Gambling in Everyday Life: Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment 9781138777439, 9781315772646

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Gambling in Everyday Life

This 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 and medical 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 process of work, investment and play. The book also contributes to the growing cultural studies literature on video and mobile gaming. In addition to original case studies of gambling moments, products 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 and neoliberal societies. Fiona Nicoll is a Professor at the University of Alberta where she holds an Alberta Gambling Research Institute chair in gambling policy in the Department of Political Science. The author of Diggers to Drag Queens: Configurations of Twentieth Century National Identity (Pluto Press, 2001) and founding member of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, she is co-editor of Transnational Whiteness Matters (Lexington Press, 2008) and Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University (University of Queensland Press, 2015). In addition to numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on gambling, she has published extensively on reconciliation, Indigenous sovereignty and whiteness in the Australian context.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Women Do Genre in Film and Television Edited by Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz Reclaiming Critical Remix Video The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works Owen Gallagher Ecologies of Internet Video Beyond YouTube John Hondros Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power Edited by Micol Seigel Ethnic Media in the Digital Age Edited by Sherry S. Yu and Matthew D. Matsaganis Narratives of Place in Literature and Film Edited by Steven Allen and Kirsten Møllegaard Unplugging Popular Culture Reconsidering Materiality, Analog Technology, and the Digital Native K. Shannon Howard Advertising in MENA Goes Digital Ilhem Allagui Gambling in Everyday Life Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment Fiona Nicoll For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Cultural-and-Media-Studies/book-series/SE0304

Gambling in Everyday Life Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment

Fiona Jean Nicoll

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Fiona Nicoll to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-77743-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77264-6 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to gamblers, past and present and future.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: Gambling in Everyday Life Gambling in Everyday Life: Signposts in the Literature 3 Gambling Is Ordinary 7 Governmentality, Gambling, and Everyday Life 14 Finopower: Transforming Intersections Between Gambling, Finance, Work, and Play 18 Methodologies 25 Structure 31 Chapter Outline 32 Conclusion 33 1

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This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling: Enjoyment Beyond the Figure of the Problem Gambler Introduction 40 What’s the Problem With Problem Gambling Research? 43 Fixing Pathologies: Addiction and the Cultural Politics of Taste 49 Gambling Beyond the Zone: Enjoyment in Everyday Life 57 Where Is the Joy? 67 Conclusion 71 Cultural Spaces of Gambling Introduction 76 Transforming Gambling Spaces 79 Statey Spaces of Gambling 84 Accommodating Casino Resorts 90

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Contents Crown Sovereignty 95 The “Pokie Lounge” as an Everyday Cultural Space of Gambling 100 Strategies and Tactics in the Pokie Lounge 108 Conclusion 111

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Cultural Moments of Gambling Introduction 115 Transforming Gambling Moments 121 Gender, Time, and Gambling in Everyday Life 126 Gambling at Work 135 On Winning the Lottery 140 National Gambling Moments: Melbourne Cup Day Celebrations 147 Conclusion 157

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Cultural Products of Gambling Introduction 160 Gambling Systems 166 Transforming Gambling Products: The Rise of the Electronic Gambling Machine 170 Online Wagering Platforms 173 Gaming or Gambling? Capitalizing on Play 177 Gambling on Financial Products 181 Conclusion 188

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life Introduction 193 Transforming Architectures of Regulation 193 Are EGMs Gambling Products? 197 Consumer Advocacy: Reading Gamblers’ Stories as Testimony 208 Sacrifice and Scapegoating: The Finopolitics of Problem Gambling 217 Problem Gambling Beyond the Individual: Defending Communities From EGMs 219 Extractive Industries and the Constitutional Grounds of Democracy 223 Regulating Gambling Research 233 Conclusion 237

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Postscript Transforming Gambling Spaces 245 Transforming Gambling Moments 246 Transforming Gambling Products and Services 246 Transforming Gambling Research Ethics 247 Amplifying the Joys of Gambling in Everyday Life 248

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Appendix Index

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Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 5.1

Treasury Casino, Brisbane, 2015 T-shirt purchased by author in Brisbane, 2008 Celebrity tower in Studio City casino, Macau, 2018 Entrance to Mahogany Room, Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Christmas light show on town hall sponsored by lottery, Brisbane, 2014 Ferris wheel built into Studio City hotel tower, Macau, 2018 Shopping mall in Wynn casino, Macau, 2018 New Lisboa casino viewed from colonial Portuguese fortifications, Macau, 2018 Exterior of Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Streetscape with pokie lounge in renovated hotel, Brisbane, 2014 Interior of pokie lounge, Brisbane, 2015 Close-up of Playboy EGM machine, Canada, 2017 Poster in Winnipeg airport, Canada, 2018 Screen featuring jackpot timing information, Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Advertisement for scratch lottery ticket, Brisbane, 2014 Selection of lottery products on display at casino in Canada, 2018 Lottery ticket checking device, Edmonton, 2018 Advertisement for Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in a hotel Advertisement for Storm Financial investment product, Brisbane, 2005 Sticker on the floor of Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018

65 66 81 82 83 85 86 88 94 99 100 116 120 120 128 139 140 146 180 207

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the University of Queensland and, in particular, former director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, Professor Graeme Turner. My research assistant, Deborah Thomas, made an outstanding contribution by running focus groups and administering surveys, as well as contributing participant observations about Melbourne Cup Day. Mark Andrejevic and Fiona Allon encouraged me to cultivate the kind of critical thinking about gambling developed in the course of the book. Melissa Harper, Maureen Burns, Carole Ferrier, Lisa Bode, Joan Leach, Frances Bonner, Nic Carah, Joan Mulholland, Cathy Squirrell, David Carter, and Margaret Henderson contributed through conversations and insights about gambling over the years. Sytze Kingma, Rebecca Cassidy, Kate Bedford, and Gerda Reith provided me with important maps for thinking about the role and significance of gambling in everyday life. Huge thanks to Helen Keane, Charles Livingstone, and Peter Adams from the “Dangerous Consumption” research group, as well as to Sarah Redshaw for insights about cultural intersections between gambling and driving. I’m also grateful to Mark Johnson for conversations about the joys and unpredictability of games and to Cesar Albarran-Torres for his friendship and collaborations. My graduate research assistants, Elise Sammons, Julien Leforestier, Zachary Palmer, and Wyatt Bourdreau, provided invaluable assistance in the final stages of completing this manuscript, as did Jonathan Leggo. Aileen MoretonRobinson and Sara Ahmed have provided support and intellectual leadership over many years, while Garry Smith and other new colleagues at the University of Alberta have given me inspiration and courage to complete a project many years in gestation. Behind the scenes of my academic life are precious friends and family members. Their tolerance and encouragement of my obsessive attention to research and writing projects over the years is an invaluable gift. The intellectual engagement and quicksilver humour of Clare McCarthy has buoyed me through many stormy patches, and I have been encouraged and inspired by my cousin Kate Price, as well as my old childhood buddies Fiona Kidd, Georgia Babatsikos, and Susan Sutton. My aunt, Jean Nicoll, has supported me over long-distance calls, and my parents, Mac and Marg Nicoll, have supplied me with mountains of newspaper clippings on gambling controversies over the years—a valuable gift when other academic activities dominated my

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attention. My sister, Bec Nicoll, is an inspirational and ethical presence in my life, and I am especially grateful for her explanations of the impact of pokies on small rural communities. I owe an enormous debt to my partner Sandi Peel for sharing her knowledge of gambling’s community-building work and for an everyday life full of laughter and the best kinds of unpredictability. I am grateful for the patience of my editors at Routledge, Felisa Salvago Keyes, Christina Kowalski, and Eleanor Catchpole-Simmons, as other projects and an international move intruded on deadline after deadline. Last, but not least, I want to thank all of the research participants, both gamblers and non-gamblers, who were willing to share their thoughts and experiences of gambling in everyday life. I hope I have done some justice to your generous contributions.

Preface

Representations of gambling moments are plentiful in popular culture, especially in narratives set in Las Vegas, an iconic site of celebrity culture and innumerable Hollywood films (and remakes). Popular narratives about gambling often present two related frames of time. The first frame contains stories of individual characters; gambling provides a vehicle to explore themes of triumph, defeat, or survival. The second frame is often evident at a metanarrative level and used to explore the impact of gambling on society or the proposition that gambling is constitutive of society. Gambling might appear as a metaphor for historical change, or corporate greed, as well as a vehicle for more abstract philosophical meditations on the idea that life is a gamble. The enjoyment of gambling moments provides tests of character as well as probing the ethical limits of market values such as competition and individual freedom. Beyond the containment provided by popular narratives, the unpredictability of gambling’s outcomes in everyday life often thwarts attempts to rationalize, or otherwise account for, the specificity of gambling enjoyment. Gambling in Everyday Life is the outcome of over a decade of reading and responding to what psychologists, philosophers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists have had to say about gambling, as well as my experience as a citizen and consumer living in a period of gambling industries’ most dramatic growth. The book enters the world at a moment when serious questions are being posed about commercial gambling’s sustainability and ethical moorings. In 2016, the gaming industry (not including online gambling) reached a value of almost US$410 billion (+1.6% compared to 2015), with the Asia-Pacific Region accounting for close to 50 percent of the sector value.1 Electronic gaming machine manufacturer, Len Ainsworth, is one of Australia’s wealthiest individuals, and the pay packet of Denise Coates, founder and chief executive of UK online gambling company Bet365, is more than triple that of Apple CEO Tim Cook (Davies, 2018, 24 November). It is perhaps fitting that the first book-length cultural study of gambling should be offered by an Australian; at the time of writing, our expenditure on gambling per annum is worth over 23 billion dollars, and our per capita average expenditure leads the world at over $1000 per annum (Responsible Gambling Victoria, 2018). Several experiences led me to a lifelong fascination with gambling in everyday life.

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I was raised in a nuclear and extended family powerfully shaped by the values of evangelical Christianity; gambling was never spoken of, let alone participated in. Gambling presented itself to me as a young academic researcher in the late 1990s. I was completing a PhD on Australian “digger nationalism,” centred on the annual military commemoration of Anzac Day, which is observed by a public holiday and marches each year on April 25. Each day I would take a long walk through the central business district of Melbourne to clear my head after a morning of writing. Along my route was the building site of Victoria’s first casino, “Crown.” Branded as a “World of Entertainment,” the casino was dogged by controversy related to the detrimental social effects of the legalization of electronic gaming machines (EGM) earlier in the decade. Notwithstanding such concerns, Crown would expand to become one of the biggest casinos in the world and the state’s largest single-site employer by 2014 (Crown Resorts Limited, 2014). The company would go on to successfully bid for Sydney’s second casino in 2015. The project at Barangaroo is nearing completion at the time of writing. In 2001, I moved to Sydney to complete my first book on digger nationalism. It was here that I witnessed the explosion of EGMs in everyday spaces of socializing. On every block of the main road closest to my home were several hotels, each boasting up to 30 of these machines. After attending an Anzac Day parade in Sydney, I followed veterans to one of these venues and witnessed an extraordinary social spectacle. Tables were moved out of the way and a large circle was formed, at the centre of which two people flipped coins on a paddle. Money was thrown to the man running the game in the centre, as well as exchanged between people on the outer periphery of the circle. Everybody seemed to know exactly what to do. I realized I was watching the traditional game of Two Up, immortalized in the book Wake in Fright (first published in 1961) about a young man who moves to a remote country town and experiences horrific excesses of alcohol, gambling, and sexualized violence. A few years later, I moved to Brisbane and, for the first time, experienced organized gambling in the workplace on Melbourne Cup Day. As I discussed this phenomenon in classes with my undergraduate students, I discovered that most of them had celebrated Melbourne Cup Day in the classrooms of their primary and high schools. I realized this was a longstanding tradition after a 92-year-old man shared his strong recollections of Melbourne Cup sweepstakes being held in his primary school classroom in the early 1900s. Over several years, I became fascinated with what happens in the minutes and hours that a horse race “stops the nation.” The final moment that consolidated the significance of the topic of gambling in everyday life occurred shortly after I began preliminary research. I attended a large conference dedicated to the study of gambling held in an Australian casino. As I skimmed the programme, I was surprised (and somewhat intimidated) to discover that my presentation was one of a tiny handful of papers not dedicated to some aspect of “problem gambling.” There was a lavish conference dinner complete with a large band to which many of the

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conference participants danced with nerdy academic enthusiasm. Afterwards, I went onto the casino floor, played a little roulette, and won a few dollars on an EGM. The following morning, I presented my paper. I began by asking other delegates to raise their hands if they had spent any of their spare time gambling in the casino. No hands were raised. I noticed some very awkward shuffling around in seats together with that socially embarrassing silence colloquially described as “crickets.” I submitted an abstract to the same conference the following year. It was not accepted. In part, this book is an attempt to understand the politics that shape speech and silence about gambling in everyday life.

Note 1. Values stated in terms of gross gaming wins (amount waged by customers minus the total amount paid out to customers as winnings) without taxes. Data for worldwide and Canada gambling are extracted from the Marketline studies published in January 2018. Data for worldwide online gambling is extracted from the Marketline studies published in December 2017.

Introduction Gambling in Everyday Life

You’ve got to be in it to win it. (Popular truism)

In 2018 the UK National Lottery released an advertisement focusing on the charity work of a hairdresser with a passion for cutting the hair of homeless people. We see images of his salon, filled with young people sitting in chairs, wearing branded cloaks that read “Haircuts 4 Homeless.” They are having their appearances (and presumably their self-confidence) made over. The owner’s voiceover narrates the depicted scene: I’ve been hairdressing for 40 years. I can’t end homelessness. What I can do is . . . use cutting hair to help other people. Because most of the homeless people out there, they feel invisible. It’s all about making them look and feel better about themselves. You can’t bottle that, you know, you can’t buy that feeling. I don’t think that people buy lottery tickets to help with causes and I don’t blame them. But buying a ticket and playing helps us do what we do. The final frame features a freshly groomed man with a weathered face overlaid by text that reads: NATIONAL LOTTERY PLAYERS RAISE 30 MILLION FOR GOOD CAUSES. EVERY SINGLE WEEK (National Lottery, 2018). This advertisement tells citizens a story which links the enjoyment of gambling to the good work of individuals and governments in everyday life. The chapters that follow will explore the kind of societies from which this kind of story emerges and explain why it continues to makes sense to so many of us. This book has four related aims: to produce the first cultural study of gambling in everyday life; to develop critical and empirical methods adequate to such a study; to provide a framework for cultural studies of gambling through the original concept of “finopower”; and to advance an argument about spaces, moments, and products of gambling to contribute to urgent debates about how gambling should be governed. Gambling embeds opportunities to win for a price. It involves taking a more or less calculated risk of staking money or something else of value for a

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potential gain. While losing is the most likely outcome of the manufactured contingency offered by commercial gambling products, moments, and spaces, the lure of large and small wins is seductive, and gambling has become an increasingly significant way through which individual and social identities and values are articulated, embodied, and “played out” in neoliberal societies. A comprehensive study of gambling in all such societies is beyond the scope of my study; my arguments are based on original social research and published literature in Australia, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. While I supplement this field of reference with examples from other jurisdictions, it is important to situate what follows within a critical cultural studies tradition concerned with the problematic of freedom from which liberal democratic regimes of power were forged. Scholarship within this tradition illuminates social and philosophical grounds on which gambling has been legitimized and criticized over the past two centuries as well as the values at stake in debates about the growth of commercial gambling over the past two decades. I will draw on it to develop arguments about history, culture, and law and to situate commercial gambling’s extractive practices within a broader, global, political context that includes decolonization and climate change. I acknowledge that conversations within this critical cultural studies tradition by no means encompass all there is to say about gambling in everyday life. Limitations of language and a lack of crosscultural fluency have prevented me from discussing important developments in continental Europe and Russia, as well as some of the most important theatres of gambling today in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. A rich account of gambling in everyday life must encompass gambling that is more or less illegal; gambling that is more or less formal, or codified; gambling that is more or less “rationalized” by participants and providers; gambling that is more or less politically contested; and gambling that is experienced as more or less “ordinary” within specific communities. There are two reasons these grey areas are important for the argument that follows. Firstly, we will see that gambling’s unique cultural force arises from its metonymic condensation of and contiguity with pleasures afforded by other spaces, products, and moments of finance and play in liberal democratic societies. Secondly, gambling industries and governance exist in a state of continual flux. This means that businesses and players are frequently operating in the ambiguous space where questions of legitimacy are unresolved and laws are yet to be passed (or not). The growth of gambling industries over the past four decades has been exponential, with annual global expenditure worth approximately 300 billion dollars annually, almost the equivalent to that spent on pharmaceuticals (Adams, 2007, p. 1). Gambling industries are often leaders in projects of regional and urban development, and many products are legally available 24 hours a day and seven days a week. There is an expanding grey area between gambling and other kinds of entertainment and investment practices: from social games on mobile devices to popular platforms for “spread betting” on financial markets.

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Gambling is also a significant generator of individual and corporate fortunes. This means that, regardless of whether we choose as individuals to gamble, gambling has become an important technique of “governmentality” (Dean, 2010; Foucault, 2004a). This book will suggest that—in certain respects—gambling has become an integral part of everyday life in liberal societies. By liberal societies, I am referring to nations that emerged in Europe and its colonies both from and through the Enlightenment’s elaboration of freedom as an absolute and universal value. To note the ubiquity of gambling in these societies is not to presume democratic consent. Citizen surveys in Australia, for example, reveal significant concerns about the expansion and accessibility of gambling, and of EGMs in particular. This illustrates a growing tension between movements seeking to eliminate harms related to gambling on one hand and strong support for individual rights to gamble and corporations’ demand for “light touch” regulation on the other (McAllister, 2013). The arguments in this book will draw on original research to explore the sources of this tension in depth and across a range of case studies and debates.

Gambling in Everyday Life: Signposts in the Literature Gambling’s role in everyday life has been the subject of literary and scholarly attention in Western culture since the Renaissance. Eighteenth and nineteenth century writers used the novel form to address the feverish pleasures and social costs of gambling in ways that remain relevant today. For example, Maria Edgeworth’s (1799/1996) short story The Lottery traces the rise, fall, and redemption of a young husband and father who becomes enamoured with gambling after an early win. Dostoevsky’s (1866/1966) classic story The Gambler is a closely observed account of social hierarchies and a semiautobiographical account of an obsession that drives a young man to risk everything on the roulette wheel. Early modern artists associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements designed creative projects around themes of randomness and chance, while Sigmund Freud contemplated the structural function of gambling within his new science of psychoanalysis. With the rise of anthropology and sociology as academic disciplines in the twentieth century, researchers began to develop theoretical frameworks to account for gambling as a pervasive social activity (Devereaux, 1949; Downes, Davies, David, & Stone, 1976). Cultural historians and structuralist anthropologists conducted comparative analyses of games within which gambling was sometimes embedded (Caillois, 1958/2001; Huizinga, 1938/1955). Early social theorists considered cultural practices of gambling, and social proscriptions surrounding these, as aspects of national and individual character (Goffman, 1967/2006; Weber, 2005). Ethnographic studies of gambling (Zurcher, 1970) and sociologists of deviance in the 1950s through to the 1970s addressed particular communities of gamblers, including prisoners and working-class men (Bernhard & Frey, 2007; Bloch, 1951). Over the past three decades, social

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researchers in sociology and anthropology have provided valuable insights about the role of gambling in shaping institutions, selves, and subcultures (Binde, 2005). A flourishing media and communication studies literature on video games and mobile gaming helps us to understand the immersive qualities of contemporary gambling products and spaces. Excellent disciplinary scholarship on gambling includes rigorous and politically sensitive ethnographic studies of gambling subcultures and environments (Cassidy, 2002, 2007; Malaby, 2003, 2007), identities (Casey, 2008), and technologies (Schull, 2012). It also includes feminist and neo-Marxist sociologists of labour who focus on lived aspects of the political economy of “casino capitalism” (Mutari & Figart, 2015; Sallaz, 2009; Chandler & Jones, 2011). Other important work embeds gambling practices and regulation within urban geography and organizational studies (Simpson, 2012; Duncan, 2015; Kingma, 2004, 2015; Schwartz, 2003) as well as a rich literature on consumer culture (Young, 2010), “risk societies,” and neoliberalism (Cosgrave & Klassen, 2001). Recent literature also includes theoretically rich accounts of regulation regimes (Adams, 2007; Woolley & Livingstone, 2010). Alongside this literature is an impressive body of work addressing questions raised by Indigenous gambling enterprises in the USA and Canada over the past three decades (Belanger, 2006, 2011; Bruyneel, 2007; Cattelino, 2008; Darian-Smith, 2004; Light & Rand, 2005; Manitowabi, 2011, 2017; Miller, 2012). Such work is significant for the attention it brings to bear on gambling’s entanglement within broader socio-historical issues, including colonialism and the politics of antiracist and de-colonizing struggles. Other work explores gambling’s reflection of emotional and libidinal economies of late capitalism (see especially Bjerg, 2009, 2011). Three works stand out in the research landscape as especially ambitious and rigorous accounts of gambling’s presence within everyday life: Gerda Reith’s (1999) sociological study of gambling, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture, Jackson Lears’ (2003) cultural history, Something for Nothing: Luck in America, and Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Schull (2012). Respectively written by a sociologist, a cultural historian, and a cultural anthropologist, these works offer rich accounts of gambling embedded in wider historical and social contexts and are interdisciplinary in their scope and impact. Three other broad areas of literature are relevant to this study of gambling in everyday life: videogaming, financialization, and media platforms and practices. Studies of videogaming flourished from the late 1990s, as the introduction of special effects and licensing agreements with Hollywood entertainment industries transformed activities and products formerly associated with “gamer” subcultures into everyday aspects of popular culture (Goggin, 2012; Hjorth, 2011; Malaby, 2009; Selfe & Hawisher, 2007). Over the past five years, the development of gaming apps for social media platforms accessed through mobile devices has brought new synergies between gaming and gambling industries (Albarrán-Torres & Goggin, 2014). Theoretical accounts of “simulation” (Baudrillard, 1994; Taylor, 2004) and algorithmic

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identities and cultural technologies (Cheney-Lippold, 2011; Striphas, 2015) are key to understanding proliferating forms of digital gambling. Accounts of online play as communicative expression (Bogost, 2007) and of the “gamification” of everyday life also help to establish a context for this study (Castronova, 2008). The application of “game theory” in disciplines of political science and economics is often underpinned by strategic and mathematical analyses of casino gambling games, particularly blackjack and poker. Literature in the interdisciplinary field of “cultural economy” research has also helped my arguments to take shape. The past decade has seen an explosion of research dedicated to understanding “financialization” as an integral component of historical, domestic, national, and global economic management (Poovey, 2008; Schiller, 2003). This work gained momentum and urgency surrounding the global financial crisis of 2008–9 (Engelen, Erturk, Froud, Leaver, & Williams, 2010; Skidelsky, 2010, Arestis, Charles, & Fontana, 2013). There is also a considerable body of literature that is broadly neoMarxist and critically engages with the political tensions between capitalism’s extractive and abstract values and the heterogeneous commons occupied by the “multitude” across a globe deeply divided by social inequalities (Hardt & Negri, 2001, 2009; Marrazzi, 2011; Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013). Also important are histories of insurance (Baker, 2000; Hacking, 1990; Patel, 2006) and finance (De Goede, 2005), as well as accounts of the “risk society” and the production of subjects of risk (Beck, 1992; Joffe, 1999; Lupton & Tulloch, 2002, Tulloch & Lupton, 2003; P. O’Malley, 2012; Zaloom, 2004). Studies of informal or domestic aspects of monetization (Cox & Schmidt-Hanissa, 2007; Zeilzer, 2001) are important, as are those dedicated to illegal trades in currency, drugs, arms, people smuggling, and sex workers (Napoleoni, 2008). Arguments about economic irrationalities and theories of randomness (Taleb, 2004, 2007; Brenner, Brenner, & Brown, 2008, p. 45) must inform any account of gambling in everyday life. I also engage with the performativity of finance (Butler, 2010; Callon, 2008; Pryke & du Gay, 2007), exploring the porous boundaries between economic and cultural spheres of social life. Science and technology studies (STS) are another source of arguments in the book; in particular, I draw on work that explores the materiality of networks and relationships between human and non-human “actants” (Latour, 1993), including bodies, algorithms, affect, and digital media infrastructure (Andrejevic, 2015). Before proceeding to the key terms of my argument, I want to explain a unique aspect of this book. Much of the literature on gambling and neoliberalism focuses on the emergence of an entrepreneurial subject for whom risk management is central. This approach is exemplified in some of the most important literature in the field, including a collected volume of essays titled The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader (Cosgrave, 2006). While risk and gambling are clearly related, I resist frameworks of analysis that reduce gambling to an epiphenomenon of the risk society or biopolitics in general. It is obvious that gambling carries risks: the house always wins and gamblers always

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lose over time; sustained gambling is likely to damage individuals’ credit rating, sense of social esteem, and subjective well-being. However, the problem with conflating risk and gambling is that experiences of winning and other accidents of good fortune in everyday life easily recede from view and analysis. At the level of everyday life, individual gamblers do beat the house, win the lottery, and gamble to feel like they are part of something bigger, whether this is a market, a nation, or an unfolding cosmological plan. The language of risk cannot account for the affective power and epistemological disruption generated when “dumb luck” falls on the uneducated, the undeserving, or the already wealthy. Another way that the scholarship of risk can overshadow the everyday cultural work of gambling is through the deployment of gambling as metaphor, from “casino capitalism” to “the lottery of life.” This book approaches gambling as more than a metaphor for risky ways of being in the world or describing the riskiness of the world. The proposition that “we make our own luck” has perhaps never been more pervasive and enforced in everyday financial discourses, and to expect that our inherent rights and value as humans will be respected in everyday life is risky indeed. But to understand how gambling contributes to this situation, we need to bring as much focus on the social processes which produce opportunities as those which create risks. Social research on elites is scarce and a recognized problem within the social sciences (Savage & Williams, 2008). Until recently, theorizations of “the subject of governmentality” were skewed towards a version of middleclass citizenship that is rapidly vanishing. However, as critical geographer David Harvey reflects, in the wake of the global financial crisis, Throughout much of the capitalist world, we have lived through an astonishing period in which politics has been depoliticized and commodified. Only now, as the state steps in to bail out the financiers, has it become clear to all that state and capital are more tightly intertwined than ever, both institutionally and personally. The ruling class, rather than the political class that acts as its surrogate, is now actually seen to rule. (2011, p. 149) With scrutiny, it becomes evident that those at the helm of corporate and political life today are rarely the autonomous, calculating, entrepreneurial individuals celebrated by self-help literature and popular culture. Insured against every material, financial, and psychological calamity, these socially networked, tax-minimizing and rule-breaking members of the global elite are often beneficiaries of inherited wealth and symbolic capital, including the property values of masculinity and whiteness (Harris, 1993). For those born into fortunes and in possession of the political contacts and other tools needed to multiply it, gambling can appear as a license to print money to which they do not question their right. This book puts wealthy and elite subjects back into the frame of analysis, making the absence of risk, the lack of

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frugality, and the excess of sovereign power an integral part of its investigation of gambling. While all of the literature discussed earlier contributes to analyses and arguments presented in this book, my account of gambling is most strongly influenced by two areas of research, which deserve more extended discussion. The first of these is “everyday life” as theorized by scholars in critical cultural studies and sociology. The second is “governmentality” as originally developed by Michel Foucault and subsequently elaborated by researchers across humanities and social science disciplines. It is from the intersection of research on everyday life and governmentality that I developed the concept of “finopower.” I use this concept to place gambling spaces, moments, and products at the centre of my project and to explain how everyday life is continually transformed by gambling and its governance.

