What theoretico-political vanguard are you trying to put on the throne in order to detach it from all the massive, circulating, and discontinuous forms that knowledge can take?

(2003, pp. 9–10)

We will see that limiting the scope of research on gambling to knowledge that is consecrated as “science” and assumed to monopolize academic values of objectivity and truth has practical consequences for the ways in which gambling is governed. These consequences cannot be simply addressed by including “other perspectives” from disciplines beyond the “psy-sciences” to provide a more robust picture of gambling. Instead, we need to consider whether a narrow “scientific” focus on problem gambling might be contributing to the very outcomes—from lost productivity, crime, corruption, and bankruptcy through to suicide—that gambling research is supposed to address?

In her book What’s Wrong With Addiction? Helen Keane argues that knowledges of addiction are inextricably linked to liberal government:

Discourses of addiction not only set out criteria by which some people are defined as outside the realm of proper and viable subjectivity, they also produce the right sort of body, the right way to live, the right way to be and the right sort of relationship to have to oneself and to others … the growth of addiction demands scrutiny because it is a notion through which specifically liberal forms of political power and government operate efficiently and seductively.

(2002, p. 189)

What follows considers how and to what ends knowledge of problem gambling is mobilized by gambling industries, governments, regulators, and local communities. I examine how the cultural figure of the problem gambler works to disarticulate gambling products, practices, and spaces from populations and places where they are most heavily concentrated and pose a series of further questions. How has knowledge about addiction been used to legitimate an expansion of commercial gambling in liberal democratic societies over the past three decades? How does this knowledge distract our focus from the wealth that self-disposing consumers provide to commercial gambling industries and the governments which depend on their taxation?

Policies exist in most jurisdictions to enable individuals who recognize they have a problem to exclude themselves from venues which provide gambling products. However—in spite of concerted and innovative outreach campaigns—those who seek help and avail themselves of self-exclusion schemes make up a minority of individuals who are harmed by EGMs.

The first part of this chapter considers why the focus of academic research and government policy in societies where gambling has become most integrated within everyday life is skewed towards the topic of problem gambling. The second part of the chapter draws on social research to link the figure of the problem gambler to broader questions about the cultural function of taste in everyday life. The third part considers theories of “the zone” that underpin many current explanations of gambling addiction. The final part of the chapter considers aspects of gambling enjoyment that are more or less beneficial to individuals and the communities of which we form part and which are more or less susceptible to governance. I will argue that gambling’s capacity to join individuals in communities of belonging exists in tension with its power to enjoin us through the creation and promotion of addictive moments, spaces, and products. And we will consider strong evidence that continuous betting forms—in particular electronic gaming machines—are “addictive by design” (Schull, 2012).

What’s the Problem With Problem Gambling Research?

I visit a casino with a research group where we meet with an employee who delivers a government sponsored service to support patrons. He is charged with informing players about the features of different casino games, providing information about responsible gambling, as well as managing requests for self-exclusion. He seems to be a deeply compassionate man; we observe him addressing “regulars” by name as he takes us on a tour of the premises. We return to the small booth in the middle of the gaming floor where he works and encounter an elderly man playing an EGM. The man’s face shows signs of deep emotional disturbance and his skin has a deathly grey pallor. The employee asks: “How much have you lost today George?” The man replies: “Over 10,000 dollars already. This machine isn’t paying today.” “Maybe it’s time to go home George,” the employee suggests cheerfully. George grunts with irritation. Although the machine where George is playing is less than one meter from the employee’s workspace, there is nothing more to be done.