Gambling Is Ordinary At the end of last century, sociologist and gambling researcher Jan McMillen (1996) expressed frustration at a “narrow, liberal orientation” that limits much research to “descriptive analysis of the functioning of gambling and gambling institutions.” Stressing gambling’s role as a powerful determinant of “new social and political outcomes,” she wondered “why gambling has attracted so little attention from cultural studies and feminist analysis which have made such important contributions to explanations of contemporary society since the 1980s?” (McMillen, 1996, pp. 32–33). Notwithstanding excellent research touched on in the previous section, gambling and gamblers continue to be objects of research and regulation considered in isolation from the identities, spaces, products, and moments that constitute gambling as a cultural domain. As a cultural practice, gambling is perhaps unique in being positioned as simultaneously inside and outside the domain of everyday life. Some of the most celebrated writers and critical theorists have found moments of transcendence in the frenzied pursuit of gambling experiences, while others have seen it as a path to downward social mobility, disease, and abjection. These two ways of seeing gambling reverberate in popular cultural distinctions between celebrated (and celebrity) poker players on one hand and consumers of electronic gaming machine players as economically unproductive zombies on the other. Gambling’s complicated and shifting relationships to epochal and aesthetic concepts, including modernity, modernism, post-modernism and neoliberalism, have caused it to slip in and out of theories and practices of everyday life. A focus on everyday life helps us to understand gambling’s ambivalent cultural status as simultaneously ordinary and exceptional. Before proceeding, it is important to clarify why everyday life is such a foundational concept for critical cultural studies. An early essay by Raymond Williams titled “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958) explicitly defines a project of cultural studies against prevailing concepts of culture. On one hand, he identifies an elitist concept of culture as a set of critical practices and aesthetic

8

Introduction

achievements accessible to only some classes of people and individuals. On the other hand, he identifies patriotic formulations of a British “national” culture as the object of preservation and heritage projects. Insisting that urban and rural working people were equally capable of appreciating and contributing to society’s “most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings” (p. 75), Williams asserted that “Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind” (1958, p. 76). Challenging a pervasive false equation between “ordinary people” and pervasive descriptions of “the masses [as] low and trivial in taste and habit,” he famously argued “there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses” (Williams, 1958, pp. 83–84). This proposition would shape the emerging discipline of cultural studies through the late twentieth century because it went to the heart of wider questions about what it means to live, work, play, and communicate in late capitalist societies. Williams’ bold arguments about cultural value and democracy are significant for any study of gambling in everyday life. Refusing “the apparent division of our culture into, on the one hand, a remote and self-gracious sophistication, on the other hand, a doped mass” is a precondition for realizing democratic values: “That the ordinary people should govern; that culture and education are ordinary; that there are no masses to save, to capture, or to direct, but rather this crowded people in the course of an extraordinarily rapid and confusing expansion of their lives” (Williams, 1958, p. 92). Gambling spaces, products, and moments often appear in public discourse as “lower” forms of cultural entertainment, designed with the sole purpose of rousing the greed of ignorant and materialistic “masses” who are often assumed to be the most susceptible to developing “problem gambling” behaviours. As we will see, the socio-cultural judgements that circulate around gambling are tied to liberal formulations of the appropriate relationships between freedom and responsibility and rights and duties in the lives of individuals. For another early cultural studies theorist, John Fiske, academic studies of everyday life address a paradox that neither conservative studies of culture nor Marxist critiques satisfactorily account for: “The system can be exploited in the interests of the weak without opposing those interests directly to those of the powerful” (1988, p. 298). As with Williams’ focus on “ordinary culture,” Fiske sees in academic studies of everyday life a democratizing approach to popular culture “a significant recognition of the legitimacy of the people and their tastes” (1988, p. 298). Importantly, for Fiske, the move towards everyday culture is more than a legitimating process of incorporation, whereby objects of popular culture are “admitted” for academic scrutiny as case studies for existing academic paradigms such as screen theory, semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Rather than explicating the “real” meaning of popular culture from a position of academic privilege, researchers of everyday life strive to “gain from the people insights into cultural processes [previously] considered to be explicable only by academia” (Fiske, 1988, p. 305). One reason that the psy-scientific discourses of problem gambling, which I will examine in the next chapter, have dominated public understanding and

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policy is that academic scholarship on popular culture has often focused on the aesthetic quality of selected objects (particularly in film and television studies) on one hand and a somewhat formulaic search in popular texts and practices for signs of “resistance” to social domination on the other. Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” is a rare exception and frequently cited in the literature on gambling. As Buse et al. put it, for Benjamin, “the everyday is the outward sheath of the marvelous and the extraordinary, the possibility of something other than what is” (Buse, Hirschkop, McCracken, & Tiathe, 2005, p. 139). I will discuss Benjamin’s account of gambling as an everyday experience in chapter 3, when I examine gambling moments. This study refuses a choice between “aesthetic,” “theoretical,” and “political” approaches to gambling. I neither insist on the aesthetic quality of gambling products, experiences, and environments nor seek to find in them grounds of political resistance to dominant configurations of social power. In approaching gambling in the spaces, moments, and products of everyday life, I also draw on Michel Certeau’s (1984) location of popular culture within everyday life. The Practice of Everyday Life appeals to everyday life in an attempt to “foil here and now the social hierarchization which organizes scientific work on popular culture and repeats itself in that work” (Certeau, 1984, p. 25). In Chapter 2, I return to Certeau’s argument that the tactics of the weak within broader strategies of power can be seen as a specific mode of social enunciation, a way of speaking the received language of power (1984, p. 18). I follow Certeau in approaching gambling in everyday life as a way to understand “a social historicity in which systems of representation or processes of fabrication [not only] appear as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users” (1984, p. 21). We will see numerous examples of this. Gamblers appropriate the time of service workers in non-productive ways for individual and social ends; gambling venues are “poached” for purposes unconnected with gambling and the tools of marketing (like free parking in venues) are turned to conveniences that may not increase or even deliver gambling consumption. Media and communication studies provide other important contributions to our understanding of everyday life. As part of “ordinary lifestyles,” we see gambling refracted through representations in popular media genres, practices of consumption, and judgements of taste (Bell & Hollows, 2005). While “everyday life” and “popular culture” are sometimes used interchangeably in this cultural research, there are important analytical distinctions between the terms which need to be registered. Stuart Hall argues “there is no whole, authentic, autonomous ‘popular culture’ which lies outside the field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination” (p. 228); rather, “transformations are at the heart of popular culture” (1981, p. 232). The importance of popular culture lies in its power as a site where individuals and social classes are made and differentiated within dynamic processes of historical change. Because gambling is often deeply embedded in popular culture, it can be a dynamic site for the renewal and invention of traditions and identity formations. Chapter 3 provides an example of this in the institutionalization of a

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Introduction

popular gambling moment, the annual Melbourne Cup Day race. We will see how celebrations of this event simultaneously contain and exacerbate social tensions related to class, gender, national heritage, and values. Before proceeding further, it is important to register some critiques of the ways that everyday life has been mobilized in cultural studies research. I will briefly dwell on arguments by Rita Felski, who approaches everyday life within Western, modernist thought as “the most self-evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas” (1999, p. 15). Attending to historical elaborations of the term, she argues that “everyday life is not simply a neutral label for a pre-existing reality, but is freighted down with layers of meaning and associations” (Felski, 1999, p. 30). She cautions that, while everyday life “beckons to us with the beguiling allure of the ‘really real’ . . . discussions of everyday life are indelibly marked by the peculiar anxieties and obsessions of intellectuals” (2002, p. 607). As a consequence of this, “Either [everyday life] is rhapsodically affirmed and painted in glowing colours or it is excoriated as the realm of ultimate alienation and dehumanisation” (Felski, 1999, p. 30). Such characterizations, she argues, are a consequence of a modernist critical tradition which associates everyday life more closely with some groups “such as women and the working class” more than others and in which everyday life is “a term that is deployed by intellectuals to describe a non-intellectual relationship to the world” (Felski, 1999, p. 16). She argues that a tendency within certain strands of cultural studies scholarship to ascribe either a regressive or progressive political content to everyday life prevents recognition of its complicated relationship to the distinction between private and public; it includes domestic activities but also routine forms of work, travel and leisure. Furthermore, everyday life is not simply interchangeable with the popular; it is not the exclusive property of a particular social class or grouping. (Felski, 1999, p. 16) Felski highlights the value of feminist and cultural studies research that questions the view of “the everyday as something to be transcended, as the realm of monotony, emptiness, and dull compulsion” (1999, p. 17). And she turns to phenomenology to produce an alternative theory of everyday life as grounded in the social values of “repetition,” “home,” and “habit,” so denigrated by theorists enamoured of values such as novelty, mobility, and rupture. She suggests that “the temporality of the everyday . . . is that of repetition, the spatial ordering of the everyday is anchored in a sense of home and the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of habit” (Felski, 1999, p. 18, emphasis added). The value of Felski’s framework is that it enables us to recognize that “the experience of moving between the registers of the everyday and the extraordinary is surely shared by all human beings, not just some” (Felski, 2002, p. 617).

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Moreover, “it does not assume that certain kinds of people—call them nonintellectuals—are naïve, credulous, and blinded by ideology, whereas others— call them theorists—are uniquely able to see things as they really are” (Felski, 2002, p. 618). Instead she offers a more modest account of everyday life as “a form of orientation to one’s environment, a way of rendering macro-cultural systems meaningful and intelligible by translating them into manageable structures of sense on a human scale” (Felski, 2002, p. 618). This sense of everyday life’s inclusive and ubiquitous qualities is encapsulated by Michael Gardiner’s description of it as The crucial medium through which we enter into transformative praxis with nature, learn about comradeship and love, acquire and develop communicative competence, formulate and realize pragmatically normative conceptions, feel myriad desires, pains and exaltations, and eventually expire. In short, the everyday is where we develop our manifold capacities, both in an individual and collective sense, and become fully integrated and truly human persons. (Gardiner, 2000, p. 2) So, what is gambling’s role in supporting and unsettling prevailing conceptions of what it means to be truly human? To answer this question, we can turn to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological account of everyday life as embedded in the fields of cultural production and consumption that commercial gambling brings together. He uses the term habitus to explain individuals’ incorporation within the “structuring structures” which tend to define and reproduce social order and meaningful action (Bourdieu, 1977). As individuals act within and between distinct but related cultural fields, the sense of habitus adjusts our subjective expectations to the objective possibilities inscribed in concrete situations. At the level of everyday life, this process is often experienced and understood as a game: Culture is a stake which, like all social stakes, simultaneously presupposes and demands that one take part in the game and be taken in by it . . . The value of culture, the supreme fetish, is generated in the initial investment implied by the mere fact of entering the game, joining in the collective belief in the value of the game which makes the game and endlessly remakes the competition for the stakes. (1984, p. 250) How does gambling operates as habitus—the invisible medium through which social order and hierarchies reproduce themselves in everyday life? Chapter 1 links everyday judgements of taste about gambling products and spaces to broader contexts of social stratification—with gender and social class being the most obvious axes of “distinction.” An obvious example is the cultural boundary separating poker from electronic gaming machine play

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Introduction

in everyday life; while the former is associated with celebrity culture, youth, and high finance and masculinity (Austrin & Farnsworth, 2012), the latter is freighted with connotations of addiction, femininity, aging, and poverty. It will also consider the cultural or symbolic capital that non-participation in gambling might afford to individuals (including researchers) in societies saturated with legal gambling options. Our decisions to engage (or disengage) with gambling spaces, moments, and products expresses and communicates about who we are. We seek out, or avoid, spaces of gambling off- and online; we buy products of gambling or protest concerns about their safety; we celebrate certain moments of gambling as members of a workplace, a family, or a nation or resist social pressures to do so. Another way that gambling relates to habitus is slightly more abstract. Bourdieu considers the wager that individuals within modern secular states place on the value of society as such, referring to this as the illusio. By this he means not only an almost spiritual belief in the value of competitions within different social fields of endeavour but also a more fundamental confidence in “the forthcoming,” in the most banal senses of getting up and going to work in the morning and of having one’s investment of time socially recognized and valued. His acknowledgement that the social realities formed through the illusio are “essentialist” helps us to understand the everyday work of gambling in societies where capital is unequally distributed along racial and gendered lines (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 238; see also Goldberg, 2009). The persistence of whiteness as a form of symbolic capital in settler-occupying societies shapes how gambling is socially imagined, represented, and administered through political institutions that govern welfare, property, and taxation. Bourdieu’s suggestion that gambling manifests the exclusion of certain social groups from the game of society can be brought into dialogue with Certeau’s account of strategy and tactics and Felski’s account of everyday life in terms of “home, habit and repetition.” While the proliferation of gambling spaces is clearly a strategy of political domination, these spaces can also be re-tooled to serve as “weapons of the weak” for those who are otherwise unable to access amenities afforded by their places of home or work. As long as gambling venues are open to the public, facilities of heating, cooling, furniture, and cheap food and drinks can be accessed “for free” by individuals who may gamble very little or nothing at all. Concepts of habitus and “poaching” enable us to recognize the cultural logic guiding decisions that individuals may make as habitual consumers of gambling spaces, moments, and products. A more recent contribution to theories of everyday life comes from sociologist Piotr Sztompka (2008). Rejecting accounts that oppose everyday life to “magical, religious, ritual, symbolic, solemn and ceremonial practices” and to certain classes of people such as elites and celebrities and to public and political life, he argues that a focus on everyday life enables us to better understand important aspects of our contemporary world. These include “technological changes .  .  ., globalization, mega-urbanization, consumerism, flexible forms of work, transformations of intimacy, expansion of risk and saturation with

Introduction

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visuality” (Sztompka, 2008, p. 29). Gambling is implicated within all of these developments. Sztompka’s identification of distinctive aspects of everyday life generates several useful areas for gambling research (2008, p. 31). Firstly, everyday life always includes relationships with other people; secondly, events in everyday life are not unique but repeated, sometimes cyclically—from eating out every week to public holidays or national ceremonies; thirdly, everyday life often flows without our explicit awareness, entailing “ritual, dramatized, stylized forms following certain un-reflexive, deeply internalised scripts”; fourthly, everyday life engages our bodies as “indispensable props in our fullfledged relations with others”; fifthly, everyday life “is usually localized in space, it occurs at certain locations [which] significantly [determine its] character, the style, form and content.” And, finally, events in everyday life have a specific duration which significantly affects their character (Sztompka, 2008, pp. 31–32). This book will consider how relationships are affected by and constituted through gambling. It demonstrates how gambling marks or defines the events of everyday life and the extent to which our involvement in gambling (most broadly defined) is the object of self-conscious reflection. It also investigates how and why bodies matter in gambling relationships and the way that gambling spaces are designed, made, and used. And it will consider different moments of and for gambling and how these moments produce its character and that of its participants. We must attend to informal ways that gambling is socially regulated as well as how commercial gambling industries circumvent laws established to control them. A useful source is Gregory Bateson’s (1973) reflections on play in everyday life. He approaches play as a kind of meta-communication that can be unstable and volatile. We will see how gambling industries play with and exacerbate meta-communicative uncertainties about the borders between play, finance, and work by inviting our participation as “part of the game.” This can pose challenging questions, such as Is this just a game? Is she/he/I playing for real? Can this really be work? What are the stakes here? Is this fun? Who is in control? How do I get out? Should I go “all in”? and Who is keeping score? Such questions can produce paralysing double binds for individuals in everyday life. Because the borders between informal gambling on one hand and legally regulated commercial gambling on the other are often porous, such questions can produce paralysing double binds for individuals in everyday life. The theories of everyday life canvassed earlier all posit culture as a stake within broader social relations of power. We considered gambling with reference to popular culture’s “ordinariness” and the historical importance of its transformations as well as its position within force fields of habitus. We considered the building blocks of everyday life in values of repetition, home, and habit and approached everyday life as a site of tactics where strategies of social domination might be momentarily undermined. We considered how gambling is embedded in processes of play and the “gamification” of everyday life. The turn to governmentality helps to illuminate the everyday power relations which shape gambling’s production, consumption, promotion, and regulation.

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Introduction

We will see how gambling’s role within everyday life has been historically shaped by struggles over how to define and govern the proper boundaries between spheres of gambling, finance, work, and play.

Governmentality, Gambling, and Everyday Life Research that engages with questions of “governmentality” takes its broad cue from Michel Foucault’s critique of a “repression hypothesis,” within which power is seen to be ontologically distinct from resistance. In this context he argues, Where there is power, there is resistance [but] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power . . . Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary . . . by definition [resistances] can only exist in the strategic field of power relations. (Foucault, 1976, pp. 95–96) Foucault’s argument about the rise of modern academic disciplines and social institutions posits a historical shift from feudal arrangements of power where the right to punish and kill transgressors resides in the body of the sovereign. The objective of post-Enlightenment regimes of power becomes the disciplinary reform of individual and social bodies, with the aim of fostering various forms of life. He describes the efficient exercise of power within liberal democratic societies as biopolitical. That is, the governmentality of things and the conduct of individuals and populations in everyday life increasingly displaces the direct exercise of repressive force (Rose, 1999). Everyday life, rather than sovereignty, becomes the locus of “capillary” forms of power that are diffused throughout the entire social body and resisted locally rather than globally (see Nadesan, 2008). The framework of governmentality affords a nuanced way of understanding and contributing to political debates over gambling which are often framed by different versions of the repression hypothesis. For example, advocates of gambling deregulation cite consumer “choice” and “freedom” to develop new products and open new markets while gambling opponents complain that citizens are being victimized as gambling products, spaces, and moments colonize new aspects of everyday life. In contrast, Foucault’s insistence on the productive character of power directs our attention to how our world is created through the struggle between pro- and anti-gambling discourses. In this book we will see that gambling is not simply a human or social “drive” that requires expression; nor are gambling industries simply sinister vampires on the social body. Rather the rise of legal gambling industries generates new cultural, political, and economic opportunities and hazards which, in turn, shape the conduct and experience of everyday life in quite specific ways. Power and resistance will be approached as immanent and interwoven within

Introduction

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our everyday engagement with gambling rather than imagined as distinct and morally weighted sites or identities. The specificities of gambling as a research object require departure from some of the historicist claims found within some of the governmentality scholarship. Although the period between c1990 and c2015 from which I gather most of my examples of gambling is usually characterized as “neoliberal,” I will sometimes use the term “liberal” in my analysis. I agree with Mitchell Dean (2010) that the term “neoliberalism” should be reserved for specific programmes of governmentality (some of which are directly related to gambling), but I disagree that “advanced liberalism” is a preferable term to describe liberalism’s manifestations in our current moment. The term “advanced” suggests a historical direction, if not an ultimate destination, of liberal social, cultural, and political forms. In this book I will use the term “finopower” to explain the co-existing modalities of governance which shape the everyday lives of individuals and organizations. This captures the transforming intersections between gambling, work, finance, and play without ascribing a predetermined destination to which their entanglement is leading. Gambling is not explicitly analyzed either by Foucault or within most governmentality researchers’ accounts of disciplinary and control societies. Kerry Chambers study of commercial gambling highlights the importance of historical contingency when we approach gambling: to understand the production of gambling practices we need to combine past and present interactions of the political-economic and sociocultural contexts where it takes place. Gambling for profit only emerges with the right mix of political, economic, social, and cultural factors. Furthermore, different configurations of these conditions produce variations in timing of adoption, regulatory arrangements, types of gambling legalized, and structural characteristics of each form. Since these conditions are grounded in contingencies, we must reject universal explanations of the manner in which legal gambling develops and evolves. We need to instead build conditional theoretical models based in historical preconditions and current events. (2011, p. 185) This is consistent with my approach to governmentality in which transformations rather than transitions are the focus. So, while I agree with Majia Nadesan that “Biopower’s mantra of the rational administration of life promises a means for realizing the elusive cybernetic fantasy of a society of self-regulating individuals” (2008, p. 3), I would not agree that “Under neoliberal governmentalities, sovereignty is disseminated amongst society’s members as the welfare state sheds responsibility for its pastorate by shifting risk and empowerment to its subjects” (Nadesan, 2008, p. 3). Once gambling is placed into the frame of governmentality studies, a new model is required to account for the way that sovereignty, discipline, and

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Introduction

biopower shape everyday life in liberal democratic societies. Rather than identifying phases of “laissez-faire liberalism,” “welfare liberalism,” and “neoliberalism” (Nadesan, 2008, p. 7), we can investigate how that these modalities of governmentality coexist in gambling’s governance. The focus then becomes not how gambling has changed over time so much as how each modality of governmentality organizes different constellations of gambling, finance, work, and play. These constellations can be very broadly mapped to understand the political implications of different modes of governmentality, which often overlap in everyday life. A laissez faire mode of governmentality exploits synergies between gambling and finance through lotteries and insurance schemes that manage the risks and opportunities of colonial ventures (Rubner, 1966, pp. 14–15). While gambling on cards and wagering on racing become popular among all classes, working-class citizens are invited to spend their leisure on “improving” pursuits, most notably sports, and uplifting cultural activities, such as attending art and natural history museums (Bennett, 2006). In a social welfare mode of governmentality, we see gambling subject to more state surveillance and control. Casinos, lotteries, bingo, and racing may be legalized, but prudent decisions are made about the opportunities and risks these pose to prosperity within bounded populations—from nations to sub-national jurisdictions such as states, provinces, and territories. While practices and performances within finance continue to be homologous with those of gambling, investment is clearly segregated from everyday practices of work and play. As states seek knowledge to protect the welfare of citizens, the “problem gambler” emerges as a distinct subject of psy-scientific research and regulation (Castellani, 2000; Collins, 1996/2006). Neoliberal governmentality transforms a closely regulated and socially problematic aspect of leisure into an instrument of state purpose and profitable component of multinational entertainment industries. Distinctions between finance, gambling, work, and play are often eroded (Taylor, 2004) as digital platforms of communication disperse everyday life across time and space. Investment institutions and opportunities are democratized and subjects are exhorted to use these to “leverage” their potential for wealth. While problem gambling continues to attract government intervention, it is increasingly reframed in neuroscientific terms as one among many problems of addiction caused by calculative media platforms that characterize digital culture. While this schematic overview captures broad transformations in spaces, moments, and products, the ways that gambling in everyday life is inflected by sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical exercises of power will depend, at least in part, on the populations of which individuals are designated members. This means that the ideological tension between “freedom to gamble” and “freedom from gambling” in liberal political debates has very real implications for different populations. While academics in everyday life are most likely to experience power as a permissive exhortation to “enjoy” (Zizek, 1999) and to exercise our “powers of freedom” (Rose, 1999) to choose within the

Introduction

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marketplace of ideas, it certainly is not the case that sovereign power never says “no” within liberal democratic societies. Accounts of post-disciplinary power, building on Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) argument about “control societies,” are often more attentive to everyday manifestations of sovereignty. Deleuze predicted a shift in the locus of power from disciplinary institutions that Foucault (1977) described as “panopticism” to cybernetic networks of enclosure where access is controlled and subjects are shaped less as individuals than as dividuals—open to continual intervention and modulation (Bratich, 2006). While this more recent elaboration of governmentality is extremely useful for understanding how gambling spaces and products are designed and engaged with (see Reith, 2013, p. 729), it is important not to overstate arguments about post-human and post-disciplinary forms of power. It is possible to recognize the persistence of institutional and individualizing forms of governmentality while remaining attentive to “dividualizing” processes such as branding and digital enclosures. In particular we need to attend to the role of gambling in making specific populations the target of punitive welfare policies which involve more or less direct exercise of force through surveillance and policing functions of the state (Nicoll, 2018; Spieker, 2013). The formation of social identities within and through liberal regimes of gaming is an important focus of this book. It matters where gambling is located and happening; it matters who is gambling and in what company; it matters how their gambling is judged by others; it matters whether their gambling is more or less public or private; it matters whether gambling accrues positive or negative economic, cultural, or social capital for individuals; and it matters how gambling is configured through state governments and borders which determine its availability and confirm its legitimacy. For while liberal regimes of government centre on an individual subject of rights and freedoms, they do so in quite distinct ways. Social identity marks an important point where experience, embodiment, sovereignty, and population converge to shape the everyday lives of gamblers. Marieke De Goede’s (2005) genealogical account of finance demonstrates that an opposition between an orientation towards money classified as “financial” and one classified as “gambling” has been formative of Western culture since the eighteenth century. She describes how a “rational” sphere of finance was secured against gambling in gendered terms: “A specifically masculine and supposedly scientific notion of certainty and foresight became articulated in opposition to Fortuna’s dangers” (2005, p. 173). Constitutional democracies originally excluded women, slaves, and Indigenous people from a legal status as fully individual subjects and the rights and protections this afforded. Instead they were relegated to adjunct status as property of white males. Gambling marks and is marked by a tension within liberal thought, which cultural historian Jackson Lears (2003) explains through a binary opposition between “cultures of control” and “cultures of chance.” This gendered and racializing opposition fuelled capitalist expansion and colonial occupation from the

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Enlightenment and has shaped the liberal social and political institutions built upon Indigenous lands ever since. Character traits associated with “cultures of control” were encapsulated by Max Weber, who took Benjamin Franklin as a cultural figure to illustrate the “ideal type” of an emergent subject of North American capitalism in his thesis on the Protestant work ethic (Weber, 2005). While feminist and postcolonial movements through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fought for and often achieved formal legal inclusion into the domain of free individual subjects, this victory was partial and incomplete. Social identities today have rarely been so complicated and resistant to established frameworks of analysis. Transnational flows of capital, labour, and seekers of asylum, together with the domination of public life by large corporations, have made classical liberal distinctions between public and private, sacred and secular, male and female domains, citizens and strangers sharper in some contexts and fuzzier in others. The rise of illiberal variants of JudeoChristian, Hindu, and Islamic fundamentalism and of new racisms and neoliberal modes of governmentality has spawned new social justice movements to counter problems of social inequality, domestic violence, and reinvigorated white racisms. What does this politically volatile terrain mean for individuals as we encounter gambling spaces, moments, and products in everyday life? Later I will advocate a subtle shift in the focus of research, from the relationship between gambling and everyday life (taken as analytically discrete concepts) to an investigation of how individuals negotiate and manage our everyday relationships to a plethora of risks and opportunities presented through gambling’s cultural spaces, moments, and products. This shift neither validates nor invalidates the arguments for more or less regulation of gambling elaborated in earlier decades or even centuries. To the contrary, my final chapter will explore how classical liberal terms such as “freedom,” “equality,” and “democracy” are being successfully redeployed by academics and activists to effect shifts on the ground of gambling regulation. The literature on everyday life and governmentality examined earlier underpins the concept of finopower, a term I have developed to describe what liberalism looks like when viewed through the lens of gambling.

Finopower: Transforming Intersections Between Gambling, Finance, Work, and Play An advertisement for the UK Health Lottery playfully addresses potential consumers at a moment when home ownership is receding as an achievable ideal for a generation of under-employed citizens on short-term contracts. The text is simple: Mortgage? What mortgage? In the midst of the global financial crisis of 2008, I notice a promotion between “pokie lounges” (segregated areas in licensed venues where electronic gaming machines are situated) and Brisbane’s tabloid newspaper, the Sunday Mail. This poster—placed on the front of a bank of electronic gaming machines—like many advertisements at the height of the global financial crisis, appealed to consumers’ desire for “value for money” and refers directly to the Australian federal

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government’s payment of a $900 bonus to taxpayers as a preventative measure against recession. Under the banner “New Year Stimulus Plan,” the poster offers $5 value vouchers for collection in the Sunday Mail. In small print at the bottom, it explains that consumers who spend $20 would receive $5 value discount on food, at the bar, and on Keno bets and bonus credits on electronic gaming machines. To prevent bypass of electronic gaming machines in search of this extra value at the venue, the small print informed them that the deal is “only available at the pokies cashier.” The examples above illustrate how ordinary processes of finance and entertainment are packaged with reference to gambling themes and opportunities while gambling products and spaces are marketed through appeals to ordinary financial decisions and practices. An invitation to play a social game, an investment opportunity, and a “hot tip” on a sporting fixture can appear and feel like very similar propositions. Opportunities to win large prizes have become so embedded within everyday marketing and consumption that we barely notice them. Consider how frequently we’re invited to choose between a purchase that simply delivers a good or services and one that also provides an opportunity to be a winner. Even if the value to the consumer is better in the former case, consumers are left with lingering regret for passing up the opportunity to win a year of free petrol, an overseas holiday, or the latest Apple product. It is not simply that buying to win is more fun than shopping for necessities, there is also a logic embedded within the former which can feel difficult to refuse. One of my undergraduate students succinctly encapsulated the cultural tensions underpinning television genres where audience members are provided with an opportunity to gamble with media networks’ money, such as Deal or No Deal. In response to my question to the class about why contestants appear to be so anxious, even though they are not wagering their own money, my student advanced a theory. Contestants are not anxious about losing, but rather terrified at the prospect of “losing the opportunity to win.” The use of everyday financial terms within casino and television game shows such as “banker” and “dealer,” and “spinning the wheel” of fortune elicits strong attachments to the prospect of un-earned wealth. This makes it very easy to feel we are losing just because we’re not winning. A more recent genre of cash-giveaway television dispenses with contestants on screen, charging premium phone rates for players to participate in games that exist to accumulate calls rather than to provide entertainment for viewers. Networked platforms for employment, banking, entertainment, and gambling are continuously available on the screens of our hand-hand mobile devices and further blur the boundaries between gambling, work, investment, and play (Gregg, 2011). Rather than being opposed to one another or existing in a relationship of analogy, gambling and finance are increasingly entangled in broader cultural processes of play. Joyce Goggin captures this aspect of finopower in her account of ludic dimensions of finance and the financial power of gaming in platforms including Second Life and World of Warcraft. Specifically, she notes how a ban on gambling in the virtual world of Second Life in 2007 was paradoxically able to establish boundaries between gambling

20

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and other aspects of financial activity that would be impossible in the broader global economy. She reflects, “If being ‘real’ means that something can be intervened in or regulated, then the . . . Second Life economy is perhaps more real . . . than the off-line economy” (Goggin, 2012, p. 452). How do we make sense of the indeterminacy that increasingly structures relationships between gambling, work, investment, and play in online and offline contexts? The neologism of “finopower” derives from Foucault’s argument that biopower is a product of liberal disciplines of political economy. Observing the rise of neoliberalism after the decline of welfare state economies, he argued, “only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (Foucault, 2004b, p. 22). Tracing a broader shift from the police state to liberal governmentality, he saw in the economic and political theories of Adam Smith (1776/2008) and Jeremy Bentham (1843) an inextricable connection between the “freedom of the market” and “the problem of public law, namely that of limiting the power of public authorities” (Foucault, 2004b, p. 38). Rather than a period within capitalism’s historical evolution, he saw liberalism as “a principle and a method of rationalizing the exercise of government” (Foucault, 2004a, p. 74) and neoliberalism as a further formalization of relations between the market, society, and the self. In this sense, liberalism is “not as an ideology or a way of characterizing a society but a practice . . . a ‘way of doing things,’ oriented towards objectives and regulating itself by means of sustained reflection” (Foucault, 2004a, pp. 73–74). Liberal political economy for Foucault is not a matter of mapping how power works through capitalist systems of ownership and their attendant labour relations: “Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or errors, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false” (Foucault, 2004b, p. 20). He argued that a fundamental truth produced by the disciplines of political economy is that “A government is never sufficiently aware that it always risks governing too much” (Foucault, 2004b, p. 18). Thus, modern biopolitics is a product of a very specific rationality. He asks, What is this new type of rationality in the art of government, this new type of calculation that consists in saying and telling government: I accept, wish, plan, and calculate that all this should be left alone? I think that this is broadly what is called liberalism (Foucault, 2004b, p. 20). Today . . . the fundamental question is not the constitution of states, but without a doubt the question of the frugality of government (Foucault, 2004b, p. 29). For Foucault, then, “the economy” is not a discrete social and political entity so much as a set of governmental processes designed around the central value of frugality or “efficiency.”

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While the value of freedom lies at the heart of both classical liberalism and neoliberalism, with the latter, relations between self, society, and market become inextricably entangled. Distinctions between production and consumption tend to dissolve as the self becomes the object of both processes and the foundations of a social fabric with which states are warned not to interfere (Foucault, 2004b, p. 226). Whereas the exchange value of labour power guided classical liberal economic theory, for neoliberal theorists: homo economicus is an entrepreneur . . . of himself . . . being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings .  .  . The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes is a producer. What does he produce? Well quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. (Foucault, 2004b, p. 226) This shift from the subject of labour and exchange to a neoliberal version of the self as manufacturer of its own satisfactions produces whole new domains of knowledge about “human capital,” including genetics, psychology, and neuroscience. The concept of finopower takes gambling to be constitutive of and immanent within liberal capitalism, regardless of how much or how little of it is allowed at any given point in time. Foucault argued that the totalitarian experiments of Nazism and State Communism provided neoliberal theorists with a historical foil for their elaboration of a subject free from the state controls and grand social designs associated with the Keynesian welfare state and New Deal settlements between labour and capital (Foucault, 2004b, pp. 172–173). Friedrich Hayek (2011), in particular, was critical of constitutional formulations of the relations between state, society, and market, seeing a minimalist task for law: guaranteeing freedom of the entrepreneurial self against state or civil actors who would define or circumscribe it. The state’s role was to secure the rules of the competitive games to which self-maximizing individuals must adhere. In everyday life we often encounter finopower is a type of address which enjoins us in “state phobia” (Anderson, 2012, pp. 37–38). Liberating gambling from the restrictions imposed by state powers is an important way that this state phobia is evidenced and celebrated. The history of gambling is one in which states have attempted to eliminate, control, or harness its power with more or less success and popular consent. Gambling was both organized and profitable prior to the emergence of liberal political theory and governmentality. However, it was only with the universalizing ambition of liberalism that gambling became an integral component of statecraft. Revolutionary intellectual Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat (marquis) de Concordet first defined “natural liberty [as] the right to do anything that does not injure the rights of others” (cited in McDonald, 1993, p. 183). His contemporary, Marie-Jeanne Roland, added an affective dimension to her definition of political liberty as “the power to be happy without

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Introduction

harming anyone else” (cited in McDonald, 1993, p. 188). Gambling posed a conundrum for John Stuart Mill who, together with his wife, Harriet Taylor, developed On Liberty, one of the most influential philosophical rationales for the supreme value accorded to free individuals within market societies. The Mills pondered what to do about the existence of classes of persons with an interest opposed to what is considered as the public weal, and whose mode of living is grounded on the counteraction of it. Ought this to be interfered with or not? Fornication, for example, must be tolerated, and so must gambling; but should a person be free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling house? (Mill, 1974, pp. 169–170) Noting that these cases “lie on the exact boundary line” between principles of social control and individual liberty, On Liberty discusses political strategies, including taxation and strict licensing conditions, to balance gambling’s potential social costs with the toleration of individual choice: A further question is, whether the State, while it permits, should nevertheless indirectly discourage conduct which it deems contrary to the best interest of the agent; whether, for example, it should take measures to render the means of drunkenness more costly, or add to the difficulty of procuring them by limiting the number of the places of sale .  .  . To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained, is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste. Their choice of pleasure, and their mode of expending their income after satisfying their legal and moral obligations to the State and to individuals, are their own concern, and must rest with their own judgement. [But States need money and indirect taxation is preferred to direct] . . . It is hence the duty of the State to consider, in the imposition of taxes, what commodities the consumers can best spare; and a fortiori, to select in preference those of which it deems the use, beyond a very moderate quantity, to be positively injurious. Taxation, therefore, of stimulants, up to the point which produces the largest amount of revenue (supposing that the State needs all the revenue which it yields) is not only admissible, but to be approved of. This highlights gambling (along with prostitution, alcohol, and drugs) as a fundamental part of the everyday social contexts that liberal government was designed to encompass. While moral censure was widespread, especially through religious and other social reform movements of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, gambling was not imagined as outside the

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scope of society as such. The Mills’ reflections on using the taxation of vice to generate revenue for states remain pertinent today. For it is partly due to the economic value of vice for governments that gambling spaces, moments, and products have become the object of research centred on individual pathologies to be discussed in the following chapter. Almost a century after the Mills’ meditations on the toleration of vice in a period of strong moral sanctions against gambling in Britain, John Maynard Keynes argued that implementing a state lottery with many small prizes would help to prevent the spread of illegal gambling. In a report to the Royal Commission on Lotteries held in 1933, he considered some of the benefits that regulated gambling offered, for both individuals and society: Gambling should be cheap, fair, frivolous and on a small scale. . . . I think it would add to the cheerfulness of life if punctually everyone in the country was to wake up each Sunday morning, stretching out for the Sunday papers with just a possibility that they had won a small fortune. It is agreeable to be habitually in the state of imagining all sorts of things as possible. (Keynes, cited in Downes et al., 1976, p. 40) For Keynes, regulated gambling was not only an evil to be tolerated and taxed but also a supplement, which adds to and completes everyday life (see Derrida, 1967/1976). I will return to Keynes at different points throughout this book, not because his academic and policy work focused on gambling but because apologists for gambling’s expansion have often taken bearings from the “Chicago School” of economic theory, which is explicitly opposed to Keynesianism. The refraction of liberal political philosophical ideas in debates about gambling almost a century after the birth of macro-economic theory makes it easy to lose sight of the continuities and personal sympathies between those who founded it (see Clarke, 2009, p. 10). As Foucault explains, the question that exercised both the first generation of neoliberal theorists and its critics was will liberalism in fact be able to bring about its real objective . . . a general formalization of the powers of the state and the organization of society on the basis of the market economy? Can the market really have the power of formalization for both the state and society? (2004a, p. 117) The concept of finopower provides one way to address these questions today. I use it to highlight gambling as a ghost in the machine of neoliberal governmentality for which it performs two vital functions. The first is to provide neoliberalism with everyday theatres of performance and social interactivity, and the second is to supplement the resources of the frugal state through taxation. While the former works on the symbolic level, the latter works at the level of politics and economy. Importantly, both inscribe and reproduce

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Introduction

neoliberalism’s claim that the individual is the site where the truth of gambling is to be found. As we will see throughout this book, this claim creates, in turn, the conditions for gambling to infuse everyday processes of work, play, and finance. As a concept referring to the operation of products, spaces, and moments of gambling in everyday life, “finopower” also emphasizes the articulation between spheres of gambling, finance, work, and play in everyday life. The concept of “articulation” derives from Stuart Hall’s method of cultural analysis called “conjunctural politics.” Rather than analyzing culture through the framework of grand narratives which guarantee or promise social liberation or progress, conjunctural politics provide a way of looking at the social, political, economic and cultural contradictions in [a] period of political settlement, and trying to understand how they are articulated to produce that settlement—and how an alternative political project might seek to produce a different settlement through different forms of articulation. (Hall & Massey, 2010, p. 57) Accordingly, my account of gambling in everyday life is neither utopian nor dystopian. As such, it pursues a “politics without guarantees” (Hall, 1981) and rejects metanarratives that posit social justice projects, such as feminism and post-colonialism, as “over” (Ahmed, 2012, pp. 179–180). Or, to put it another way, my approach to the cultural history and social analysis of gambling is to understand it as “a dialectic without synthesis,” whereby new elements are introduced into capitalism which displace but do not necessarily replace existing ones (Taylor, 2004, p. 52). In the pages that follow, we will see that spaces, moments, and products of gambling can be overwhelming in their scale, attraction, and forcefulness, as well as banal, invisible, and unexamined, and the kinds of enjoyment they offer can be more or less ordinary or extraordinary. If states, gambling, and markets are inherently entangled, the question is not simply a matter of whether gambling should be more or less strictly regulated. Rather—as we will see in the final chapter of this book—the question is what the relationship between gambling, finance, work, and play should look like. How does gambling in everyday life secure the liberal value of frugal government? What efficiencies are created through the convergence of work, play, finance, and gambling? What is to be done about the innumerable losers that commercial gambling’s zero-sum games produce as their “human waste”? (Bauman, 2005). When I refer to “expanding intersections between gambling, finance, work, and play,” I am not arguing that cultural and moral distinctions between these spheres are, themselves, disintegrating. Rather, I show that these intersections are extraordinarily profitable spaces that function to create uncertainty about where the boundaries between working, playing, gambling, and investing lie. It is possible that increasing social advocacy related to problem gambling,

Introduction

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together with concerns about global economic inequality, will cause the lines between gambling, work, and play to become more firmly entrenched. However, this would not mean a return to Enlightenment or Keynesian configurations of finopower but a new settlement about what it means to invest, gamble, work, and play in everyday life, or a fundamental re-evaluation of liberal claims about markets and governments. In the final chapter of this book, I argue that the latter will require significant transformation of prevalent, neoliberal, understandings of what it means to be human. I have described “finopower” as a process whereby spaces, products, and moments of gambling work together to enable a frugal exercise of power over individuals and populations. Defined most simply, it is an aspect of biopower that concerns individuals’ relationship to money in everyday life, from investment, wage earning, business ownership, and shopping to insurance, gift exchange, and gambling. Finopower brings together material and symbolic aspects of biopower by governing the relationship between wealth and poverty. As Achille Mbembe and subsequent theorists of state sovereignty have shown, “necropower” is at one end of the biopolitical spectrum and fostering life is at the other (2003). The social death and incapacitation which often links bankruptcy to suicidal thoughts and acts lies at one end while the capacity to generate and enjoy money lies at the other. In this sense, it is possible to describe large or repeated gambling losses as finocide. In chapters 4 and 5, we will see that while the relationship between finocide and suicide is not always direct or causal, it should not be ignored by researchers and policy makers.

Methodologies The everyday life of individuals has become a source of data harvested by companies which, in turn, provide customized marketing of gambling spaces, moments, and products. In spite of this, those who play within commercial gambling industries often seem invisible to those who research and govern gambling. To bridge the gap between existing research on gambling, produced primarily from disciplines of psychology and medicine and a much smaller but vital body of social research, I combine insights of critical cultural theory with ethnography and other social research methods. The social research methods used in this book acknowledge Felski’s point that we should eschew “statements about the daily lives of others that are not supported by evidence and example” (2002, p. 618). This raises the question of what constitutes evidence and example in the study of everyday life. The methods used throughout this book build on Felski’s point that “the quotidian is not an objectively given quality but a lived relationship” (Felski, 1999, p. 31). When it comes to gambling, accessing the lived relationships from which evidence and examples are generated is unusually challenging. With important exceptions (see, in particular, Schull, 2012; Cassidy, 2002, 2007; Sallaz, 2009), gambling spaces, moments, and products are largely opaque to researchers. Gaining access is highly challenging due to the involvement of

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Introduction

powerful government and commercial interests in retaining the status quo that sustains their revenue. Research in gambling venues is often prohibited as disruptive of business and as invasive of gamblers’ privacy. There are typically rules in place limiting photography, and the vigilance of security personnel makes it almost impossible to inhabit gambling venues as an observer. This is one reason that the vast majority of gambling studies are conducted either via population-level surveys or in custom-built laboratories. However, there are significant biases associated with these research methods, including payment or non-monetary compensation to participants, the recruitment of undergraduate university students as research subjects, and the very different social and behavioural contexts of gambling in laboratories, compared to gambling in actual venues. Moreover, participation often skews towards individuals who are aware of or have disclosed problems linked to their gambling, prior to being approached by researchers. There are several other methodological issues affecting social research on gambling. The first is an epistemological obstacle described by Pierre Bourdieu as “fallacies of the rule” (1977, p. 22); that is when we take statements about cultural rules by participants in social research at face value, without acknowledging the gap between practice and theory and the strategic agency of research participants. The second methodological problem is identified by feminist and critical race standpoint theorists (Collins, 1997; Harding, 1993; Moreton-Robinson, 2013). These authors point to the challenge of producing representations of the everyday lives of dominated social groups by putatively disinterested and disembodied researchers using scientific methods and universal theoretical frameworks; they argue instead that the standpoint of subjugation can produce new knowledge about dominant and dominating social formations. Their insights are valuable because research on gambling too often reduces social harms to the “co-morbidities” and “vulnerability” of individuals from subjugated social groups, without exploring the sources and kinds of violence that render them targetable for different kinds of predations. While some of the most important and recent research on gambling employs methods from science and technology studies and actor network theory, this work poses other methodological issues. In particular, key concepts including “assemblages,” “affect,” and “actants” often reproduce Western epistemological distinctions between human, nature, body, mind, and machines, even in the process of “transcending” them. While this can produce extremely rich descriptions of gambling organizations, technologies, environments, and affects, attention to the political relations that continue to produce and sustain gambling spaces, moments, and products in neoliberal societies is often lacking. Communication materials generated by gambling and gambling industries are an important source of evidence used in this book, as are statements on the public record by politicians, academic experts, social welfare advocates, and members of the communities on whose behalf they purport to speak. I pay close attention to popular practices and representations of gambling in

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media sources over the past decade and a half. And I engage with a sparse but significant body of scholarship that maps gambling’s relationship with finance, games, and labour over the past three centuries. Rather than providing a window through which to peer at an otherwise opaque socio-cultural phenomenon, I use qualitative research to address readers who are understood as citizen-stakeholders in gambling spaces, practices, products, and moments. Cassidy, Pisac, and Loussouarn describe qualitative research as a creative process, not a straightforward exercise in description or enumeration. It requires us to examine our own assumptions about the dynamics of gambling, its social meaning and its function before we devise ways to investigate alternatives. Each of us is to be found “in” our research as an active participant with a reflexive awareness of how we produce knowledge as researchers. (2013a, p. 23) The methods I use are guided by a conviction that work within a critical cultural studies tradition—including Marxism, feminism, critical race studies—still has much to offer an investigation of gambling in everyday life. At several points in the book, I draw on experiences as a “participantobserver” of gambling moments and spaces and as a consumer of gambling products. Participant-observation requires researchers to “take part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions, and events of a group of people as one of the means of learning the explicit and tacit aspects of their life routines and their culture” (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2010, p. 1). While it is conventional within the discipline of anthropology to conduct participant-observation on or with people whose location, values, knowledge systems, and laws are radically different from those of the anthropologist, it is less common for researchers to conduct participant-observation on people who are “closer to home,” both literally and metaphorically. In 1982, David M. Hayano, an anthropologist who had established a career as an expert on Papua New Guinea, published an academic study on poker parlours in his local area where he played regularly. He dedicated a lengthy appendix to explain why this local research was scientifically legitimate, observing: There is a growing body of information on the personal experience of research by fieldworkers in the social sciences. Still a noticeable gap exists between the researcher’s stated empirical and theoretical interests and his finished monographs. This gap—the methods and experiences of data collection—can be closed only if researchers are willing to undertake a closer examination of their motives, involvement, and analytical procedures. (Hayano, 1982, p. 143)

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He was aware that, in communicating his fieldwork to academic audiences, he would “either have to frame the subject in the detached jargon of social science or spend a lot of time telling anecdotes about the players” (Hayano, 1982, p. 151). However, establishing expertise through “looking over the rails” onto the poker playing area is the equivalent of the much maligned nineteenth-century “armchair anthropologist.” His “attempt to present an insider’s view of the work of professional poker players could only be accomplished by prolonged immersion and, more important, by being a player” (Hayano, 1982, p. 155). The value of qualitative approaches to gambling research in a research context dominated by quantitative methods will be discussed in detail in the following chapter. There are some other precedents for participant-observation as a method of gambling research. John Rosecrance’s (1985) ethnographic study of “inveterate” wagers in Lake Tahoe grappled with very similar challenges to those described by Hayano: Scientific research in this area has been insignificant. Even anecdotal or folk knowledge consists of inaccurate stereotypes . . . Even though millions of Americans are influenced by their participation in this activity, the social world of horse race gambling remains largely invisible. (Rosecrance, 1985, p. 5) Although a relatively skillful gambler, he acknowledged that his study was shaped by his position as a researcher who had also experienced the negative contingencies that are an integral part of this endeavour. I have felt the confusion and insecurity that results from a protracted losing streak. I have resorted to self-defeating gambling techniques out of frustration and anger. Unfortunately, much of my empathetic knowledge results from having shared negative consequences with other “inveterates.” (Rosecrance, 1985, p. 14) To produce knowledge of gambling spaces, moments, and products, I did not sit aside from “the action” making notes on a laptop, but simultaneously experienced and reflected on the enjoyment of playing different games with time and money that I judged to be affordable. The availability of time and money for gambling changed over the ten years of my participant-observation, as did my tendency to spend more of each than I intended. Different sites of my participant-observation research included gambling venues located in London (UK), Edmonton (Canada), and Sydney and Brisbane (Australia). The most sustained site of my research was undertaken in a gambling venue within a large hotel in Brisbane. It was through participantobservation in this venue that I became involved in conversations about gambling with staff members and customers over a period of four or five years. I