A 2013 study found that 56% of editorial board members from the two leading gambling journals have a background in psychology, psychiatry, or medicine and that the majority of those who self-identify as researchers in Gambling Studies are also psychologists by background (Cassidy, Loussouarn, & Pisac, 2013, p. 49). The accuracy and efficacy of this research is limited by several factors, including the quality of data provided by standardized psychological screens, low rates of self-reporting by gamblers in trouble (often related to social stigma), and ethical and epistemological issues related to laboratory research on human subjects (Livingstone, Rintoul, & Francis, 2014; Delfabbro & Le Couteur, 2003, p. 113; Hing, Nuske, Gainsbury, & Russell, 2015). A focus on “responsible gambling” at the turn of the century was lauded as a new settlement between industry, academic, and government stake-holders and has provided a framework for research on problem gambling ever since (Hancock & Smith, 2017). However, critical researchers interested in the entanglement between global gambling industries and the states responsible for their regulation (Cosgrave, 2010; Livingstone & Woolley, 2007; Young, 2010; Cassidy et al., 2013) argue that problem gambling is far from a self-evident object of scientific knowledge. And the epistemological problems raised by research on socio-cultural phenomena with which scientists lack personal familiarity has not gone unobserved. For example, in his book Gambling Government, psychologist and academic researcher Michael Walker writes, “I am continually surprised by the extent to which those in government who regulate the gambling industries, those who research gambling issues and those who seek to help gamblers in trouble are not themselves regular gamblers” (1998, p. 4).

I have argued that the focus of psy-sciences on aetiology and cures of various pathologies does not equip them to understand the networks, identities, and affects through which gambling and addiction become entangled in knowledge and made governable (Rose, 1999, p. 29).

The preface of this book related how my early experience of gambling studies at the turn of the twentieth century was shaped by attending conferences hosted by casinos and opened by politicians responsible for gaming regulation. With a tiny handful of exceptions, presenters were evenly distributed among academic experts on problem gambling and representatives of the social services who cared for problem gamblers. Discussions centred on effective measures to prevent problem gambling, ranging from clocks on screens and in venues, signage about the signs of addiction, provision of accurate information about odds, time-out pop-up screens on gaming machines, and software blockers for electronic gaming consumers. I described the uncomfortable silence following my inadvertently disruptive invitation to delegates attending my presentation to raise their hands if they had gambled on the previous night in the casino where the conference was held. The sense of indecorum and embarrassment generated by my question seemed at odds with the prevailing agreement that less than 5 percent of gamblers were afflicted by addiction. So, why wouldn’t delegates participate in a form of entertainment that supposedly delivers pleasure and recreation to over 95 percent of consumers? Why wouldn’t discussion centre on the gambling amenities of the venue hosting the event? Why was gambling enjoyment apparently unspeakable in the heart of one of its most important providers? What is this silence on the part of gambling researchers telling us?

To answer these questions, we need to attend to the discourses that constitute academic research, policy, and industry vehicles for knowing gamblers (Foucault, 1976, p. 27).

At issue is not just that the remarkable cultural force of gambling within transnational circuits of global capitalism requires more attention from researchers. Focusing on problem gambling can distract researchers’ attention from specific and local problems for individuals and communities caused by the accelerating integration of gambling within everyday cultural spaces, products, and moments of finance and play. This not only means that academic gambling studies and studies of problem gamblers are often conflated, it also leaves a vast arena of products, identities, and spaces neglected by social and cultural researchers.

In 2013 a major research report was published based on qualitative and qualitative data gathered using content analysis of literature and semi-structured interviews with 109 gambling research stakeholders, including researchers, regulators, and industry representatives in the UK, Europe, Australia, North America, and Hong Kong/Macau (Cassidy et al., 2013). They found that gambling research was

unified by a focus on “problem gambling,” which presents gambling as entertainment and places the blame for “bad” gambling with the individual. “Problem gambling” is silent on the relationships between the state and gambling operators … There is a lack of collaboration between gambling studies and related fields and a reluctance to accept alternative methodologies and wider definitions of evidence. The impact of creating disciplinary bunkers is that internally homogeneous communities of referees and commentators participate in self-referential dialogues, rather than engaging in wider, more creative discussions.

(Cassidy et al., 2013, pp. 8–9)

Their recommendation to redress this state of affairs is for studies of gambling to “investigate a wider range of social processes, including not only individual behavior but also problem games, problem products and problem policies” (Cassidy et al., 2013, p. 10). This lack of dive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Gambling in Everyday Life
• 1 This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling: Enjoyment Beyond the Figure of the Problem Gambler
• 2 Cultural Spaces of Gambling
• 3 Cultural Moments of Gambling
• 4 Cultural Products of Gambling
• 5 Governing Gambling in Everyday Life
• Postscript
• Appendix
• Index