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will refer to insights gathered from my relationship with these individuals at different points throughout this book. For four years, I also participated in gambling events, punters clubs, and lotto syndicates with colleagues in my university department of around 50 staff members. While the method of participant-observation was important for qualitative research, I also found it insufficient. I needed to corroborate my observations with other kinds of social research so I could exclude experiences and interpretations that were idiosyncratic and focus on social practices and meanings that are widely shared in the cultural field of gambling. Institutional ethnography provided another valuable method for several reasons. Firstly, it enabled me to more rigorously explore my location as a researcher relative to others in the broader field of gambling. As Marie Campbell and Frances Gregor explain, Rather than treating a knower’s location as a problem of bias . . . [institutional ethnography] reveals something about whose interests are served. And that is an issue of power. To explore how knowing relates to power, institutional ethnographers study how one’s knowledge is organized—by whom and by what. (2002, p. 15) They argue further that Institutional ethnographers believe that people and events are actually tied together in ways that make sense of such abstractions as power, knowledge, capitalism, patriarchy, race, the economy, the state, policy, culture and so on. (Campbell & Gregor, 2002, p. 17) In contrast to participant-observation, as described earlier, institutional ethnography identifies specific “problematics” that link researcher and researched together, not just within, but also across, specific institutional locations. Within the broad theoretical framework of finopower outlined in the previous section, I used institutional ethnography to identify enjoyment as the cultural and political problematic that both structures gambling spaces, moments, and products and poses specific challenges for governance. I supplemented participant-observation by conducting institutional ethnography over five years in the following ways. I conducted in-depth interviews, administered surveys, and held focus groups with individuals who had engaged with gambling in different roles. These included students, knowledge workers, creative workers, administrators, finance workers, activists, and retirees. Each of these sources of information contributed to my understanding of spaces, moments, and products of gambling in everyday life. The site of my institutional ethnography was a large public sector organization located in an Australian capital city. With nearly 60,000 staff, this organization’s employees and clients ranged in ages from 18 to 70 and was

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significantly stratified by gender, with men occupying more positions as knowledge workers and directors and women dominating finance and administration roles. Together with a research assistant, I administered three annual surveys on Melbourne Cup Day celebrations and two focus groups as well as conducting face-to-face and email interviews with staff and others recruited using a snowballing method. Social research gathered in this way provided a yardstick against which to evaluate my perceptions of gambling in the workplace as a participant-observer. A further source of original social research was interviews with gamblers and former employees of gambling industries. These individuals provided a view of gambling industries from the inside. I also interviewed academic and activist critics of gambling deregulation. These people provided insight into more or less effective strategies used to advocate for individuals and communities harmed by gambling products. Together with material generated by participant-observation, these interviews provide a sense of the rich texture and complex politics of gambling in the everyday lives of individuals. The final source of evidence and examples for this research was autoethnography. This method can be controversial insofar as it challenges perceptions about the boundary that should divide research objects from research subjects. As Chris Hackley explains, For many social scientists, science is the task of gaining agreement on general principles, even though this may entail an order of reductionism. It matters not that such research fails to capture the human condition, because that is the task of art. On such a view, interpretive social science methods like autoethnography confuse the two ends, the scientific, and the humanistic. An alternative view is that interpretive work can reinscribe social science with a sense of meaning and ethics that has been lost in so much of our self-referential published research, and that it can re-connect it to culture. Autoethnography represents one such approach to attempting to invest social research with meaning, humanity and zest, capturing both the scientific values of truth, and the human need for meaning. (Hackley, 2016, p. 115) Auto-ethnography introduced a rigor to my thinking beyond the methods of participant-observation, social research, and institutional ethnography. It was not enough for me to observe and play; I had to account for the experience of my play through regular processes of self-reflection. I also had to consider how my identity as an academic researcher, who was known by other gamblers to be writing a book on gambling, impacted their relationships with me and what they chose to disclose and withhold about their experiences. I signal my auto-ethnographic reflections by using italics at different points in the book.

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Structure The concept of finopower structures this book in two ways. Firstly, it forms a pivot, connecting gambling to theories of everyday life on one hand and to theories of governmentality on the other. Secondly, it provides the foundation for permutations of “enjoyment” that I will explore throughout the book. The book is divided into five parts, followed by a short postscript. Three chapters explore how everyday life is shaped by local, regional, national, and transnational spaces, products, and moments of gambling. By spaces, I mean both establishments dedicated to pursuing the business of gambling and spaces where gambling occurs. Spaces of gambling can be physical and online, and they can deliver profits to a “house” or exist on an informal, community, or social basis. By moments of gambling, I refer to the subjective experience of gambling as well as gambling events such as sporting competitions, lotteries, and casino games. Moments of gambling can be produced specifically for the purpose of wagering, such as horse races, or they can be attached to events that unfold in time, such as changes in stock price movements. By products of gambling, I mean systems, equipment, and paraphernalia, technology, media platforms, and services that enable gambling. Products may be used to generate profit or simply to facilitate gambling between players in the absence of a commercial house. In everyday life, we will typically experience spatial, temporal, and material aspects of gambling together. For example, we may use an online sports betting platform with specific design characteristics to experience a gambling moment as we wager on a sporting event in the space of our bedroom. A license might be granted to a casino to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This will produce a qualitatively different experience of gambling for citizens in a jurisdiction than in cases where gambling is only allowed during restricted times for charitable purposes and is housed in a space ordinarily designated for other activities, such as bingo games held weekly in a church hall. The felt power of gambling will vary accordingly; compare, for example, the disgrace of being violently ejected from a commercial gambling venue by private security forces to the subtle disapproval of a nongambling parishioner who sees me leaving the bingo game. Nevertheless, the separation of gambling into spaces, moments, and products is analytically useful to explore theoretical and political questions arising within specific jurisdictions. Policy questions might include, Should casinos be allowed in a particular area or community? Should betting be allowed on a particular moment, such as youth or amateur sporting events? Should electronic gaming machines be legal? Theoretical questions might include, What makes a gambling space? What distinguishes the enjoyment of a gambling moment from the enjoyment of other moments? How important is the human element of a gambling product or service, relative to non-human components and artificial intelligence?

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Chapter Outline Chapter 1 carves a space for this study within the voluminous literature on problem and pathological gambling. I demonstrate how the cultural figure of the problem gambler circulates in academic research, popular culture, and policy contexts, facilitating the governance of gambling through stereotypes affixed to gambling addiction. While this figure sustains a platform to reconcile often competing interests of gambling businesses, governments, players, and social welfare advocates, I argue that qualitative cultural research is needed to unpack the sense that we make of gambling spaces, moments, and products in our own—and others’—everyday lives. I offer an alternative account of gambling’s cultural spaces, moments, and products through an expanded concept of “enjoyment.” Chapter 2 considers how gambling spaces appear as intelligible signals in the landscape of neoliberal societies, enabling political tensions of frugal government to be accommodated. Describing such spaces as “statey,” I discuss their exceptional powers of territorial appropriation and policing. The first part of the chapter discusses case studies of two casino resorts in Australia, and the second part draws on participant-observation and social research to examine the interplay of strategies and tactics in the intimate cultural space of the pokie lounge. Chapter 3 considers moments of gambling in everyday life. A review of the literature on the specificity and power of these moments highlights gender and other facets of social identity as key aspects for analysis. Case studies exploring gambling moments in detail include lottery participation, workplace competitions, sports betting, and annual celebrations of Melbourne Cup Day in Australia. These moments are linked to historical and cultural processes of nation building and the politics of belonging in institutions and organizations. Chapter 4 considers gambling products at a moment of unprecedented innovation and expansion. After a discussion of different systems of gambling, I consider products that straddle and erode cultural and legal borderlines between spheres of finance, work, and play. Arguments address new challenges posed by the rise of “sticky” algorithmic gambling forms that enable and encourage continuous play as well as cultural values and practices that distinguish videogaming from gambling in everyday life. Chapter 5 examines how gambling spaces, moments, and products cultivate self-blaming and self-disposing individuals and populations. I link opportunities created by commercial gambling spaces, moments, and products to predatory processes of targeting individuals and populations for extraction, and I evaluate arguments about whether it is accurate to describe electronic gaming machines as gambling products. Gamblers’ testimonies and consumer rights advocacy are then examined as components of activism aimed to ameliorate harms caused by gambling products in specific jurisdictions. I conclude with reflections on how racial biopolitics have shaped the architecture of gambling regulation in settler-occupying nations.

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A brief postscript addresses some urgent issues raised by this study of gambling in everyday life. It contributes to current policy debates by sketching a vision of what corporate responsibility and social sustainability might look like in gambling’s future development and concludes with brief reflections on gambling’s unique joys.

Conclusion This chapter introduced the literature and theoretical frameworks I will use to explain how cultural practices and social identities are played out in spaces, moments, and products of gambling. It also explained the value of qualitative social research methods for understanding gambling. My next chapter explores the figure of the problem gambler. I will show how this figure has been used to authorize a shift of focus of gambling research and policy away from the arena of everyday cultural practices and social identities and to construct gambling as a domain of exception, crisis, and policy intervention. I will elaborate a cultural politics of “enjoyment” as a counterpoint to psy-scientific (and more recently and more specifically, neuroscientific) approaches based on the pathology of individual human and animal organisms.

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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

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 41 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

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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

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 43 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 stakeholders 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).

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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

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 45 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 diversity in gambling research methods and disciplinary frameworks is linked to the frugal government of higher education and research in nations where gambling has been deregulated (Livingstone et al., 2017). To appreciate the extent to which the study of gambling has become synonymous with the study of addiction, consider results from a Google Scholar search using the following terms: “enjoyable gambling,” “recreational gambling,” “responsible gambling,” “problem gambling,” and “pathological gambling.” The results were: Recreational—35,400 Enjoyable—22,300 Problem—400,000 Pathological—51,400 Responsible gambling—180,000 (Google Scholar 9 March 2016) The combined results for “recreational” and “enjoyable gambling” are not much greater than those for “pathological” gambling alone. When “problem gambling,” “responsible gambling,” and “pathological gambling” are combined, research on “recreational” and “enjoyable” gambling accounts for less than 10 percent. This figure is even smaller when we consider that most of the research on “responsible gambling” is related to regulations devised to address “problem gambling” rather than to understanding “recreational” or “enjoyable” gambling. The results of my original social research in Australia were consistent with these search engine findings. While the “fun” and “cultural significance” of gambling was frequently mentioned by participants, the theme of addiction predominated. This pattern was reflected in a survey of people under 25 years I conducted asking participants what a book on gambling in everyday life should include. The vast majority of those who responded to the question said that the focus of such a book should be gambling addiction or problem gambling. To drill more deeply into the gambling scholarship, I used a big data approach to map research topics and problems as these appear in peer-reviewed

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literature held on Web of Science and Scopus databases. I limited the scope to research produced in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK between 1996 and 2017. These are all nations which have seen considerable growth and deregulation of commercial gambling industries. The metadata examined included titles and abstracts of 6749 articles. While 31 percent of the article abstracts mentioned either problem gambling or pathological gambling and addiction was mentioned in 14 percent, recreational gambling accounted for less than 2 percent, “moderate,” “professional” or “fun” gambling each accounted for 1 percent or less. Later I will explore how psy-scientific knowledges of gambling subjugate local, embodied forms of practical knowledge to a highly limited model of the human (Foucault, 2003, pp. 9–10). And, I will investigate how these knowledges protect the freedom of gambling industries by placing legal responsibility for damages upon the individual, imagined as the self-possessed owner of an autonomous body and mind. For over three decades, researchers have documented the rise of problem gambling as an object of study and therapeutic intervention (Castellani, 2000; Collins, 1996/2006). Collins’ genealogical account of the inclusion of “pathological gambling” within the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) in 1980 demonstrates how statistical data was generated to support the self-governance of individual gamblers and to justify medical interventions in cases of addiction. While demonstrating a broader social tendency towards the “psychologization” of everyday life, Collins (1996/2006) presciently suggested that a diagnostic approach to identifying and treating gambling harms would facilitate liberalization of gambling laws into the late twentieth century. Vicki Abt and Martin C. McGurrin relate the everyday institutional and political struggles which saw the professionalization of addiction counselling from the 1970s, culminating in the recognition of pathological gambling in the DSM-III. The collaboration between self-help movements, which adapted the Alcoholics Anonymous model of group treatment to gambling and academic researchers in medicine, led to the formation of the non-profit American National Council on Problem Gambling in 1975. As a consequence of this collaboration over two decades, “problem gambling [was] transformed from a generally regarded form of social deviance or moral laxity to an official medical disease” (1991, p. 663). This marks an important shift in gambling’s governance; rather than gamblers appearing as agents of moral depravity who deserve punishment, the task became the identification and treatment of the addict as a type of individual and cause of legal problems that cluster around gambling (see Foucault, 2004, p. 35). With its formal inscription within the DSM, excessive gambling’s moral stigma was displaced by a pastoral focus, and health institutions were empowered to govern it: the image of the problem gambler as a victim of disease [was used] in order to eliminate the moral stigma assigned to problem gamblers and to

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 47 obligate government and health insurers to cover at least part of the cost of treatment and rehabilitation . . . Since all hospital treatment programs for problem gambling are simply repackaged and relabeled alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs, there was no new knowledge or technology for addiction counselling staff to master. Thus, gambling treatment profit margins were extremely attractive to hospitals. (p. 664) We see here how frugal government shaped the field of academic gambling studies, which proceeded to circumscribe the topics, methods, and theoretical frameworks appropriate to the investigation of gambling. More recently, Reith embeds pathological gambling within a social analysis of consumption within neoliberal political systems, arguing that it embodies “both the imperatives of self-expression and self-restraint” (Reith, 2007, pp. 41–45; see also Kingma, 1997, p. 182; Kingma, 2017; Reith, 2008). Exploring how the pervasive language of consumer choice promotes a view of gamblers as “free moral agents,” she argues that problems related to gambling are more usefully located “within the intersection of state policies and commercial technology in neoliberal societies, rather than within the bodies and minds of individual gamblers themselves” (2013, p. 722). A recent shift from psychological and behavioural models to neuroscientific models for understanding and treating individuals experiencing harms from gambling is important in this context. Successful trials of the pleasure-blocking drug Naltrexrone to treat problem gamblers at the end of last century illuminated commonalities among addictions, leading to a shift in the ontology of problem gambling. As Scott Vrecko argues, “The space in which the problem is thought to originate and to be most fruitfully worked upon has shifted from the interface between the individual and social/environment to the individualized complex of mind, brain and behavior” (2008, p. 62). Gambling industries’ investment in this kind of research creates ethical problems insofar as neuroscience funding has come to form part of a strategy for engaging in the politics of gambling, and the biology of the gambling brain has been made to order . . . with a view of reordering, or reconfiguring, the territory in which gambling and gambling problems are governed. (Vrecko, 2008, p. 64) One consequence of this ontological shift is the dis-embedding of bodies and brains of gamblers from specific social environments in which they are enjoined to behave as responsible individuals. This means that problems related to gambling are increasingly being diagnosed and treated at the level of the biological organism at the very moment that researchers have established significant concentrations of gambling spaces and products in the lowest socio-economic regions of many states (Volberg & Wray, 2007, p. 56).

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To encapsulate the arguments presented earlier, the concentration of gambling research within the psy-sciences individualizes people who experience problems and inoculates government and industry agencies from responsibility for these problems. This is not a new point. Similar critiques have been voiced since the commencement of commercial gambling’s expansion from the mid-1990s in many jurisdictions (Goodman, 1995). Their failure to gain policy traction can be understood partly as a consequence of disincentives for researchers who question prevailing assumptions within problem and pathological gambling research. I am not seeking to dismiss problem gambling research paradigms as a type of false consciousness overlaying the “real” issues of corporate power, social inequality, and compromised governments. Rather, I want to account for the powerful social realities that problem gambling research creates. To put it another way, the problem is not that problem gambling is a fiction. Rather, the problem is that problem gambling research often diverts attention from developments that have fundamentally transformed what gambling means today. I have shown that engaging with research on problem gambling is an integral part of any study of gambling in everyday life. However, when discussions of gambling’s benefits and costs become focused at the level of synapses, dopamine, and serotonin, important questions of cultural value and meaning are pushed out the frame of legitimate gambling research. There are at least two dimensions of culture that I want to claim for retention here. Firstly, culture is a uniquely human endowment of a capacity to construct and act upon social worlds in ways that are distinctive and extraordinarily diverse. Secondly, culture is characterized by uniquely human forms of creativity. Raymond Williams brought these two aspects together in his foundational definition of culture as ordinary in its encompassing of shared practices and values as well as the finest individual achievements (1958). I will use his concept of culture as a “structure of feeling” (1977, pp. 129–132) later in this chapter to unpack the relations of power that shape “vernacular knowledge” (Escoffier, 1998) of problem gambling. While anthropologists and sociologists have sometimes embedded themselves within contexts of gambling provision (Cassidy, 2013; Sallaz, 2009), ethnographic descriptions of gambling consumption are extremely rare in academic gambling research. The fact that academics’ experience of gambling, and of EGMs in particular, is opaque and almost unspeakable within gambling research forums does not mean that this experience does not exist. But it does mean that gambling is a highly sensitive topic for many educated professionals. I will demonstrate how the habitus of such professionals is constructed in opposition to that of EGM players, in particular. We will see that there is a clear hierarchy of gambling products, with EGMs at the bottom and games involving elements of skill and strategy such as poker and blackjack at the apex. The boundaries drawn between types of gambling and types of gamblers, in turn, demarcate cultural hierarchies of taste and value. My media research, focus groups, and interviews with professional employees of a large public sector organization revealed consistent patterns of moral disapproval

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 49 and negative affects towards problem gamblers and EGM venues, from mild distaste to strong disgust. We will see how the problem gambler works affectively as a cultural figure, enabling gambling to be governed at the level of individuals, communities, and populations.

Fixing Pathologies: Addiction and the Cultural Politics of Taste Before proceeding, I need to explain the way that I am using the term “fixing” in this section. Firstly, I will use it to refer to the problem gambler as an addict whose need for a fix requires fixing. Secondly, I will use it to refer to the feelings that attach to problem gamblers within the broader sphere of culture. We can observe this fixation in circulation of stories in popular culture, tabloid, and public broadcasting news and current affairs programmes, as well as the testimony of individuals within recovery narratives. While Australia might offer the richest archive of cultural mediations of problem gambling, many examples could be cited from the US and other nations or cultural contexts where commercial gambling is ubiquitous. So, how does the problem gambler become the object of popular fixation? An article in Vice magazine collated stories from gambling industry workers, including this one from a former surveillance officer on a cruise ship: One morning at about 6 AM, the casino I was working in was empty except for one American woman playing the slots. This woman was cleaning up; she’d already won a few thousand dollars. At some point she realized she needed the bathroom, but was convinced someone would steal her winnings if she left. Some players are a bit paranoid—that’s just the way it is. Even though they know that myself and my colleagues are monitoring the TV screens . . . So, instead of just going to the toilet, or even calling the attendant, she went behind the slots, pulled her trousers down and laid one out right there. After, she sauntered back to the slots relieved—two meters away from her own shit—and continued playing as if nothing had happened. (Axinescu, 2015) In popular discourses and research alike, problem gambling is often figured through tropes of abjection, including incontinence, suicide, and indifference in the face of accidental death. Natasha Schull’s (2012) ethnographic study relates how Las Vegas casinos pioneered training of security staff in the use of heart defibrillators to reduce the rate of deaths among ill and elderly machine gamblers. She describes a surveillance video of a situation where a defibrillator had to be applied to a player: [The] victim . . . rubs his temples, leans back, and tries to clear his head— then collapses suddenly onto the person next to him, who doesn’t react at

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This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling all. The man slips to the floor in the throes of a seizure and two passers-by stretch him out, one of them an off-duty ER nurse. Few gamblers in the immediate vicinity move from their seats . . . More disconcerting than the fact of the attack itself is the disjuncture between the stopping of the man’s heart and the play that continues unabated all around him . . . Despite the unconscious man lying quite literally at their feet, touching the bottom of their chairs, the other gamblers keep playing. (Schull, 2012, p. 33)

These examples evoke the problem gambler as a site of social abjection; an adult individual reduced to an infantile state that has been theorized as “presubjective” by some researchers (Woolley & Livingstone, 2010). We will consider further examples of how problem gambling talk shapes popular representations and social perceptions of certain kinds of gambling spaces and products. But for the moment, I want to consider how the affective character of such representations moulds research and public understanding of problems associated with gambling. Particularly useful are Sara Ahmed’s arguments for the importance of engaging with the emotions that both “stick to” and “move” researchers and our objects. This takes us beyond an individualized understanding of emotion as subjective interiority to an approach that might elaborate the productive “sociality of emotion” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 8). Part of the reluctance on the part of researchers to position ourselves as consumers of legal gambling products is related to the affect of shame that contagiously attaches to gambling in forums where problem gambling is at issue. EGM gambling is widely perceived (including by the industry itself) to be a “blue collar” form of entertainment (Doughney, 2002, p. 22). And designers of EGMs discuss them as truncated versions of culture: “appealing to the inner child” (Ka-Ching, 2016, 11:00) and “like a one scene movie” (Ka-Ching, 2016, 11:38) while a composer of their musical themes describes his objective as “keep[ing] the player’s attention on the machine. You don’t want them to be too mindful. Everything is in a major key. No losing sounds” (Ka-Ching, 2016, 13:17). In this context, we can attribute part of the silence about the role of gambling in researchers’ everyday lives to the cultural politics of taste. In Distinction (1984), Bourdieu identifies taste as “one of the most vital stakes in the struggles fought in the field of the dominant class and the field of cultural production” (p. 11). Drawing on and developing a critique of Kantian aesthetics, he argues that the aesthetic judgements that individuals make on matters of culture have a powerful performative dimension. An important function of these judgements is their capacity to “classify the classifier,” situating the latter at a specific point within a social hierarchy. Whereas “disinterested” judgement of cultural products—from cuisine and music to cinema and art—is associated with the aesthetic capacities of dominant social fractions, “interested” judgements of culture are ascribed to members of the dominated classes. My social research revealed how the “problem gambler” is constructed as the antithesis of the “aesthete” or the “intellectual”—defined by Bourdieu

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 51 as individuals whose consumption of culture is characterized by the (apparently) disinterested playing of the game of classification, which lies at the heart of the faculty of judgement (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 317). Several of my university-educated participants expressed aversion to gambling spaces as sites of everyday entertainment or recreation. One of the focus group participants spoke of “aversion to going to a place that is devoted to gambling. And casinos I find really tacky and filthy and grubby; I’ve never had an enjoyable experience in a casino.” Another said, “I find casinos awful places, clubs with pokie machines, ugh, it doesn’t appeal” (Focus Group A (FGA), 2014). I asked Tony, a regular gambler and hospitality worker, to discuss the stigma associated with EGMs. He described them as the lowest form of gambling because it takes no amount of cognition, in fact it is just the opposite. Most forms of gambling ask the gambler to consider the odds and make a reasonably educated guess, [EGMs] merely require the feeding of credit and a base level of dexterity and co-ordination. Tony felt that social stigma against pokie players was justified, because If the intelligence of the average player was higher and all they cared about was increasing their stake rather than play a neuro-stimulating, reward-based video game, they would get off the seat, invest in a Wall Street Journal or Financial Review, and begin their portfolios. (Interviewee A, 2015) Note the coexistence of vernacular knowledge about neuroscience with strong social judgements on EGM gambling spaces and subjects in this last comment. This is a tension that persistently arose in my interviews with individuals who identify as “recreational” or “responsible” gamblers. On one hand, they are filled with compassion for lives ruined by cunningly designed addictive products. On the other hand, they seem both disgusted and intrigued by scenes of financial abuse that cannot entirely be blamed on individuals, corporations, or governments. When their perceptions are considered together with tabloid and documentary exposés of abject players who wear diapers or remain oblivious when someone on the next machine is having a heart attack, a vivid image of pokie players and venues is evoked that resonates with nineteenth century social criticisms of “gambling hells.” An article in the Journal of Gambling Studies provides a welcome focus on social stigma attached to problem gambling and how this affects individuals’ help-seeking. However, the way that researchers gathered data to establish degrees of stigmatization was to present vignettes to participants, asking them to consider X as “a man who lives in your community” (Hing et al., 2015, p. 861). But what if the problem gambler is pre-figured by research participants as already belonging outside the borders of “their community”? To get

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to the epistemological and methodological problem here, Ahmed’s (2000) account of “strange encounters” between “embodied others in postcoloniality” is useful. She explores the phenomenon of “stranger fetishism”— proposing that the stranger is an ontological presence prior to our embodied encounters with him or her, obscuring the social relations which allow “us to face that which we have already designated as the beyond” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 3, see also Bhabha, 1994). This is why—notwithstanding its relatively recent arrival onto the scene of knowledge production and governance—the “problem gambler” is often a strangely familiar figure and often linked to populations that are already stigmatized or presented as otherwise “vulnerable” to addictions. The sense of disgust triggered by EGM players through the familiar stranger that is the problem gambler cannot be separated from the expectation that researchers of gambling will focus on “data that can most easily be grasped, recorded, transported, and examined in secure places” (Certeau, 1984, p. 20). Consequently, most research is based on screens for addiction administered to gamblers, forming the basis for population studies of problem gambling prevalence, leaving the everyday tactics of gamblers as they negotiate spaces, moments, and products of gambling, opaque. The affects that stick to EGM players as stereotypical figures of pathology in the landscape of everyday life make it difficult to imagine cultural spaces such as the “pokie lounge” as sites where the practices of consumers and workers sometimes operate as tactics of solidarity and resistance. I’ve suggested that the problem gambler marks a boundary between respectable and celebrated and abject and disparaged gambling identities. This boundary is policed with considerable force in the arena of professional poker, a significant site of celebrity culture. In 2011, rookie film-maker Mike Weeks produced a short documentary titled Drawing Dead about two online poker players. The film cast a critical eye on the hyper-masculine myth of poker stardom, revealing the compulsive, and potentially lethal, lifestyle of some young men pursuing their gambling dreams. While one of the players in the film makes a very good living as a professional player, the other drops out of college and becomes addicted to the game, committing petty fraud in pursuit of success. The latter is interviewed while walking around America with his dog to recover and educate others about the hazards of online poker. Over 1000 comments on YouTube, where the short film is screened, demonstrate players’ investment in the idea that poker is an arena to demonstrate individual merit and skill and entrepreneurial savvy. To fail in this arena is to earn contempt from other players. Below are examples of some of the responses to the story of the young man who became addicted: I hate the way he deflects blame to poker. No mate, you ruined your own life. People who suck at poker give their money to good players. End of story.

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 53 If this guy didn’t ruin his life with poker it would have been with scratch off tickets or cheeseburgers. Don’t blame poker. The idiot should have learned the game. He’s a classic donk who doesn’t understand bank management, probably played over his head with money he couldn’t afford to lose, and is a thief and degenerate low-life of the lowest order. Maybe he will get run over by a big truck and improve the gene pool before he breeds. That is what separates a good player from the bad. Money management and self control. While I have grown out of poker, it taught me everything I needed to become a successful swing trader. While I would never sit down at a poker table again, I can’t thank it enough for what it taught me. Poker isn’t gambling. It’s pure strategy. Luck is minimally involved. Those who say Poker is gambling don’t actually understand the rules very well and how to play properly. (Mike A., 2018) This is just a taste of a much larger corpus of comments, which range from offensive to instructional in tone. What is most notable is the consensus on individual responsibility for consequences of gambling involvement and a sense of frustration, if not disgust, at players who appear to be blaming the game rather than their own limitations. In many of the comments, poker is presented as a pedagogical tool for managing the self as owner of a finite bank of resources for play. Increasing one’s bankroll through various disciplines of the mind and body is a requirement for players who are serious rather than frivolous participants. Social status in general and masculinity in particular are clearly at stake in vernacular knowledges that circulate about the value of poker. Don Schlitz, writer of Kenny Rogers’ famous song The Gambler, attributes some of his inspiration to his father. Forty years after the song’s release in 1978, he reflected on its structure and pedagogical impetus: “My dad wasn’t a gambler. He was a policeman and a great man. I wanted to the song to feel like one of our talks, in which he stressed the importance of making good choices” (Schlitz quoted in Myers, 2019 p. 3). I’ve suggested that distaste towards everyday spaces and products of gambling may inflect the way that consumers are imagined by researchers. This, in turn, can limit our capacity to engage with players’ own understanding or “practical knowledge” of gambling. If, as Ahmed argues, it is through strange encounters with embodied others in everyday life that the possibility of new, collective solidarities emerges “beyond the opposition between common and uncommon, between friends and strangers, or beyond sameness and difference” (2000, p. 180), the discursive production of the “problem gambler” figured as the stranger that must be expelled to sustain the “joy” of recreational gambling is a worrying development. For the everyday suffering that individuals (and those close to them) experience as consumers of gambling products is easily overshadowed by visions of problem gamblers as abject and damaged subjects, attached to extraordinarily low cultural values of entertainment and

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vulnerable to other harms, gathered together in the psy-scientific literature as “co-morbidities” (alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity, tobacco). Concentrating everything that is concerning about the expansion and operation of gambling industries into a single, pathological figure fuels the myth that a silent majority of “recreational” gamblers exists, whose interests need protecting. This sustains, in turn, what Woolley and Livingstone describe as gambling industries’ “discourse of business as usual” (Livingstone & Woolley, 2007). One of the most immediate effects of this discourse is that responsibility for harms related to gambling is displaced from operators and regulators to players (Hancock & Smith, 2017, p. 3). Gambling appears as an unremarkable component of everyday life in a risk society and participants are enjoined that it “must remain fun” (Kingma, 1997). While economic and reputational costs to governments and providers can be minimized if individuals can be governed as self-responsible subjects, rather than as noisome “victims” of government and corporate greed, the responsible gambling consensus generates other problems. As we will see in the later chapters of this book, one of these problems is that individuals view themselves as failures insofar that they are unable to “gamble responsibly,” and as problems to be disposed of. One way that researchers have tried to address these issues is by elaborating on the concept of “the zone,” developed to account for the addictive qualities of EGMs. A milestone in this scholarship is Natasha Dow-Schull’s (2012) Addiction by Design. She investigates the strategies of gambling machine companies to extract time and money from individuals as they inhabit and move between spaces of gambling and therapy in Las Vegas. Her elaboration of the assemblage of machine gambling illuminates the networks of human and non-human actants involved in the social production of “the zone” to which players become addicted. In this account, the zone is figured as a point of escape from social roles and obligations, a kind of “unbecoming” that EGMs provide to individuals. As Schull puts it, “the zone” is a phenomenal world in which “conventional spatial, bodily, monetary and temporal parameters are suspended” (p. 73) and “human and machine seem to merge” (p. 76). Richard Woolley and Charles Livingstone (2010) produce a related but slightly different account of how EGM play generates experiences of being in “the zone.” Drawing on philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’ psychoanalytic account of the “social imaginary,” they argue that “the qualities of the EGM commodity and the experience of pokie machine gambling consumption as immersion in a continuous flow, or what we term a ‘stream of indeterminacy’ makes available a relatively ‘open space’ for meaning-making activity” (Woolley & Livingstone, 2010, p. 52). Seeing EGM consumers as driven by “the desire for a state of immersion in the originally experienced steam of indeterminacy, the magmatic originary state that precedes ensemblization and socialization,” they contend that the EGM “distils the subject’s desire for magma into a commodity, and sells it back at a substantial premium” (Woolley & Livingstone, 2010, p. 55). This desire for pre-subjective immersion explains why dedicated EGM players are “not playing to win” (Schull, 2012, pp. 2–3)

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 55 but to achieve an equilibrium between winning and losing in order to stay in the zone as long as possible. Experimental work with gamblers by Dixon and colleagues extends the concept of “the zone” to elaborate gamblers’ experience of a psychic space of “dark flow” (Dixon et al., 2018). All of these scholars highlight a unique experience that is produced and commodified by high-intensity gambling machines. However, I want to note some limitations of the concept in accounting for gambling in everyday life. Firstly, accounts of “the zone” may exaggerate and universalize individualistic or anti-social characteristics of gambling and of electronic gaming machine play, in particular. My participant-observation in gambling spaces presented in chapter 2 highlights more social dimensions of gaming machine play. Secondly, when it is refracted by journalists and other public intermediaries, academic accounts of “the zone” are quickly harnessed to pervasive moral panics about addiction, leaving other dimensions of gambling spaces, products, and moments neglected. Thirdly, while “the zone” convincingly explains the immersive qualities of some gambling products, it doesn’t offer a detailed account of the pleasures or joys that these may also generate. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, “the zone” collapses an important analytical distinction between spaces, moments, and products of gambling enjoyment. As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, while these aspects of gambling in everyday life are intimately related, their interaction needs to be understood more clearly. For gambling enterprises are successful only insofar as they can align spaces, moments, and products to specific markets. As we will see in chapter 4, it is possible to camouflage some cultural technologies that do not involve a wager as gambling and to disguise some gambling products as non-gambling platforms for conducting finance. A further aspect of literature on the zone requires a more sustained discussion. Schull (2012) derives her explanation of the zone of machine gambling from the concept and value of “flow” developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. She uses it to emphasize continuities between the experience provided by EGMs and the sense of total absorption when we have mastered a skill and seem to perform without effort: Unsurprisingly, the “zone” of intensive machine gambling is characterized by the hallmark psychophysiological shifts and desubjectifying effects of flow. Gamblers “forget themselves” and feel carried forward by a choreography not of their own making; much like mountain climbers who describe merging with the rocks they climb, or dancers who report feeling “danced” by music, they feel “played by the machine.” Yet their experience differs in a crucial respect from that of the artist, athletes and scientists who appear in Csikszentmihalyi’s writings. For these professionals, flow is life affirming, restorative, and enriching—a state of “optimal human experience” that enhances autonomy in day-to-day life. Repeat machine gamblers, by contrast, experience a flow that is depleting, entrapping, and associated with a loss of autonomy . . . [their] escape motivations [can be]

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I am cautious about accepting the accounts of gambling addicts that Schull cites on face value. We will recall Bourdieu’s explanation of the “fallacies of the rule” from the introduction (1977, pp. 22–23). There is an important epistemological distinction between what people say they do on one hand and the reasons and ways that they do (or fail to do) things on the other. As we will see in chapter 5, there are very sound legal reasons for players to use terms which emphasize their victimization by EGMs (see Alliance for Gambling Reform). While the concept of the zone, and the language of addiction more broadly, conveys a powerful experience of self-alienation and the rupture of social connections experienced by many EGM players, the research presented in the previous section suggests that these descriptions may also be related to the circulation of the problem gambler as an abject figure in popular culture. In other words, it is easy to interpret the decision that individuals make to inhabit cultural spaces of EGM gambling on a regular basis as anti-social by default. Or to put it another way, the social fact of enjoying these spaces tends to mark one out from the flows enjoyed by autonomous individuals who enjoy more “improving” spaces (like nature) and activities (like dancing). In the next chapter, we will see that cultural spaces of EGM gambling can be intensely social at certain moments and in certain contexts. They are also spaces where the attraction of machines can be explicitly acknowledged and where the positive and negative consequences of this attraction can be worked through with others who share the space. While claiming that the “distinctive potency” of EGMs “lies in their capacity to engender the sort of compelling subjective shift on which some individuals come to depend” (2012, p. 17), Schull also links the pursuit of “the zone” in gambling machine play to broader socio-cultural tendencies: computers, video games, mobile phones, iPods and the like have become a means through which individuals can manage their affective states and create a personal buffer zone against the uncertainties and worries of their world . . . More than a case study of a single addiction, an exploration of gambling addicts’ intensive involvement with gambling machines yields clues to the predicaments, tendencies, and challenges that characterize wider “zones” of life. (Schull, 2012, p. 14) The prescience of this argument is clear in current media panics surrounding smart-phone addiction. An Australian newspaper article cited a national survey in which 46 percent of 18–34 year olds described themselves as “addicted” to their devices. It went on to cite a psychiatrist comparing internet addiction to EGMs and describing instant notifications as “digital crack” (Arlington,

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 57 2016, p. 20). Like the endless flow of distraction afforded by EGM play, interacting with ubiquitous screens affords escape from some of the demands of everyday life. The discussion above highlights a contradiction within the concept of the zone, whereby it is both immanent to and beyond the sphere of everyday life. On one hand, the zone is a distinctive experience produced and commodified by EGM industries, and on the other hand, it epitomizes everyday life in technologically saturated societies. While this contradiction is often productive, it can also cause confusion by shifting the focus from the political and cultural work of gambling to problems experienced at the individual level. The next section develops an expanded, socio-cultural concept of gambling enjoyment, encompassing dimensions of possession, belonging, prohibition, and joy.

Gambling Beyond the Zone: Enjoyment in Everyday Life Once we move from research focused on gambling pathologies, it becomes possible to investigate what makes gambling valuable for players in everyday life. To answer this question, we need to reach beyond the affects of shame and disgust generated by discourses of problem gambling and consider how feelings create, sustain, and transform public spheres more broadly. My orientation to gambling’s affective power draws on frameworks exploring the “cultural politics of emotion” and “public feelings.” Part of cultural studies’ “affective turn” over the past decade is indebted to a queer and critical race feminist researchers’ work to rearticulate liberal understandings of affect to account for specifically public dimensions of emotion (Ahmed, 2004 Berlant, 2012; Cvetkovich, 2012; Gregg, 2006, 2011, Lorde, 1984). The account of affect which structures my account of the “public feelings” of gambling in everyday life below is especially influenced by Ann Cvetkovich (2012). Building on Raymond Williams’ definition of culture as a specific “structure of feeling” embedded in keywords, she notes the definition of “feeling” itself as emotionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences . . . something we come to know through experience and popular useage and that indicates, perhaps only intuitively but nonetheless significantly, a conception of mind and body as integrated. [It] takes seriously questions like “How do I feel?” and “How does capitalism feel” as starting points for something that might be a theory but could also be a description, an investigation, or a process. Terms such as affect, emotion and feeling are more like keywords, points of departure for discussion rather than definition. (Cvetkovich, 2012, pp. 4–5) Her study of depression not only “emerges from the important traditions of describing how capitalism feels . . . it also puts pressure on those left-progressive projects not to rush to meta-commentary” (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 11).

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Cvetkovich’s careful account of depression’s genealogy and cultural politics indicates the power of keywords to prise open otherwise neglected aspects of everyday life. Like problem gambling (to which it is sometimes causally connected in the psy-scientific research), we accept depression as a social “thing” in liberal, capitalist societies; much cultural work goes into disseminating “truths” about its aetiology and treatment. There is also considerable academic literature and public policy discussion about the causes of and means to promote “happiness,” both at the level of individuals and communities. The remainder of this chapter will elaborate an account of the very “thing” that commercial gambling industries are supposed to deliver: enjoyment. Taking “enjoyment” as my keyword, I will explore a set of related terms as a way to frame my discussion of gambling spaces, moments, and products in the pages that follow. To understand affects specific to gambling, I suggest the value of enjoyment needs to be distinguished from other terms with which it is often used interchangeably. Enjoyment is frequently confused with happiness in academic literature and everyday discourse. This is understandable, since the concept’s etymology in classical Greek and early English emphasized the role of “fate” and “luck” being closely related to terms such as “happenstance” and “perhaps,” but this usage shifted from the European Enlightenment. By the time liberal political philosophers, including Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, JS Mill, and Karl Marx were writing, happiness had become inextricably linked with modern projects of self and social improvement (McMahon, 2006, pp. 10–11). The stakes of happiness remain high: it is not coincidental that academic and popular literature dedicated to happiness has flourished amidst an epidemic of depression and other mental illnesses in neoliberal societies. The project of defeating these epidemics has generated enormous profits for large pharmaceutical companies over the past three decades. And they have seen the growth of an academic field of study dedicated to “positive psychology.” Csikszentmihalyi was an important figure in establishing the field of positive psychology from the University of Chicago, elaborating the value of “flow,” from which many accounts of “the zone” are derived. He uses “flow,” together with “happiness,” “enjoyable,” and “meaningful,” to describe the rewards accruing to self-directed individuals who display “autotelic” personality traits. Such individuals do not make strict distinctions between time spent working from free time; instead they invest everyday life with values of play, approaching activities with clear goals and rules of performance and using feedback to improve their human potential. Rather than being a property of particular personality types or related to socio-economic status, he argues that “by happiness we mean the less obvious enjoyment of life that flow provides” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). He contrasts flow states with “passive leisure,” which he argues is too often wasted on activities such as media consumption, gambling, or promiscuity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 100). We saw in the previous section how gambling researchers, including Schull (2012) and Dixon et al. (2018), build on and adapt this account in

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 59 their account of “the zone” experience produced by EGM gambling. Schull (2012) points to the limitations of Csikszentmihalyi’s account of flow’s two directions—an escape forward to achieve transcendence and personal evolution or an escape backwards into repetitive habits that dull experience: [He] neither elaborates on the profit motives behind the design of user flow nor reflects on how these motives might lead to products and services whose configuration risks drawing users’ escape motivations in a “backward” direction, such that they lose themselves without selfactualizing gain. (Schull, 2012, p. 167) Schull’s relational analysis of machine gambling, through its constitutive networks of players, designers, regulators, and businesses, does not seek to apportion blame exclusively to individuals or to industries. Instead, she approaches addiction as “a relation that develops ‘through repeated interaction’ between a subject and an object, rather than a property that belongs solely to one or the other, it becomes clear that objects matter as much as subjects” (Schull, 2012, p. 17). For example, users’ data enables machine designers to modulate their affects: “As gambling machines become increasingly adept at tailoring their responsive output to the input of particular users, the losers are increasingly bound to stay the course that is plotted for them, colluding in their own extinction” (Schull, 2012, p. 181). She notes, however, that the ground on which this collusion occurs is fundamentally asymmetrical, as the depletion of players’ autonomy produces revenue for those who provide access to “the zone.” Dixon and colleagues (2018) elaborate a concept of “dark flow” designed into players’ experience through “losses disguised as wins,” and they link this flow to subjective states of depression. Although these gambling researchers extend Csikszentmihalyi’s arguments, they share a broad understanding of depression or self-depletion or un-becoming as negative states, opposed to the happiness that “forward flow” can potentially deliver. The concept of enjoyment that I will elaborate later does not map onto positive or negative flow states, nor does it distinguish between addicted and recreational gamblers. Rather, it extends Schull’s arguments about the asymmetry that structures political and affective economies of “the zone” to explore happiness and depletion as inseparable aspects of neoliberal finopower. In other words, the dark, or backwards, flow from which addictively designed products and services profit is a precondition for the emergence of the happy subject of positive flow—or what Csikszentmihalyi (1997) calls the “autotelic personality.” While the promise to deliver “happiness” is one of commercial gambling’s most potent marketing tools, it makes no more sense to think of gambling as a tool through which happiness is acquired or stolen than it does to attach happiness or unhappiness to other experiences generated as we participate in processes of work, finance, or play.

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Even when narratives, theories, and therapies of positive psychology do not explicitly posit the pursuit of happiness through flow as a zero-sum game, their emphasis on the importance of the integrity of the subject is subtended by particular assumptions about what it means to be human. An implicit distinction between better and worse ways of being human is clear in the language used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe the experience of groups who have either experienced colonization or chosen to reject the affordances of modernity—notably, Indigenous people and Amish communities. He argues that the former “have lost the opportunity to experience flow in work and communal life and seek to recapture it in [dangerous] leisure activities that mimic the earlier enjoyable lifestyle,” while the latter’s persistence with traditional activities has “been at the price of remaining embalmed in amber . . . arrested at a point of technological and spiritual development that now seems quaint” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, pp. 70–71, 74). The title of Csikszentmihalyi’s sequel to Flow, The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, further highlights his commitments to the subject of modernity as an engine of creativity, innovation, and meaning (2016). The evolving subject of forward flow can be understood in conjunction with Friedrich Hayek’s Schumpeterian account of capitalism as an evolutionary process of creative destruction. Hayek describes the “creative powers of a free civilization”: Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. If we knew how freedom would be used, the case for it would largely disappear . . . It is therefore no argument against individual freedom that it is frequently abused . . . Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad. (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 83) Placing the individual subject of freedom at the heart of neoliberal theory does not mean that individuals are drivers of social evolution. Rather, the institutions of freedom that Hayek argues sustain a universal project of civilization generate imitable cultural habits that enable some peoples to progress and render others stuck in a poverty that is both material and intellectual (Hayek, 1960/2011). Transposed to the level of individual psychology, this argument posits a qualitative distinction between those who experience maximum flow in their everyday lives and those who are stuck in passive leisure pursuits or who dedicate their lives to the joyless fulfilment of social obligations. Thus, like gameplay, with which Csikszentmihalyi often equates it, the enjoyment of flow by individuals is presented as socially adaptive in and of itself. For artists, scientists, and other subjects of flow: work and play are indivisible, as they are for people living in traditional societies. But unlike the latter, creative persons have not retrenched into

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 61 a frozen moment in time. They use the best knowledge from the past and the present to discover a better way of being in the future. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p. 77) To clearly articulate the best way to be in the future (beyond the level of the individual life course) would be to compromise freedom to continue searching for new frontiers of knowledge and meaning. On one side is the creative destruction ascribed to evolution; on the other is the self-destructive drive to “extinction.” What is important here is that the former is aligned by both neoliberal theorists and positive psychologists as “modern,” whereas the latter is defined in opposition to modernity. On the ground of everyday life where discourses of problem gambling operate, this creates a distinction between types of individuals on one hand and specific populations on the other (see Spieker, 2013, p. 312). Just as some individuals are “stuck” in habits that inhibit flow in their lives, some populations are understood to be mired in pre-modern ways of being human. While Csikszentmihalyi takes pains to argue that there is no necessary connection between the state of individuals and the state of groups organized within social hierarchies, a lack of positive enjoyment is ascribed in both instances to those who fail to embrace new frontiers of knowledge and innovation. In their respective fields, Hayek and Csikszentmihalyi reject Marxist and “postmodern” theories of self and society as pre-empting, dismissing, or limiting the absolute and universal value of freedom anchored in the open markets of capitalism. Individuals whose ambitions exceed their capacities and are uncontained by rules of games at which they can succeed in everyday life are compared with populations which remain attached to values and practices that resist assimilation within modernist narratives of the evolving self and society. They are constructed as “vulnerable” subjects in the sense that their lives are pre-figured as less meaningful and enjoyable than those in which flow is maximized. Csikszentmihalyi defines his broad research project as understanding what it means “to live” in a sense beyond mere biological survival. “It must mean to live in fullness, without waste of time and potential, expressing one’s uniqueness, yet participating intimately in the complexity of the cosmos” (1997, p. 2). We note the importance of eliminating waste to this definition of a “good life.” In Wasted Lives: Modernity’s Outcasts, Zymunt Bauman clarifies the mutually constitutive relationship between waste and creativity: “There can be no artistic workshop without a rubbish heap . . . The act of creation reaches its culmination, completion and true fulfilment in the act of the separation and disposal of waste” (2004, pp. 22–23). He argues that modernity’s commitment to ceaseless change is expressed in the commitment to design: To be seen as “realistic,” as capable of implementation, design needs to simplify the world’s complexity. It must set apart the “relevant” from the “irrelevant,” strain the manageable fragments of reality out of such parts as

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This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling are resistant to manipulation, and focus on the objectives which are rendered “reasonable” and “within our power” by currently available means and skills, supplemented by means and skills it is hoped will be acquired soon. Between them, all the conditions listed, in order to be met, require that a lot of things be cast aside—out of view, out of thought and out of action. They also require that whatever has been left out is turned— turned immediately—into the waste of the designing process. (Bauman, 2004, pp. 24–25)

My point in this discussion of positive psychology is that the neoliberal subject conceived as a self-possessed, autonomous, and frugally governed individual engaged in self-evolutionary processes of flow is a contingent, and arguably disastrous, way of being human. I have shown that the individual subject in pursuit of “flow” requires the foil of a traditional or anti-modern “other.” Commercial gambling produces, supports, and relies upon this logic, which regulators and academic researchers, for the most part, accept as truth. The connection between individual and social happiness in liberal modern thought as indices for progress discussed earlier has real consequences for the study of gambling in everyday life. It means that the positive flow that successful designers in commercial gambling industries may enjoy also produces the backward or “dark” flow of players who deliver profits until they self-dispose. Distinctions between recreational and problematic gambling, which are used to identify and govern different kinds of individuals and populations, turn out to be interdependent in everyday life. I’ve argued that a new framework is needed for exploring the pleasures of gambling in everyday life, free from the epistemological baggage of psyscientific disciplines, and of positive psychology in particular. I have proposed the affective lens of “enjoyment” and distinguished this from the value of happiness promoted by the academic literature on “flow.” Before proceeding, it is important to briefly address the value of “fun” to which happiness, flow, and enjoyment are frequently linked in positive psychology, and which is regularly used in gambling marketing. While enjoyment is inextricable from finopower, my research indicates that “fun” is a mechanism through which awkward political questions about gambling are often deflected. Connotations of amusement or teasing and an association with youth culture make it easy for providers to market different kinds of gambling as “just a bit of fun.” This is perhaps most evident in the change of industry nomenclature over the past three decades, from companies presenting themselves as providers of gambling to providers of gaming. In contrast with “happiness,” until very recently, “fun” was not considered as holding the secret to “the good life”; it was more likely to be associated with the “passive leisure” criticized by Csikszentmihalyi. While “gamification” is rapidly investing fun with potential in areas not previously associated with it (Woodcock & Johnson, 2017), from financial literacy to history teaching, enjoyment remains a richer concept with which to understand gambling in everyday life.

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 63 In contrast to positive psychology’s emphasis on the individual subject of flow, intersubjective aspects of enjoyment are inextricable from liberal definitions of property, which are linked, in turn, to gender and racial classifications. For example, the legal recognition of rape within heterosexual marriages is a relatively recent development in liberal societies. Previously the marriage contract was understood to guarantee the sexual enjoyment of his wife by a husband. The ascetic, Christian version of capitalism that developed in North America defined property as legitimate and sacred against the value of enjoyment as such. Ownership and accumulation were signs of grace to be protected rather than expended in frivolous pursuits such as gambling (Weber, 1946/2005, emphasis added). More recently, forms of native title recognized within the settler-occupying states of Australia and Canada distribute rights to enjoyment of territories between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples but do not confer exclusive possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). In the final chapter, we will see that enjoyment is a founding marker of biopolitical distinction from the outset of colonial occupation which continues to inflect discussions about Indigenous gambling today. Subjects are enjoined to commit to universal norms for the enjoyment of property rights and freedom, and Indigenous people are invited to join a system that significantly curtails their capacity to enjoy other ways of being human. Aboriginality is then positioned in nostalgic terms, as a common property of the human past available for appropriation by the bearers of modernity. These examples demonstrate that enjoyment is directly related to the use and exploitation of human and non-human resources in ways that are not the case for “happiness,” “entertainment,” and “fun.” And this makes it is a more penetrating concept to account for the affective politics of gambling in everyday life. The sense in which I will use the term “enjoyment” throughout this book is significantly qualified by three related terms which surround it: “joining,” “enjoining,” and “joy.” For the purpose of the argument to follow, I will be working with the following definitions of each term: Join (verb): 3. to bring together in relation, purpose, action, coexistence. 9. To mate. 12. To be contiguous or close. Enjoin (verb): 1. To order or direct (a person etc.) to do something. 2. Law to prohibit or restrain by an injunction. Enjoy (verb): 1. To experience with joy; take pleasure in. 2. To have and use with satisfaction; to find or experience pleasure for (oneself). 5. To have sexual intercourse with (a woman). 6. To have a good time. Enjoyment (noun): 1. The possession, use or occupancy of anything with satisfaction or pleasure. 2. A particular form or source of pleasure. 3. Law the exercise of a right: the enjoyment of an estate. Joy (noun): 1. An emotion of keen or lively pleasure arising from present or expected good. 2. A source or cause of gladness or delight. 3. A state of happiness or felicity.

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I also take the following phrase into account: 7. not to have any joy . . . to be unsuccessful (Macquarie Dictionary, 1997). Ambivalence surrounding the enjoyment of gambling is a feature of liberal finopower and related to an inherent tension between governable and ungovernable aspects of chance in everyday life. Three examples illustrate how enjoyment both attaches to and moves subjects, spaces, practices, and technologies of gambling. The first is a television advertisement for Brisbane’s casino, which is housed in the original nineteenth-century Queensland State Treasury building and has retained this history in its name “Treasury Casino.” Renovations have seen only minimal changes to the building’s original exterior, and the interior lay-out reinforces links to its original use, with private gaming rooms for “high rollers” located in former offices off the corridors. The advertisement opens with a shot of a young, white and apparently heterosexual couple reclining on what appears to be a hotel bed after a vigorous session of sex. He turns to her and says words to the effect of, “That was amazing. How was it for you?” His sexual partner turns and replies, gazing dreamily into space, “It was good but it wasn’t exactly ‘Treasury.’” Her voicing of the name “Treasury” triggers a montage of images of casino activities and the young woman then breathlessly narrates a series of words and phrases including “on-line jackpots” and “wheel of fortune.” She collapses back on the bed, apparently exhausted with sheer ecstasy, and her partner with a glint in his eye asks, “Do you want to go again?” The second example is a T-shirt which displays a cartoon symbol in profile of two figures each with the handle of a vibrating one-armed bandit or poker machine in his rear while coins pour out of his penis. Above the image are the words “WARNING POKIES” while small text underneath the image reads “Government Backed Backdoor Tax.” Two striking aspects of this image are its literal re-contextualization of the “money shot” with which traditional pornographic representations climax, and that its representation of EGMs erotically vibrating players is very close to the truth. I’m not sure exactly when this image was produced, but machines equipped with subtle vibrations timed to “go off ” when triggered by animation and musical “features” are common in most Australian gambling venues. There are some obvious comparisons and contrasts between representations of gambling provided in these two texts. In contrast to the Treasury advertisement’s portrayal of a happy white heterosexual couple, the T-shirt iconography is racially un-marked and at once homoerotic and masturbatory. And whereas the Treasury’s vision of commercial gambling is one of glamour and winning, the T-shirt paints it in terms evoking pathology, addiction, and loss. While the ad is concerned with feeling good, the T-shirt evokes bad feelings. Yet the thread of eroticism binds them together in commercial gambling’s broader discursive field. Whereas gambling at Treasury feels even “better than sex,” the T-shirt is suggestive of the masochistic use of EGMs to make us “hurt so good.” In different ways, both examples point to an affectively charged ambivalence about the enjoyment provided through spaces, moments, and products of legal gambling.

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Figure 1.1 Treasury Casino, Brisbane, 2015 Source: Photograph by author.

In the Treasury advertisement we see two people enjoying sexual possession of one another; we see one partner enjoining the other to join her in the superior pleasures offered by the products and space of the casino and we see something about the force of repetition in constructing gambling moments in what seems to be a rhetorical question: “do you want to go again?” The T-shirt image depicts two apparently male figures joined in a sexual sense to gambling machines; their sexual enjoyment is quite literally expressed through the financial sign of ejaculated coins in response to the stimulation of the machines. Viewers of the text are enjoined to avoid the dangerous pleasures depicted by the sign “Warning.” This enjoinment is reinforced and elaborated in the alliterative and richly metaphoric text in small print: “Government Backed Backdoor Tax.” Connotations of sexual perversion and dishonesty are projected onto the state as the source of official warning signs which enjoin consumers to gamble responsibly. In the T-shirt image, gaming machines appear as technologies of enjoyment designed to literally screw you over for the benefit of governments. We’ll also note that while a certain degree of joy is evident in the first text’s depiction of sexual pleasure, it is qualified by a sense of lack that only gambling can fully satisfy. For the female partner, at least, sexual intercourse

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Figure 1.2 T-shirt purchased by author in Brisbane, 2008 Source: Photograph by author.

seems to be a simulacrum of more satisfying pleasures that await at Treasury Casino. Deliberate ambiguity is produced when the male partner suggests that the couple “go again.” Does he mean another attempt at intercourse or another visit to the casino? In the T-shirt, the affect of “joy” is notably absent from the depiction of gambling’s stimulating effects. If the two figures can be read as enjoying themselves, it is in a masturbatory sense. In an inversion of the meanings produced in the Treasury ad, gambling is presented here as simulating “real” sexual enjoyment. This simulation is connected with perversion through the non-human agency of the gaming

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 67 machine and the apparent obliviousness of the two human-figures to one another’s presence. My third example of how affect is inscribed within gambling’s address is an advertisement for an instant lottery ticket titled “Scratch me Happy!” Themed with celebratory icons, from balloons and sweets to streamers and words including “dance,” “cheer,” “feast,” and “heart,” it alludes to enjoyable moments of life. These values sit in productive tension with the term “scratch,” with its connotations of compulsion, disease, irritation, friction, and damage. If happiness is the promise denoted by this text and product, addiction is its subtext. In purchasing this ticket, a consumer is joining a shared social vision of happiness tied to the state which promotes and administers the product. Yet this product, as with other gambling products, can be a gateway to the ultimate enjoinment of addiction: the itch that must be scratched at any cost. Importantly, however, there is a tiny chance that a consumer will experience the joy of winning, and perhaps the hope that the labour of scratching will cease once and for all, with the event of a financial windfall. In this way, it hints at the coercive aspect of gambling industries’ appeal to us to join in through the spaces, moments, and products they provide. We have seen that debates about problem gambling dramatize a tension in liberal philosophy between individual freedom and individual responsibility. This tension does not register profoundly social understandings and experiences of enjoyment characterized by Slavoj Zizek as follows: Our Post-Modern reflexive society which seems hedonistic and permissive is actually saturated with rules and regulations which are intended to serve our well-being . . . there is the obverse paradox of pleasure becoming duty in a “permissive” society. Subjects experience the need to “have a good time,” to enjoy themselves, as a kind of duty, and, consequently, feel guilty for failing to be happy . . . the command to enjoy doing your duty coincides with the duty to enjoy yourself. (Zizek, 1999, para. 21–22) This injunction to “enjoy!” that Zizek equates with postmodernity is consistent with aspects of gambling I have described as joining and enjoining. I will conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the joys of gambling in everyday life.

Where Is the Joy? If it is easy to see how individuals are enjoined to participate in gambling as a socially acceptable activity which can nevertheless become compulsive— whether in response to the “itch” of psycho-biological addiction or in response to the social expectations of others, the unique and specific “joys” delivered by gambling often remain elusive. I’m reluctant to follow Frederick Jameson in seeing addiction as the ultimate structure of the commodity (2004, p. 52). He

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links addiction to a pervasive social despair about the capacity of institutional politics to transform the inequalities that structure everyday life, reflecting a subject position simultaneously enamoured with and terrified of the prospect of “utopia.” While gambling marketing obviously appeals to consumers’ hope for a better future, I’d argue that the joy of gambling is not, in itself, utopian. It does not imagine a different kind of political future nor a world from which social injustices have been excised. Instead, gambling’s joys turn on its capacity to simultaneously engage individuals from different social positions in a single moment (like a national horse race) or a single space (like a casino) or a single product (like a gaming app). We will see that this joy is not necessarily dependent on gambling’s commercial provision or effective government regulation; it may be equally or more characteristic of informal, and even illegal, contexts of gambling. Gambling’s capacity to produce “eventful” experiences and “fateful” outcomes connects it with the “social action” that constitutes spheres of finance and work and play (Goffman, 1967/2006). Like a tragic accident or a sudden fatal illness, winning at gambling can happen to anyone who has a stake in the game. To understand the joy of gambling beyond its capacities to join and enjoin social subjects as responsible individuals, we will need to expand our conception of the game to encompass wider fields of social action and investment. Bourdieu’s concept of illusio (2000)—the stake we have in the value of society itself—captures the power of gambling to continuously generate compelling cultural narratives. In societies riven by inequalities, it is difficult to remain unmoved by stories of socially unfortunate individuals who—by virtue of a lottery win—are able to care for themselves and enjoy a version of a good life. Similarly, it is difficult to suppress a sense of disappointment when lottery winners already have more than enough money to secure themselves a comfortable existence. Marieke De Goede (2005) explains that the power of the Roman goddess “Fortuna” was embedded in discourses of finance from the outset of modern capitalism’s emergence. Fortuna seems to have been present even in the ascetic Protestant values that gave rise to liberal political theory and governance in North America. While the doctrine of pre-destination in Protestantism strictly precluded gambling, a belief persisted that individuals chosen to receive the grace of God were marked by their material prosperity (Weber, 2005). Lears (2003) describes the unpredictable distribution of luck as “mana”: “a first principle of potentiality, it is suffused with hope and foreboding. It is luck made material, palpable, and accessible” (2003, p. 26). Other authors suggest that gambling’s joys are inextricable from religion. Mark C. Taylor suggests that today, more than ever, markets are embroiled within cultural processes of symbolization and that neo-Marxist frameworks cannot adequately account for the ways in which art, philosophy, and religion underpin the network economy. In contrast to modernist thought which imagines cultural forms, social processes, and individuals as autonomous, in a network society “all action is interaction” (Taylor, 2004, p. 284). Distinctions between the real and virtual which underpinned secular theories of economic

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 69 and political value are rapidly becoming redundant. To support his argument that virtual reality is “the current guise of what once was called sacred or perhaps even God,” Taylor deploys gambling to convey a sense of everyday life as a state of endless flux: The openness of the future [that] is not subject to the calculations of probability; indeed, the improbable not only can happen but does happen repeatedly .  .  . For the canny player, life is not a crapshoot but a game of poker. Since one can never be sure the chips can be redeemed, the best strategy is to keep the game going as long as possible. In the final analysis, the problem is not to find redemption from a world that often seems dark but to learn to live without redemption in a world where the interplay of light and darkness creates infinite shades of difference, which are inescapably disruptive, overwhelmingly beautiful, and infinitely complex. (2004, p. 331) This captures aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of the “joy” that gambling can engender and highlights simulation as an integral component of this. I do not agree, however, that neo-Marxist analyses are incapable of addressing aesthetic and religious aspects of gambling’s joy. We have seen that expressions of distaste surrounding gambling subjects and spaces are often linked to social hierarchies that shape taste within class societies. For anthropologist Wayne Fife, gambling is one way that all individuals seek a deeper meaning in everyday life in secular, class-based societies. He presents a compelling account of the “gnostic” pleasures offered by different kinds of commodified cultural tourism experiences, juxtaposing trout fishing in remote parts of Canada with playing electronic gaming machines in Vegas. Whereas the experience of winning at the latter seems to offer up the secret at the very heart of capitalist values, the experience of catching wild trout seems to provide access to a joy beyond their purview (Fife, 2016). In both moments “the actor comes to feel as though he or she has penetrated to the heart of a deep secret” (Fife, 2016, p. 22). Fife’s point is that these—and other singular experiences sold within a broader tourist economy—are capable of inducing an “affective state that fuels serial consumption” (2016, p. 22). However, regardless of whether they are sought in remote wilderness streams or casinos, he argues that these commodified moments of joy work against the cultivation of a critical political consciousness (Fife, 2016, p. 22). It is also possible to locate joy in different styles and ethics of play including, but not restricted to, competitive, co-operative, and collaborative gambling. James P. Carse offers a useful distinction: There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play . . . If a finite game is to

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This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won. (Carse, 1986, p. 3)

This is suggestive of at least two qualitatively distinct orientations towards games, one that seeks the resolution of winning and losing, and the other that takes playing the game itself as the ultimate end. While the first could be described as secular, the second often involves spiritual beliefs about the game of life within which finite games are contained. An example of this is a conversation I had with the young son of a friend after I introduced him to a game of dice where outcomes are entirely random but mathematical calculations must be made after each throw. I kept winning in one of those lucky streaks that are familiar to regular gamblers. As the adult in the room, I felt somewhat apologetic, since my aim had simply been to have a little bit of fun together. But my young opponent discovered a reason for his losing streak which gave him considerable comfort and satisfaction: “Maybe God felt sorry for you.” I may have been winning the finite game but there were serious doubts about my position on the leader board of the infinite game! It is difficult to imagine gambling’s joys without regard to “insurance,” whether within or beyond the scope of any given game. Or, to put it another way, “missing the chance to win” is closely tied to “avoiding the chance of losing.” A sense of joy can be generated by an absence of worry or the experience of safety, of having escaped a harm that was destined to disable or destroy us. This simultaneous desire for safety and for more good things can be exploited or cultivated by advertisers and marketers. Consider, for example, an offer of medical insurance I received from the company that insures my car. As well as providing me with “more reasons to travel” and “less to worry about,” it informed me that I could win a new BMW if I called for a quote on the advertised coverage. While this attempt to embed a gambling moment within the everyday activity of buying insurance illustrates the convergent logics of gambling and insurance, the joys of playing to win and of winning to continue playing continue to distinguish gambling from the joining and enjoinments involved in finance and insurance. To include joy within an account of gambling in everyday life is not to suggest that a “purer” kind of enjoyment exists that lies beyond the governmental agencies of joining and enjoining. It is, however, to recognize singular experiences as an inherent aspect of the way gambling spaces, products, and moments govern chance. Statistically rare events of winning a life-changing amount of money provide the narrative and affective power of gambling within everyday life in neoliberal societies. Without this possibility, gambling might be less enjoyable—in the sense of being less able to exert joining and enjoining functions. A large prize offers us significant opportunities for transformation: from renter to homeowner, from employee to employer, from creditor to investor. Insurance and gambling industries do more than make random events and accidents profitable; they continually produce new risks and opportunities.

This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 71 Good financial standing can make us feel powerful, and insurance can relieve us of worries about more or less life-threatening events. But only gambling can bestow the singular experience of having placed oneself in the path of luck and been randomly selected as a beneficiary.

Conclusion I have shown that the focus of academic research and government policy in liberal societies where gambling has become a pervasive aspect of everyday life is overwhelmingly skewed towards “problem gambling.” However, the problem gambler is also the product of pervasive, vernacular discourses of addiction (See Keane, 2002, p. 189). This chapter approached the “problem gambler” not so much as a social identity or a bundle of pathologies but as a cultural figure attached to specific populations and cultural spaces and used to arbitrate the interests of governments, gambling industries, and consumers. The dominance of psy-scientific and neuroscientific discourses of problem gambling has not only produced a dearth of research in humanities and social science, this epistemological vacuum has significant political implications. Without support for research that describes and evaluates cultural aspects of gambling spaces, moments, and products and the specific kinds of happiness, fun, joy, entertainment, or recreation derived from them, policy debates about gambling economies will remain mired in trench warfare between advocates of abolition or tighter regulation and defenders of consumer freedom. The former will continue to cite social costs of problem gambling (see Doughney, 2002, p. 22), while the latter will cite benefits predicated on a “consumer surplus” delivered by more competitive markets in gambling products (see D.M. Walker, 2007, p. 10). By explaining and problematizing “the zone” as a key concept within academic gambling studies, I have created a path to investigate gambling enjoyment in the chapters to follow.

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This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 73 Fife, W. (2016). The gnostic tourist: Gambling, fly-fishing, and the seduction of the middle class. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 8(2), 22–38. Focus Group A (FGA) (2014). Discussion of gambling in everyday life facilitated by Deborah Thomas with employees of large public sector organization. Foucault, M. (1976). History of sexuality (Vol. 1). (R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (1983). This is not a pipe with illustrations and letters by Rene Magritte. (J. Harkness, Trans. and Ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2004). The birth of biopolitics. In Ethics, subjectivity and truth. New York, NY: Picador. Goffman, E. (2006). Where the action is. In J. F. Cosgrave (Ed.), The sociology of risk and gambling reader (pp. 225–249). New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1967). Goodman, R. (1995). The luck business: The devastating consequences and broken promises of America’s gambling explosion. New York, NY: Free Press Paperbacks. Gregg, M. (2006). Cultural studies’ affective voices. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregg, M. (2011). Work’s intimacy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Hancock, L., & Smith, G. (2017). Critiquing the Reno Model I-IV, international influence on regulators and governments (2004–2015): The distorted reality of “responsible gambling”. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 15, 1151–1176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-017-9746-y Hayek, F. A. (2011). The constitution of liberty: The definitive edition. (F. A. Hayek & R. Hamowy, Eds.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1960). Hing, N., Nuske, E., Gainsbury, S. M., & Russell, A. M. T. (2015). Perceived stigma and self-stigma of problem gambling: Perspectives of people with gambling problems. International Gambling Studies, 16, 31–48. doi:10.1080/14459795.2015.1092566 Jameson, F. (2004). The politics of utopia. New Left Review, 25, 35–54. Ka-Ching: Pokie Nation. (2016). Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Lawrence, N. (Executive Producer), Goldman, M. (Producer), & Manning, J. (Director). Sydney, NSW. Keane, H. (2002). What’s wrong with addiction? Parkville, Vic: Melbourne University Press. Kingma, S. F. (1997). “Gaming is play: It should remain fun!” The gaming complex, pleasure and addiction. In P. Sulkunen (Ed.), Constructing the new consumer society (pp. 173–193). New York, NY: St Martin’s Press. Kingma, S. F. (2017). Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and addiction in gambling. Journal of Historical Sociology, 30, 891–917. doi:10.1111/johs.12086 Lears, J. (2003). Something for nothing: Luck in America. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Livingstone, C., Adams, P., Cassidy, R., Markham, F., Reith, G., Rintoul, A., .  .  . Young, M. (2017). On gambling research, social science and the consequences of commercial gambling, International Gambling Studies, 18(1), 56–68. Livingstone, C., Rintoul, A., & Francis, L. (2014). What is the evidence for harm minimisation measures in gambling venues. Evidence Base, 2, 1–24. Livingstone, C., & Woolley, R. (2007). Risky business: A few provocations on the regulation of electronic gaming machines. International Gambling Studies, 7, 361–376.

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This Is (Not) a Book on Problem Gambling 75 Williams, R. (1977). Structures of feeling. In Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woodcock, J., & Johnson, M. J. (2017). Gamification: What it is, and how to fight it. The Sociological Review, 66(3), 542–558. Woolley, R., & Livingstone, C. (2010). Into the zone: Innovating in the Australian EGM machine industry. In S. Kingma (Ed.), Global gambling: Cultural perspectives on gambling organizations (pp. 38–63). New York, NY: Routledge. Young, M. (2010). Gambling, capitalism and the state: Towards a new dialectic of the risk society. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10, 254–273. Zizek, S. (1999, March 18). You May! London Review of Books, 21(6). Retrieved from www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may

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Introduction Over several days in 2015, I visited a large bingo venue, located in a gentrifying suburb of inner London. The first thing I observed was the variety of types and platforms of bingo that supplemented a daily schedule of live calls. The live calls were a theatrical event presided over by a man in his early 60s, master of the art of distinguishing numbers using humorous slang such as “legs eleven,” and “lucky sevens.” During these live calls, venue screens depicted the lucky balls falling into place through a live video feed. The local game was linked to other games across the country, engaging the caller and players with a national community of remote callers and players, simultaneously competing for large jackpot prizes. The live calls were not the main game in this space; they were restricted to early afternoon and early evening sessions. In addition to paper and colourful bingo markers, used during the live calls, players were provided with electronic devices, the size of a laptop computer, to participate in multiple bingo games at once. These devices were used by most players I observed. Another striking feature was the design of the venue. Several small spaces packed with 300 EGMs surrounded the large bingo room, like spokes of a hub on a wheel, and they were open to players 24 hours, seven days a week. There was also a large buffet area with a kitchen where a variety of cheap meals were available for purchase. The bingo venue appeared to provide a space of everyday accommodation for the unemployed, elderly, disabled, and/or socially isolated. For example, on one day a young man came into the venue carrying a small bag and stayed for four hours. He took a seat alone at a table but he did not seem to be playing games. Instead he watched the numbers appearing and disappearing on the screens and the live caller’s periodic appearances on stage. Shortly after midday he reached into his package and retrieved two slices of bread and other ingredients for a simple sandwich. After consuming this and neatly disposing of the wrappings, he pulled out a small container with hot water, a tea bag, and milk. After completing a ritual that seemed to have been finely honed over time, he settled back in his seat to watch the numbers for another hour or so. For this man, the bingo venue appeared to satisfy a basic need for being with others even while alone. The social joining function of the bingo venue was also evident at times when the most valuable cash prizes were on offer. At such times, the number of people would multiply; long queues formed at the ticket desk while the EGM rooms filled with those waiting for the called games.

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Another notable aspect of the space was its position within a shopping strip featuring numerous betting shops, liquor outlets, and pawn stores. In this “streetscape of vice,” individuals could move between venues only a short distance apart offering alcohol, wagering, bingo, and EGMs. This example introduces several themes, including amenity, accessibility, accommodation, sociality, and the profitability of clustered legal vices, which will be explored in the course of this chapter. My introduction developed the concept of finopower to explain how gambling shapes intersections between work, finance, and play. Chapter 1 offered a critique of popular representations and academic research focused on problem gambling. Bringing gambling back into the orbit of everyday life, I argued that more research is needed to understand the affective and political work of “enjoyment.” How do gambling spaces generate enjoyable cultural practices related to work, entertainment, leisure, and play? Drawing on critical theories of space in everyday life, I will explore how gambling spaces join citizens together as producers and consumers through carefully designed spaces of surveillance and “fun”; how they enjoin citizens to responsible behaviours; and how they enjoin governments for support . The proliferation of gambling spaces is evident in the transnational expansion of branded casino resorts, the ubiquity of electronic gaming machine venues, the expansion of betting shops and bingo venues, as well as online spaces including internet casinos, betting exchanges, and gambling apps within social networking sites. The boom in casino-based and online poker has created new spaces, while eSports gamblers bet on live-video games held in huge stadiums. In everyday life, we might encounter gambling spaces in various settings, from tourism and leisure activities, to “checking in” on a wager at work, buying a national lottery ticket, or playing an EGM in a dedicated space of a local club or pub. Digital mobile gambling apps allow us to move around the world with a “casino in our pocket” (Albarrán-Torres & Goggin, 2014). I compiled the following list of spaces where people regularly gamble in surveys with Australians between 18 and 74 years old. They include homes, smartphones, pubs, casinos, clubs, cruise ships, online, racetracks, pool halls, and live sporting games. One of my interviewees, Tony, shared his experience of several different kinds of gambling spaces in a large Australian city. A part-time barman and mature age student, he worked in hotels with electronic gaming machines (pokies) and identified as an active gambler; he was also familiar with various sites of gambling, from illegal gambling in pool halls and poker games at home to large commercial venues. While he visited casinos quite regularly, he described them as “not very positive places, especially at four in the morning.” He recalled a somewhat sinister story told by one of his father’s poker buddies about a trip to Las Vegas: “They won a lot of money and they could . . . tell that they were getting fed a lot of wins so that they’d get cleaned out. They cashed out and were followed .  .  . by people from the casino.” He described a gambling venue in one of the largest sporting

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clubs in his city as “weird”: “It’s hard to find a bathroom or a bar anywhere because there are hundreds of poker machines in the middle.” The most disturbing gambling space was in the pub where he worked: “you know the little rooms, sometimes hard to find . . . it’s a seedy area of the pub. It’s dark generally and you know crappy carpet, stinks like beer and there are just people kind of zombified sitting in front of these machines hitting a button over and over again” (Interviewee A, 2015). To understand what links these spaces together we need to develop a “critical geography” of gambling that is capable of locating them within broader global and national processes of capitalist extraction and commodification (Hannigan, 1998; Young, 2011). If cultural space is inextricable from social power, it is important to understand how gambling makes spaces and conquers territories (see Brenner & Elden, 2009, p. 353). Using the concept of “accommodation,” I will explain the process through which spaces of gambling enjoyment appear to reconcile public and private interests. Ethnographic fieldwork, case studies economy, and critical cultural theory are used to address the following questions. How do gambling spaces respond to and shape history? What kind of claims to the future are made through their financing, design, and regulation? How are borders of local, regional, national, and transnational space marked and transcended by processes of gambling investment? How do gambling spaces shape social identities and political relationships? What kinds of narratives and embodied social practices are generated by gambling spaces? How do gambling spaces produce and threaten local, regional, and national forms of cultural heritage? What happens to spaces of “work,” “leisure,” and “home” when online casinos become spaces of labour? How are broader relations of sovereignty refracted through cultural spaces of gambling? What follows draws on critical cultural theories of space to explore how broader finopolitical transformations are accommodated through the enjoyment of spaces of gambling. Like the figure of the problem gambler, spaces of gambling have become metonyms for broader concerns about economic, political, and social transformations in neoliberal societies. As critical theorist Henri Lefebvre explains, “Space is at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also a stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on the future” (1991, p. 184). And gambling researcher Sytze Kingma explains, space does not merely refer to location but should be understood as constitutive for gambling practices, which cannot adequately be conceptualized without this spatial embeddedness . . . space is as much a condition for gambling organizations as it is a consequence of them. (2011, p. 85) How do the social and political wagers embodied in gambling spaces shape everyday life for individuals and specific populations in neoliberal societies?

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New “spaces of luck” are gradually transforming how we work, invest, play, and are entertained, addressing us as potential beneficiaries of “something for nothing” (Lears, 2003). Some of these spaces are monumental establishments employing tens of thousands of people, others are small niches within existing spaces of sport, socializing, and play; many are digital spaces and continuously accessible. While gambling spaces may be more or less ordinary or extraordinary, they share a cultural function of accommodating tensions between individuals, corporations, states, and the populations they govern. While these tensions produce certain ways of governing through and within gambling spaces, we will see that they also generate some distinctive forms of resistance. I’ve developed finopower as framework that enables gambling to be understood as an intrinsic rather than contingent aspect of liberal governmentality. As social mobility recedes from the control of individuals seeking to enjoy “the good life,” gambling is promoted as an arena of agency, albeit highly limited and oriented towards almost impossible odds. And the political corruption, criminality, and corporate greed that produced and sustained Las Vegas as a cultural space of gambling becomes more ordinary than exceptional. As Denton and Morris argued at the turn of last century, Far from traditional centres of commerce, [Las Vegas] is a model for much of the nation’s economy. It is a provincial outpost become an arbiter of national power. Once thought the society’s most aberrant city, it is not just newly respectable but proves to have been an archetype all along. (2001, p. 9) Although gambling is not explicitly associated with neoliberal theorists, the resonance of Las Vegas as a global cultural space is inextricable from the American exceptionalism for which “Chicago School economics” has become a shorthand. And it is with reference to the arguments of neoliberal economic theory, about the limited role of government in free-market societies, that advocates of gambling deregulation most often defend their case.

Transforming Gambling Spaces Gambling spaces are transforming in at least three senses. Firstly, they are agents of transformation within communities and areas where they are located. Secondly, these spaces are in continual states of transformation related to broader political and economic forces, both in and beyond the jurisdictions where they are located. Thirdly, gambling spaces can effect important subjective transformations within their inhabitants. What kind of relations of subjugation are inscribed and recorded on bodies and spaces through gambling? What are some of the “accidents,” “errors,” and “false calculations” that define the work of freedom and regulation in gambling spaces? (Foucault, 1971, p. 81).

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Monte Carlo casinos, opened in the late nineteenth century, were some of the first modern European gambling spaces and established several of the architectural and iconographic elements associated with them today. Tourists mingled with celebrity clientele of aristocrats and royalty in spaces with walls covered with silk and gilt-covered chairs, staying for weeks at a time, and fluttering their wealth away with studied disinterest (Spanier, 2006, p. 173). North American gambling spaces emerged from a tension between a “culture of control” and a “culture of chance.” While respectable Northern Protestants’ “fondness for risk-taking was channeled into economic life . . . forms of chance flourished especially among the people stigmatised by the evangelical-rational consensus as childlike, backward, undisciplined or simply weird” (Lears, 2003, p. 99). This cultural schema saw agonistic, skill-based games associated primarily with white men and aleatory games with women and African-American people. However, both kinds of gambling were seen as a threat to the domestic ideal, “where risk and uncertainty were kept at bay by love . . . [the home] was on the front line of the cultural war against chance—an agency of progress, a means for preparing productive rational citizens” (2003, p. 172). This strong Protestant ethic persisted well into the twentieth century and was a strong force behind the confinement of gambling to a desert space, far from the suburbs where the culture of control governed the family and related social institutions. While bodies inscribed by relations of class and gender are important aspects of the story of legal gambling spaces within liberal modern societies, whiteness, race, and Indigeneity are equally significant. As sites of “togetherness in difference,” cultural spaces of gambling foster what Ien Ang describes as “complicated entanglement,” “in which difference and sameness are inextricably intertwined” (2001, p. 201). Prior to the rise of Native American casinos from the late 1980s, Indigenous people were rarely considered in gambling research, and African Americans were more visible as service workers and entertainers within commercial gambling industries than as gambling entrepreneurs and consumers. Recent studies highlight the importance of organized games of chance, such as “policy,” as engines of social cohesion and local business growth for African-American communities in the inner cities (White, Garton, Robertson, & White, 2010). Some of these games were based on results of the day’s horse races or closing stock market figures and demonstrate the role of gambling in challenging and reinforcing colour lines in early modern America. The lack of attention to such games in gambling scholarship reflects racial logics that continue to structure the classification and governance of spheres of “gambling” and “finance.” For most of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, then, gambling spaces were distinct from, yet intimately related to, ordinary spaces of domestic or suburban life from which (predominantly male) players departed and to which they returned. Today architecture, interior design, iconography, art, surveillance, and data collection and analysis work together in gambling spaces to not only reflect

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but to actively shape the cultural landscape of late capitalist societies characterized by increasing social stratification, an individualist ethos, and service-based economies. Enjoyment is promoted through images and symbols of excessive consumption: bigger jackpots, faster cars displayed on casino floors, better entertainment, and superior services. The consumer is often addressed

Figure 2.1 Celebrity tower in Studio City casino, Macau, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

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by default as a very important person (VIP), with player reward schemes offering access to higher levels of luxury and amenity in enclaves that resemble spaces like gentleman’s clubs. Gambling’s incorporation into ordinary spaces of leisure and entertainment has diminished some of the distinctive qualities of its architectural language and iconography. This is transforming, in turn, how we experience and understand the relationship between gambling and politics in and across spaces of everyday life. However, we can still find gambling machines called “Ambassador” and global brands called “Aristocrat” or “Crown,” and entrances adorned with red carpets and interiors replete with luxury furnishings, stylish furniture design, and contemporary art works. While the version of luxury that such spaces promote is usually more modern than aristocratic in its reference points, the iconography of contemporary legal gambling spaces often references rich histories of gambling as a quasi-legal activity which thrives on and tends to reproduce territorial ambiguity. Melbourne’s Crown Casino provides an example of how cultural signifiers of historical periods or places are used to design gambling spaces in the present. Its “Mahogany Room” won a state architectural award in 2013 for its interior design. The gold aluminium and leather lobby was inspired by luxury handbags, and the room itself features bespoke carpet, vertical garden walls, and sculptural installations. Inspired partly by interior home design from the 1960s and the most celebrated Las Vegas casinos of that time, the architect and design team employed artisans and craft people locally and overseas to deliver this

Figure 2.2 Entrance to Mahogany Room, Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

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Figure 2.3 Christmas light show on town hall sponsored by lottery, Brisbane, 2014 Source: Photograph by author.

distinctive and historically resonant space (Crafti, 2013, p. 34). To contextualize the case studies to follow, I present a series of examples illustrating reciprocal process through which politics shapes gambling spaces and how gambling spaces shape politics today.

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The previous chapter mentioned that a large casino in an Australian city was built within the shell of a colonial sandstone building which formerly housed the state Treasury. In the same city, a laser light show sponsored by the lottery is screened onto the town hall every Christmas; the logos of the lottery and the City Council appear together to jointly brand this family entertainment event. Holland Casino in the Netherlands presents visitors with a front desk reminiscent of airport border security where staff check gamblers’ identity documents and provide them with a permission slip to proceed. In the Canadian province of Alberta, a proportion of gambling proceeds directly supports community organizations; fines are imposed on volunteers who fail to show up to do a shift at the casino on a nominated day. After many years of prohibition, the small island state of Singapore decides to capitalize on global gambling consumption, protecting its citizens by imposing a $70 entry charge and designing policies enabling spouses, parents, and children to exclude their addicted family members from its new casino. A debate about the impact on live music of closing venues early in a large Australian city’s “party precinct” is framed by consideration of the special license afforded to the casino nearby that never closes. A local gambling venue supplies a small brochure that players can pick up near the cash register. The front cover is illustrated with an image of falling dominos while the title reassures the reader, “You can control your gambling.” On the back cover is a quotation attributed to Confucius, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Inside this brochure is a plastic card in the style of a debit or credit card. This “Help card” includes phone numbers for counselling services and a reminder: “Only spend what you can afford to lose.” Toilet stalls in the same venue feature a series of government-sponsored posters providing information and contact details for assistance to those with mental health issues including depression, anxiety, and age-related problems. A gambling tycoon intervenes in a national debate about racism in sport and positions himself as a leader in Aboriginal reconciliation through Indigenous employment programmes (see Nicoll, 2018). A former politician with oversight of online gambling retires and is quickly appointed to head a lobby group to promote “Responsible Wagering” whose members are the largest sports gambling providers. While all of these examples highlight gambling spaces as regulated by and within states, many also raise questions about a failure, absence, or lack of regulation where government intervention might be expected.

Statey Spaces of Gambling It is 2018 and I am visiting the Special Administrative Region of Macau, currently the largest gambling centre in the world, which serves a market of primarily Chinese gamblers and tourists. Macau’s economy has become almost entirely dependent on this market and provides a variegated landscape of casinos with different clientele, from social elites to working-class service workers who live in Macau. The region is an important showcase for transnational casino brands and allows them to expand their properties to ever-more monumental scales. Each property provides different

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thematic architecture, entertainment brands, and tourist attractions. For example, Studio City features a Ferris wheel built into a skyscraper and integrates Hollywood cinema products, including a Dark Batman ride and Avatar-themed displays. My visit is a week before Christmas, and all of the casinos are capitalizing on the holiday to stimulate consumption, with extravagant displays, including Christmas Trees, enormous baubles, and other symbols of seasonal festivity in their foyers. One of the

Figure 2.4 Ferris wheel built into Studio City hotel tower, Macau, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

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Figure 2.5 Shopping mall in Wynn casino, Macau, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

largest casinos memorably features a huge Christmas tree suspended upside down in its lobby. In spite of casinos’ attempts to distinguish their brand identities for different target markets, there is a strong sense of homogeneity provided by global luxury brands such as Chanel and Rolex which display their wares in shopping malls which punctuate visitors’ movements through gambling spaces.

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As a visitor inside the casino properties, it feels as though I could be anywhere in the world. But as I move around the city, in between casino properties, there are reminders of the strong presence of the Chinese state in multiple border points through which visitors and employees from the mainland must pass. These borders represent and enact the containment of commercial gambling to Macau and the power of the state to punish those who breach them. While in Macau, I also visit historical sites that preserve and commemorate centuries of Portuguese rule. Wandering around the battlements of the old fort with other tourists, I take a photograph which seems to encapsulate my research on gambling spaces and governmentality. It shows a cannon in the foreground pointing towards a large building with a strikingly innovative form. The building is the new Lisboa casino, among the highest earning casinos in the world, and a re-invention of the original casino established last century by gambling billionaire Stanley Ho. The visual dialogue between cannon and casino in the photo introduces the relationship between gambling and territorial appropriation and control that I will elaborate later. Tim Simpson describes Macau as an exemplar of global “enclave ‘spaces of exception’ within larger states; transnational investment regimes; public–private partnerships; transient multinational populations; superlative and iconic architecture; and economies devoted to shopping, gambling, sightseeing, spectacle, and amusement” (2015, p. 27). Replete with symbols and products denoting extreme wealth and status placed within impressive and luxurious surroundings, these exceptional spaces easily mask the reality of losing with the sensuous experience of being a winner. It would be a mistake, however, to see gambling spaces primarily as texts, to be decoded within the broader language of architecture or urban development. As we will see, gambling spaces also function as powerful signals to citizens within the states they both inhabit and occupy. Lefebvre’s critique of post-modern analyses of architecture for reducing spaces to texts that can be read as just one more form of discourse is instructive here: That space signifies is incontestable. But what it signifies is dos and don’ts—and this brings us back to power. Power’s message is invariably confused—deliberately so; dissimulation is necessarily part of any message from power. Thus space indeed “speaks”—but it does not tell all. Above all, it prohibits. Its mode of existence, its practical “reality” (including its form) differs radically from the reality (or being-there) of something written such as a book. (1991, p. 184) To follow Lefebvre’s argument is not to deny that the architecture and iconography of gambling spaces is designed to be read (see Venturi, 1972); it is to suggest that even the most nuanced readings of these spaces may fail to capture their social power. His arguments about monumental spaces that appear to speak for themselves help us to understand the power of transnational casino resorts in particular. He writes, spaces made (produced) to be read are the most deceptive and tricked-up imaginable. The graphic impression of readability is a sort of trompe l’oeil

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Figure 2.6 New Lisboa casino viewed from colonial Portuguese fortifications, Macau, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

concealing strategic intentions and actions. Monumentality, for instance, always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message. It says what it wishes to say yet it hides a good deal more: being political, military, and ultimately fascist in character, monumental buildings mask the will

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to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 184) Important here is his proposition that monumental spaces work repressively partly because of their apparent intelligibility. The power of gambling spaces is often felt as much as it is perceived or understood on a cognitive level. Or, to put it another way, the affectively charged “zones” of gambling spaces are related to the tensions of governance they literally materialize. This allows us to think through a paradox that is not addressed by Foucault and subsequent theorists of governmentality but which is acutely evident when we give serious attention to spaces such as casino resorts. Neoliberalism is characterized by a state of constant vigilance over the possibility of “over-governance” (Anderson, 2012). So, while casino resorts are certainly sites where frugal government is represented, they remain intimately entangled with processes of state power and sovereignty. On one hand, the intersections between gambling, finance, and play embodied by gambling spaces are clearly the result of frugal government. On the other hand, these intersections can be the focus of intensive investment, if not regulatory oversight, by states. Or to put it another way, gambling spaces are regulated but not quite in the same way or quite to the same extent as other social spaces. I will use the terms “statey” and “stateyness” to explore some of the unique issues raised by legal gambling spaces. I derive “stateyness” from the work of cultural theorists who attempt to describe power in terms that do not reinforce already constituted identity categories and classification schema. A challenge for such theorists is how to describe the relations of domination built into institutions and everyday cultural practices while registering the circumstances of individuals and specific communities. Marilyn Frye explains the concept of “whiteliness”: “the connection between whiteliness and light-colored skin is a contingent connection: this character could be manifested by persons who are not white; it can be absent in persons who are” (1992, pp. 151–152). Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined the term “gender-y” to explore ways that gender identification and expression are sometimes more evident in their intensity than in their relationship to binary categories of masculine and feminine. As she put it, “Some people are just plain more gender-y than others” (1995, p. 16). Like the concepts of “whiteliness” and “gender-y,” the concept of stateyness does not require a border to be drawn between state and private prerogatives and interests. Instead, it enables gambling spaces to be approached as contingent manifestations of state and corporate power along a continuum, from fully state-controlled and -administered spaces to entirely private and self-governing spaces. Considering gambling spaces in everyday life as “statey” also helps to explain an experienced or felt sense of their power in their presence. While certain aspects of these spaces are “stately” (such as red carpets, aristocratic references,

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and heritage iconography), they lack the exclusivity or call to respect that this term would imply. Commercial gambling’s address is nothing if not inclusive! In neoliberal states, gambling spaces present themselves to everyone to enjoy. Like gender-y and “whitely” people and practices, “statey” spaces of gambling also generate powerful “public feelings” in the sense that “public spheres are affect worlds at least as much as they are effects of rationality and rationalization” (Berlant, 2012, p. 340; see also Cvetkovich, 2012). The statey quality of gambling spaces raises questions about whether gambling industries have become so powerful that they are a law unto themselves and whether local and state citizens can exercise any meaningful power where gambling spaces are concerned. The following section will consider these questions with reference to casino resorts.

Accommodating Casino Resorts I’ve argued that gambling spaces accommodate tensions between statephobia and the political and cultural economies of local, subnational, and national states. In many states, casino resorts have become part of transnational processes of “neoliberal urbanism” (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009, pp. 53–54). Casino resorts embody a set of promises: urban renewal, taxation dollars, employment, tourism, cultural prestige, and financial investment more generally. They are also spaces where transnational, national, and local processes of labour and consumption come together to support larger popular culture and global entertainment industries through branded restaurants, live acts, DJs, cinema, and sporting spectacles. As a shrinking public sphere imposes austerity on museums and art galleries previously used to join people together by promoting a shared sense of belonging to empire and modern nations (Bennett, 2006), large casino resorts occupy a position once held by major public institutions. The scale of these resorts is often “sublime” in the sense of emphasizing “grandeur of scale and conception and designed to excite, elevate and, ultimately overpower their audiences” (Riding & Llewellyn, 2013). The National Geographic Television show MegaStructures features three episodes dedicated to casinos as the pinnacle of architectural and engineering achievement. These include Atlantic City’s Borgata (Stack, 2004); Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands (Chan, 2010), and, most recently, one of the largest buildings in the world and the world’s biggest casino, The Venetian, in Macau (Schutz, 2010). In these documentaries, excited narrators breathlessly enumerate material and human components of these resorts, from tonnage of marble and concrete used in construction to the volumes of catering produce required on opening night. The sense of awe and wonder conveyed in MegaStructures is amplified in everyday life through social media platforms, as tourists and other visitors upload their own photographs and videos, as they move through interior and exterior spaces, which are often adorned with expensive design features and original masterpieces and commissioned contemporary art works.

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One reason that casino resort spaces loom large in the popular imagination is the capacity they embody to attract local, national, and transnational capital at a moment when many governments are challenged to provide basic public and social services. Feminist authors note that the promise of economic salvation via casino resorts has powerful gendered dimensions which carry, in turn, specific values and assumptions about what gambling is and should be (see Bedford, 2011, 2016; Casey, 2008). For example, working class women’s highly social practices of bingo enjoyment are denigrated in favour of more efficient, technologically enhanced ways to deliver games via the individual screens provided in the venue, which I described at the beginning of this chapter. And their regular purchase of lottery tickets is often dismissed as banal or superstitious, in contrast with the gambling warriors appearing in high-stakes poker tournaments. Feminist critiques also cast into relief the way gambling entrepreneurs in popular culture appear as embodiments of hyper-masculine qualities, closely linked to those attached to “players” within high-end real estate businesses. Donald Trump and Steve Wynn are obvious examples. Trump’s ventures in the Atlantic City casino market in the last two decades of the twentieth century exemplify a blustering, hyper-masculine celebration of gambling erections. Touted as the “biggest,” the “greatest,” and the most beautiful, Trump’s Atlantic City hotels were also some of the brassiest. His first hotel, decorated in New York Art Deco style, even featured slot machines in brass cabinets set on brass stands (Demaris, 1986). To celebrate his contribution to the city, an episode in his reality television show, The Apprentice, sent contestants to develop new marketing materials for his Taj Mahal casino (Burnett, 2004–2017). The story of Atlantic City’s transformation from a small resort city to a thicket of casino towers catering to elderly day visitors and making profits for organized criminal syndicates is a microcosm of a broader narrative in which gambling provides an irresistible way to attract and keep funds in struggling jurisdictions. This promise to voters inevitably disappoints local residents, with developers and investors raking profits, partly via generous tax concessions, before moving on and out. Trump’s foray into the world of gambling is an example of the role played by celebrity entrepreneurs to legitimate the version of enjoyment offered by the casino resort. In Australia, casino gambling has rapidly expanded partly due to the work of another celebrity business persona: James Packer. The son of one of Australia’s most powerful (and now deceased) media tycoons, Kerry Packer, with a net worth estimated at four billion dollars (Forbes, 2018), James is under constant scrutiny by financial reporters for his business decisions, and his volatile personal life provides rich tabloid fodder. While his father placed a defining stamp on the nation’s culture in the era of broadcast media and was accused of treating the political process with contempt, James stakes a claim to national importance through the large and striking spaces of gambling that he has placed on the Australian landscape. Rather than presenting Packer as an individual to be celebrated or condemned, I understand

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him as embodying an orientation to the particular kind of enjoyment that casino resorts define and promote. The following sections will apply some of the ideas discussed earlier to two of his casino resort projects. Melbourne’s Crown Casino is Victoria’s biggest single-site employer (Crown Resorts Limited, 2014) and his new casino, Barangaroo, is being promoted as a driver of regional economic development in Sydney’s CBD and Western suburbs. In 2017, after over a decade of investment in international gambling markets including Macau and Las Vegas, Packer decided to sell 700 million dollars of global assets to focus on drawing the world to his Barangaroo site (Tasker, 2017, p. 19). A 60 million dollar penthouse on two levels of the casino will become his primary residence and a token of his commitment to the project, the state, and the nation. In an interview, he described Barangaroo as “my proudest achievement. It is the most exciting thing in my business life and in terms of my relationship with Australia” (Tabakoff, 2017, p. 1). This unfinished casino resort project provides a clear case study of how gambling makes cultural space. A former dock site, Barangaroo was made available for new urban development and named after the Cammeraygal woman who was a companion to Bennelong—a political and cultural broker from the Eora nations in the years following the establishment of a British penal colony in 1788. As Barangaroo Point faces Bennelong Point, the site’s naming spatially evokes, and arguably perpetuates, relations of colonial domination. The unsolicited bid for a second casino in Australia’s largest city by Crown, which had established casino resorts in Melbourne and other major national and international cities, was accepted in 2012. The original proposal was for a hotel with a modest but luxurious VIP casino located in Sydney Harbour, one of the city’s most picturesque tourist attractions. Packer’s pitch to the NSW government claimed that the development was poised to capitalize on a growing market for middle-class Chinese tourist destinations. Comparing the profitability of the Chinese middle class to that of “the internet,” he pointed out that tourists were as attracted to “man-made attractions” as to picturesque natural features. Contrasting the 40 million visitors attracted to Las Vegas with the three million who visit the nearby natural attraction of the Grand Canyon in Nevada, he presented the Barangaroo development as part of a global drive to provide “better hotels, better restaurants, better shopping” to this target market (NT News, 2012). Over time, the height and the width of the planned Barangaroo resort has grown to encapsulate nearby escarpments, encroaching onto land previously zoned for public use. As the company proposed “modifications” that would add 30 stories to the hotel and replace public access to the foreshore with a small park, concerns about the casino’s creep into previously open spaces were voiced by residents and professional organizations. Members of a Design Advisory Panel contested recommendations that the engorged development should be approved as an “iconic” addition to Sydney’s skyline. The president

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of the Australian Institute of Architects, Shaun Carter, put his professional view to city planners tasked with approving the design in passionate terms: You are the last check and balance for the people in this process. Now, it is up to you to protect the public’s interest . . . I for one don’t want to be remembered as the people that chose a private exclusive casino over a harbour-side public park. A park that will live on [in] perpetuity . . . that will be a gift to this city, a gift for our children and our children’s children. (quoted in Davies, 2016) A commentary by former city councillor, architect, and academic Elizabeth Farrelly took issue with the approval process and euphemistic description of the casino as “iconic”: If you or I want to amend our home renovation by 50 centimetres it’s a whole new DA (and fee). But Packer’s casino adds storeys, grows its footprint to 6000-odd square metres and shuffles the lot forward onto waterfront public park and it’s a modification? A tweak that big? Like he already has permission? Like Packer himself is the icon? This is a defining moment for Sydney. What, if anything, do we hold sacred? (Farrelly, 2016) Noting the failure of the government to protect heritage trees and significant Indigenous sites, Farrelly suggests disturbing cultural dimensions of the casino’s expansion: Beauty, community, public space, heritage, nature, localism, Indigenous issues, refugees, children: these “soft” values give our lives meaning, but the new anti-urban masculinism discounts whatever is not hard and fast. (Farrelly, 2016) This perceived masculinity of the casino resort development recalls Lefebvre’s description of “abstract space” as oriented towards the goal of homogeneity and inextricably tied to “power as such, and the state as such.” Referencing psychoanalytical theory, he argues that “the phallic . . . fulfils the extra function of ensuring that ‘something’ occupies this space, namely, a signifier which, rather than signifying a void, signifies a plenitude of destructive force” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 187). While prefiguring Barangaroo as abstract space requiring a large project to achieve fulfilment enabled those seeking alternative futures and valuing different aspects of the past to be dismissed as “anti-development,” perceptions and criticisms of excessive power are a challenge for casino resorts and require careful management. The Packer family expressed gratitude for government approval of the project in 2013, pledging a $30 million donation of funding for the arts in Western

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Sydney, a struggling socio-economic region of the city. Acknowledging his sister, Gretel, as the source of this initiative, James Packer said, I know local Western Sydney organisations will make the funds go a long way and touch many people’s lives for the better . . . I may not be the most committed art and theatre goer, but I know from my own family how much joy the arts can provide; all Sydneysiders should have access to see the very best art and performances. (quoted in Lehmann, 2013) He also committed Crown to establishing a hospitality college in the region to train around 1200 local residents including school leavers and a training scheme for 200 Indigenous employees (Lehmann, 2013). This exercise of “soft power” in a site named after a historically significant Indigenous woman produces the

Figure 2.7 Exterior of Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

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casino resort as a cultural space where Indigenous art and employment (Barangaroo Delivery Authority, 2017) are accommodated within the profit-generating activities of commercial gambling and middle-class Chinese tourism. Since the Barangaroo project was approved and construction commenced, relations between Chinese and Australian governments have become less accommodating. Australian governments have increased property taxes to restrict Chinese speculation in property markets, and executives from Crown casino were arrested for illegally promoting gambling in mainland China. This is a reminder of the limits to “global” capital that states can and do impose in the name of the “national interest.” We note the engorging casino resort’s capacity to appear as an answer to the political challenges posed by frugal government. Barangaroo appears as a deliverer of training and employment, a bringer of big-spending Chinese tourists, a broker of Indigenous reconciliation, and a facilitator of public art and cultural access to the deprived. It is reasonable to ask how governments, unable to provide these public goods to their citizens, can possibly resist this lure? As both face and replacement for governments, the statey capacities of the casino resort are simultaneously desired and despised. Before shifting the focus from Packer’s gambling empire, I want to apply the lens of “surveillance” to explore the casino resort as an exceptional space of governance. I will show how the privatization of security can shift the focus of regulation from the public interest and towards a non-liberal exercise of sovereign power. The case of Melbourne’s Crown Casino will be used to illustrate how “Repressive space wreaks repression and terror even though it may be strewn with ostensible signs of the contrary (of contentment, amusement or delight” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 184).

Crown Sovereignty The statey feel of casino resorts derives in part from their appropriation of state security functions to oversee and police their space. Gamblers are subjected to more or less obvious disciplines to keep them playing games or engaged in related activities, such as drinking alcohol and eating at venue restaurants. While architecture and interior design do much of this work, limiting seating to playing areas that fill every inch of available floorspace, the public to which casino resorts market and on which they depend for profits are not always compliant. Thieves loiter to empty the wallets of lucky punters; illegal prostitutes circulate in search of work; young night clubbers bring excessive exuberance onto the gaming floor; drunks look for a pretext to fight. This not only creates employment opportunities for (mainly) men with experience in armed forces, policing, and private security operations, it can also make policing inside casinos much more intensive than in the space beyond their perimeter. A vivid example comes from the early days of Atlantic City’s development; in the mid-1980s, the city’s police commissioner estimated that up to one third of his workforce were moonlighting for the casinos (Demaris, 1986, p. 432).

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We will recall a reference to Schull’s ethnography in the previous chapter in which a surveillance employee relates the apathy of fellow gamblers as one of their number slumps from a heart attack at the table. She describes how casino resorts introduced and trained employees in the use of defibrillators because the deliberately labyrinthine floor design meant that patrons would otherwise die before the arrival of emergency staff. Dead patrons are bad for business. They bring negative publicity and eliminate the player as a human resource that the timely use of defibrillators can otherwise sustain. Their availability and use enables customer “care” to be incorporated into the casino resort brand. Faith that patrons on site are being “seen and looked out for” also releases fellow gamblers from a disturbance and a sense of moral obligation to act in the presence of an emergency. If this is a relatively benign example of surveillance, consistent with a disciplinary mode of biopolitics described by Foucault, other examples of surveillance in casino resort spaces are more consistent with a punitive exercise of sovereign power. The following examples suggest that cultural spaces of gambling enjoyment are also spaces where private owners enjoy exceptional capacities to enjoin patrons and employees to obedience. Such capacities have led to criticisms that casinos resorts are a “law unto themselves.” To understand this power, it is important to understand the economic heft of casino resorts. For example, the volume of global revenue flowing through Melbourne’s Crown Casino is unprecedented in this city. Until quite recently, “high rollers” flown to the casino from China enjoyed credit lines of up to ten million dollars (Donelly, 2014). In her study of Crown as a case study of failed corporate self-regulation, Linda Hancock observes loopholes related to the EGMs which take up a large proportion of Crown’s gambling space: various tax and regulatory concessions [are] granted to Crown Casino that are not given to hotels and clubs. Ministerial dispensation for up to 1,000 of Crown’s 2500 gaming machines on spin rate, note acceptor denomination and pay-outs over 2000 by cheque are seen as explaining how Crown “farms” its machines more intensively than the national average . . . This prompts questioning as to how and why casinos are treated differently from other gambling venues; and what justifies “excusatory discourses and practices”—especially with regard to taxation and implementation of state government harm minimisation measures aimed at improving consumer protection. (Hancock, 2011, p. 11) She concludes “in the case of Crown Casino . . . we appear to have highly autonomous self-regulation of an operator whose responsibility for the outcomes it generates is questionable” (Hancock, 2011, p. 6). This sense of Crown as a space of exception was referenced in my interview with Stanley, who worked for an EGM company in the early 2000s. He recalled regular visits to the casino:

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there was a sense that Crown was “our turf.” If we ever had a lunch or function it would be at Crown and the boss would sort of strut across the floor in that arrogant “Fordist factory owner surveying the workers” kind of way. (Interviewee E, 2015) The presence and policing of criminality on Crown’s premises has been the focus of considerable social concern. This is by no means restricted to issues of cheating and intoxication. Reports in 2015 noted the proximity of drug dealers, illegal prostitution, scams, and fraud as well as violent assaults. They also provided figures revealing that a crime is committed every 10 hours on site and a violent crime every third day. The state’s Crime Statistics Agency recorded 1180 assaults, 80 sexual assaults, 50 robberies, and 13 abductions in the gaming venue alone, with a further 7000 nonviolent crimes in the wider establishment. Missing from these figures are numerous crimes that are not reported to police but handled “in house” by private security employees after being classified as “non-serious” (Vedelago & Houston, 2015, p. 6). Last Bets is a short non-fiction book published in 2014 which considers the casino resort as a morally and legally ambiguous space in contemporary Australian society. Michaela McGuire’s account centres on the death of a 40-yearold man in 2011 at Crown Casino after he was critically injured by security guards while executing a “shut down position” in the process of removing him from the venue. This position involves three men simultaneously pinning a target to the ground through a complete immobilization of their limbs and is intended only to be used on violent and aggressive individuals (Russell, 2012). The casino’s failure to immediately contact the police about this incident limited access to witnesses and staff who might have testified about the victim’s forceful restraint and the injury of two of his friends. While some of the security guards were ultimately charged on other matters, they were not convicted of excessive violence in the manner of removing him from the premises. Having worked briefly in a service role in another large Australian casino resort and having found the experience depressing and disturbing, McGuire was prompted by this incident to investigate dark rumours about other violent deaths on Crown premises, including the presence of “suicide traps” to discretely remove bodies and the existence of a morgue on the premises. Worried that Crown is somehow above the law, McGuire sets out to address a series of questions: What had really happened that night? How had it become writ that the casino’s security would function as rogue operators? Was there anyone at Crown that night who thought to question protocol? Were the bouncers involved concerned? Did they think to call the hospital? Or was Anthony Dunning just another drunk patron, that Sunday evening just another night on the job?

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As she encounters responses from police, witnesses, and friends of the deceased, she becomes disturbed by an unscripted statement on the news by a senior police officer: “I think [Crown Casino] probably had a moral obligation to contact the police” (quoted in McGuire, 2014, p. 5). In her search to extract some clarity from this morally murky case, McGuire follows the trial of the security employees, becoming fascinated by individuals involved in the courtroom drama; from friends who accompanied the deceased on the night of the tragic events, to the muscle-bound bouncers who struggle to fit within their allocated seats, their Crown counsel, family members and internal and independent witnesses. A witness statement by a couple who were gambling nearby is particularly chilling. The husband—who is partially deaf—acts out the scene he remembers: “The dead man went down—pooooof! [and] I am shouting, ‘You are choking him mate.’ I say this three times . . . His face turns red then blue then white” (quoted in McGuire, 2014, p. 91). The witness’s wife called emergency services after seeing the scuffle between Dunning and the bouncers and hearing the screams of his friend: “She saw screens being brought over to where Dunning was, and ‘at some stage’ it occurred to her that casino staff members were attempting to cover up what was happening” (quoted in McGuire, 2011, p. 93). Her emergency call was played back to the court: “The bouncers have jumped on a man and he can’t even breathe. I can’t talk, they’re watching me. They’re choking him. I don’t know if he’s breathing. I can’t stay, I have to go” (quoted in McGuire, 2014, p. 96). This testimony portrays a sense of fear triggered by sudden and excessive violence together with a concern that a crime was being covered up by venue staff. After detailed research on laws applying to security and police personnel, the author began to see Crown Casino less as an exceptional space. Instead, she finds herself reappraising the capacity of the law to deliver judgements that are both legal and moral. Last Bets leaves readers with the unsettling thought that it is our trust that such a distinction exists which allows commercial gambling industries to thrive in an ambiguous space neither quite above, nor altogether within, the law. This ambiguity was evident again in 2015 when media organizations reported an altercation between Packer and a 60-year-old security employee. The employee tried to block access as Packer and another senior Crown executive arrived at a New Year’s Eve concert. The employee told the media “the pair both screamed abuse at him and pushed him aside at the bridge entry to the main gaming floor at Crown Towers, before demanding that he be sacked on the spot” (Morris-Marr, 2016). After leaving his workplace, the employee allegedly collapsed from shock and was hospitalized for treatment. Later, “Crown denied he was sacked and said he had been suspended then reinstated following a routine inquiry” (Morris-Marr, 2016). As a celebrity entrepreneur in Australia, Packer attracts considerable media interest, and this was not the first documented report of his involvement in a physical altercation (Gye & Auerbach, 2014). By juxtaposing the incident with Dunning with the mogul’s

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personal conduct, I am not trying to point to a “double standard” but to reach towards a better understanding of the kind of cultural space that casino resorts make and sustain in Australia. I have explored the urban zones that casino resorts both invade and create in Australia. We saw how these spaces colonize territories and carve up urban spaces through practices of zoning and surveillance, extracting “value” and “security” for and from individuals and populations. Casino resorts illustrate the limitations of democratic institutions’ capacity to adjudicate between the competing claims of public and private stakeholders in cultural spaces. They demonstrate how social and economic elites work with governments to substitute monumental casinos for spaces that are less extractive and more representative of constituents’ interests. In contrast to Crown Casino and the Barangaroo project discussed earlier, where gambling spaces very obviously dominate the urban landscape and impose their priorities on government and local populations, the pokie lounges I will discuss next create a relatively subtle transformation, at the level of the streetscape, through building renovations and signage. The presence of surveillance and the embodiment of security in these spaces is often muted, and we will see that they are not always or necessarily incompatible with values of community and care.

Figure 2.8 Streetscape with pokie lounge in renovated hotel, Brisbane, 2014 Source: Photograph by author.

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Figure 2.9 Interior of pokie lounge, Brisbane, 2015 Source: Photograph by author.

The “Pokie Lounge” as an Everyday Cultural Space of Gambling My earlier discussion of the casino resort used the concept of accommodation to explain how these spaces use gambling to realize the objective of frugal

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government through large-scale private developments that generate urban and regional economic growth, while providing other social amenities such as architecture, art, and spectacle. The arguments mounted in support of allowing EGMs into Australian hotels and clubs in urban, suburban, and rural premises follow a similar neoliberal logic. However, the spaces formed in this process are more familiar and intimate than those of casino resorts and the kind of enjoyment they offer is less extraordinary. One of the most significant developments on the ground of gambling from the early 1990s has been the emergence and proliferation of high intensity EGMs. The second most significant development has been the relaxation of laws that previously restricted these machines to casino spaces and their subsequent spread into spaces of everyday life, from cafés and supermarkets to adult gaming arcades and hotels, clubs, and pubs in many jurisdictions. Martin Young argues, dialectical relations between the state and capital have been responsible for the mass production of local EGM spaces of consumption. Through its reproduction of bounded spaces, EGM gambling represents a new wave of global capital accumulation where local citizens are reconstituted according to the imperative of global aleatory consumption. (2011, p. 33) While I don’t disagree with this claim, I think it is important to distinguish between the types and scales of these bounded spaces and address their cultural specificity. Some unique aspects of EGM venues in Australia were underscored through my comparative research in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, the Czech Republic, and the UK. Gaming machines in not-for-profit community organizations were familiar to many Australians by the time they appeared in hotels. “One-armed bandits” were legal in New South Wales from the 1950s, and some of the clubs that housed them became tourist destinations for busloads of people from adjoining states. Deregulation and technological innovation made these machines more accessible and lucrative in other states in the 1990s; by the turn of the century, each EGM could earn owners the equivalent of the price of a small home (Wardill, 2006, p. 3). While larger EGM venues in Australian clubs share some of the statey charisma of casino resorts, smaller ones are camouflaged within the texture of everyday leisure and consumption. The “pokie lounge” may be a uniquely Australian phenomenon due to its location in pubs and clubs. Many of these spaces were created in areas formerly allocated to the “Ladies Lounge” in existing venues at a time when heavy drinking was accepted as a social practice for men in the period between and following the two world wars. As pokie lounges became a fixture on many Australian streetscapes, profits from EGMs funded major renovations to hotel properties built in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. And clubs of various kinds paid architects and designers to transform their premises into major entertainment and recreational venues; one rugby league club in Sydney’s outer suburbs even built a luxury hotel. An executive from a club in

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one of Australia’s most impoverished regions proudly claimed in a television documentary that the high-quality finishing of the venue’s interior provided an experience of luxury that most customers would be unable to afford in their own homes (Ka-Ching, 2016). While the ironic and self-serving character of this comment is obvious, it nevertheless captures something important about the operation of finopower within and through these spaces. As Garry, one of the research participants involved in a campaign to prevent the construction of a pokie lounge in his rural town pointed out, “There are very few outlets in the [wealthy] suburbs of any state in this country” (Interviewee P). In addition to providing a new leisure activity for women who previously might have been reluctant to enter pubs and clubs without accompaniment, the incorporation of gambling spaces has eroded the exclusivity previously associated with subcultural spaces of alcohol consumption. Previous boundaries between “gay” and “straight” pubs became blurred, as venue owners sought patrons of all sexual orientations to enjoy their new amenities. And spaces for live entertainment within these venues were significantly reduced or eliminated. These development provoked anger, activism, and nostalgia for “pubs” as spaces that nurtured a sense of community and creative endeavour epitomized in live rock music. It is now common to see hotels and clubs in Australian suburbs with pokie lounges to advertise discounted meals and children’s play areas to position themselves as part of the daily life of their communities. Over two decades, the pokie lounge has become incorporated as a familiar site within Australian popular culture; appearing in various guises as a site of satire, social commentary, and aesthetic critique (see Nicoll, 2011). Negative perceptions of EGM gambling spaces were expressed by several of my focus group participants. One expressed “aversion to going to a place that is devoted to gambling.” Another said, “I find casinos awful places, clubs with pokie machines, ugh, it doesn’t appeal” (Focus Group A (FGA), 2014). However, others referred to their role in supporting local clubs for sporting teams and returned service personnel as well as enhancing the everyday lives of the elderly; “playing the pokies” in the clubs was a favourite outing for several participants’ mothers and grandmothers. Helen is a professional woman in her mid-50s, whose first introduction to gambling on EGMs was with her mother on regular visits to a small sporting club with a Chinese restaurant. In an interview, she described some of the changes she had observed to gambling spaces over two decades: [Previously] the rooms were smoke filled—the majority of people smoked at the machines in those days. People were possessive about their machines— they would place white cups on the handle when they leave (toilet/food break) [as]a sign they were coming back . . . Today there are special “break” signs, and machines have “reserved” buttons . . . [Previously] if people had a significant win and left to get a cup to fill [with winnings] no one would dare take a handful of coins out of the [EGM] tray. Increasingly machines print out a docket and money is retrieved elsewhere. No noise. No fun.

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Once upon a time the poker machines were rigidly lined up like desks. [Today] they can be in “rounds.” Sometimes they hug the shape of the room rather than fight it. They used to be tucked away but increasingly take center stage in a pub . . . There is often a literal portal through which people enter—some have balloons or pillars at the entrance . . . [sometimes based on themes from the games]. The best places offer reading material chairs and tables for non-playing partners. Increasingly free food and drinks are available; self-help coffee machines are almost universal. The food quality has improved: lollies came in the same time smoking was prohibited; finger food is circulated in the morning (tea and biscuits) and afternoon (savory bites). Biscuits and cake are left all day by the coffee machine . . . Air conditioning is much better. Frequently the venues have “games” in which prizes (money, gift vouchers, food items) are offered . . . and thus the whole room becomes part of a bigger gaming [experience] . . . Venues are open longer hours. The end result is a more welcoming place where the focus does not appear to be gambling. A different view of the pokie lounge is provided by an EGM player who contributed a short story to an edited collection by people experiencing harms from gambling. She describes the space through the eyes of the protagonist in her story: The gaming rooms looked like caves, she thought. Dark shadowy corners hiding all sorts of secrets, no outside light, the rows of blinking, singling machines promising riches. These caves had become a haven out from stresses, things difficult to deal with, impossible to face. In the caves she was safe from reality; the repetitious rolling of the symbols hypnotised her into a false sense of quiet. (Bardsley, 2013, p. 12) The author describes an interior monologue after a domestic argument drove her from the house and back to the pokie venue: “Go for a drive, get in the car, get away. But I don’t want to just drive, to be driven away. I want to be somewhere, belong somewhere” (Bardsley, 2013, p. 12). The theme of the pokie lounge as a homely space of belonging is explored by another contributor to this collection whose essay titled “Fitting In” tells the story of a problem gambler, mother, wife, and part-time administrator who volunteers as an English tutor for a woman who migrated to Australia after fleeing a brutal military regime. She introduced her student to different places in her new country and encouraged her to make excursions beyond the home. She is surprised and concerned when her student appears beside her one day in her local pokie lounge. Her student appeared “pleased and excited,” proclaiming, Teacher you said we should go to more places that Aussies do. So, my family came here for a meal on my husband’s birthday and then I came

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The imagery of the pokie lounge as a cave or shelter that offers a sense of belonging indicates the powerful joining function of this space in everyday life. It is virtually impossible to gain access to gambling premises for qualitative research with regular gamblers; participants are mostly recruited from organizations that treat a small minority of individuals who identify as problem gamblers, such as Gamblers’ Anonymous. Apart from this, the only other ethical ways to access the experiences of gambling in everyday life for research purposes are as an employee or a consumer. Participant-observation as a consumer gave me access to the experience of playing EGMs within cultural spaces that have made gambling a pervasive and acceptable social practice in Australia. This enabled me to capture and render the unique texture of sociality that local spaces of gambling represent, enable, and reproduce. My participant-observation was carried out in three Australian cities over a decade. The first phase involved visits to different kinds of venues at different times of the day. This was important because the deregulation of EGMs was accompanied in many jurisdictions by extended opening hours for the venues housing them, making them attractive places for shift-workers, particularly in the hospitality and health sectors, to relax before heading home. The later research involved regular visits to one venue in particular over a period of four years, mainly early on Friday or Saturday evenings. The venue I attended was attached to a large hotel which had a separate area for wagering and an indoor and outdoor area for non-gambling activities. There was a small corridor outside the pokie lounge with chairs and tables where customers could step out to smoke. There was also an ATM in this area. Amenities included several comfortable lounges, free newspapers, free espresso, free biscuits and sweets, as well as regular servings of fried snack foods on the bar. Surveillance was both transparent and muted in the pokie lounge. A closed-circuit television was placed directly next to the cash register so workers and consumers could watch ourselves and one another being watched. I emerged from my participant-observation convinced that a more nuanced understanding of the pokie lounge as an everyday space of gambling is needed. I found that addiction and community coexist in this space and to account for them exclusively in either of these terms is to misunderstand how gambling shapes and plays out in everyday life. Rather than imagining it as a ghetto where problem gamblers congregate in tragic isolation seeking a way out of their everyday problems, we need to develop a better understanding of the informal relationships and regulations that can make the pokie lounge an enjoyable space. The figure of the problem gambler was clearly visible to staff and players. The latter were called to make judgements not only about their own well-being but about that of their dependents, including children. Government-produced

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pamphlets and posters were prominent, depicting the consequences of addiction, including neglected children, domestic discord, and begging behaviours. In the final part of my participant-observation in Australia, new pamphlets and posters began to appear, aimed particularly at older people and targeted specifically to men and women. These encouraged players to attend to their mental health and to seek medical assistance for depression and anxiety. The visibility of these messages did not necessarily empower inhabitants to take positive action to ameliorate problems. Arguably, the presence of warnings about problem gambling had the opposite effect; they were simply telling people what they already knew to be the case. Below I convey the texture of relationships formed in the course of my participant-observation in this space. Peter is a married barman in his early 30s and loves to stay fit through weightlifting. He tells me that he hates having to work with EGMs. In particular he is angry on behalf of one of his customers, who gambles too much. He tells me that the owners of the venue make him extend credit to this customer. A divorced father of two children, this customer appears in the hotel nearly every day after finishing his job as a truck driver and spends hundreds of dollars on the poker machines. Carole is a middle-aged woman. A well-travelled high school teacher, she is also the wife of a businessman who drinks and wagers on horses and sports in the wagering area of the venue, which is almost exclusively occupied by men. A teetotaller, she prefers the mixed gendered atmosphere of the pokie lounge. With a budget restricted to 20 dollars per session, she likes to share a joke and enjoys conversation about the latest books or cinema titles. One evening we organized a game of charades in the space after deciding we didn’t want to lose any more money on the machines but we weren’t ready to go home. Deborah is a single female gambler at the venue in her early 30s. Keen on physical fitness, she plays the same machine every time she visits because it promises the biggest jackpot. The owner of two houses, one of which is an investment property, she also visits the city’s large casino every fortnight. She has a fixed budget for gambling and never uses her credit card. Part of a loose social network of regular casino gamblers, she has qualified for a “platinum” loyalty card. This provides her with free alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and a 30% discount on meals at the venue. On an informal tour of the casino premises, she introduced me to one of her friends. This friend was an old-age pensioner who didn’t look up from her machine at any point through the introduction. Deborah told me that her friend is usually more sociable but she was not doing well that day. She had lost over $10,000 dollars in four hours. Geoff is a regular gambler on racing at a hotel where he also plays the pokies. A member of the venue’s “punters club,” he claims to have been wrongfully dismissed from a job he loved and forced to settle for work for a government service provider before retiring early. The hotel is the centre of his everyday life where he is part of a community of “regulars,” consisting mostly of older and middle-aged men. Stephanie is a university student working in the racing and pokie areas of the hotel to finance her studies. Her occupation of this role has brought familiarity with the venue’s older male “regulars.” She tells me that there have been occasions

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when she has driven them home when they have no money for a taxi and are too intoxicated to walk. She has also invited some of the regulars to her home to watch live sporting events on television. They are among her loose network of “friends.” Although she is very interested in the book I’m writing, she is reluctant to commit to an interview. Glenda is a distinguished older woman and widow who, until recently, was the primary carer for her mother in law. Shortly after moving to her own apartment, she was diagnosed with cancer. She has a network of friends within the pokie lounge and appears with a shaven head after her chemotherapy. To lift her spirits, Deborah organizes a lunch with some of the other “regulars” in the venue’s dining area. Unfortunately, her cancer is aggressive and, after her death, Deborah organizes a memorial lunch. The Bloom family was another staple of the space. Mrs Bloom owns a small business in the shopping strip adjacent to the pokie lounge and comes to play at lunch times. Even after she is diagnosed with advanced cancer, she continues to work. She visits the pokie lounge more often, sometimes with her husband, and puts large amounts of money into the pokies. Her daughters are taking over the family business and a decision is made to move both parents out of the city, perhaps so they are away from the temptations of squandering their children’s inheritance. The Oldsters are an elderly couple in their 80s who walk a couple of kilometres each day to the shopping strip. While the husband shops for daily groceries, the wife plays minimum credits on the pokies as she waits. After he returns, they often both play for a while, never going above the minimum bet of one line and one credit per spin. One day Mrs Oldster wins a major jackpot and she enjoys telling others about her windfall for quite some time afterwards. A collective figure in the cast of characters is the small groups of young men who regularly appeared throughout my visits. While the membership of these groups changed frequently and I wasn’t able to establish rapport with them, they made an impression with their unique and rapid style of play. For many regular players, visiting an EGM venue is a way to spend, if not kill, time. In contrast, the groups of young men I observed turned the venue into the scene of a single dramatic and high-stakes gambling event. They would begin by pooling their money together and gathering around the machine in a loud and intense social interaction until it was either all spent or multiplied considerably. Such “sessions” would rarely last more than 20 minutes, after which the young men would leave the venue and continue with other activities on their night out. Very occasionally I would see one of these young men alone in the venue but they were usually very focused on their machines and not interested in socializing. To test my participant-observations, I separately interviewed Helen, a professional woman in her mid-50s and regular pokie player about the social norms that governed the space of the pokie lounge. She described “pokie etiquette” as follows: Don’t look over someone’s shoulder. If, by mistake, someone does play your machine [when you step out for a break], they will apologise profusely and

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offer a handful of coins as repayment. You take those and nod in mutual forgiveness and acceptance. Many people have machine preferences; they will head to a specific one at their usual haunt and they will seek it out in a new place. There is a camaraderie among players—they talk and commiserate, they will smile and nod at a winning player; they will stand around and congratulate big winners. It is a social space and for many people, this might be the only social interaction of their day. It often is for my [elderly] mother. (Interviewee L, 2016) I asked Tony, a hospitality worker in one pokie lounge who sometimes played in other venues to describe some of the social conventions he observed. He noted that the gaze of other players was often a factor that influences the monetary investment individuals make: say you bet a cent because you only have five cents left [as credits on the machine] and you win a feature, which is what everyone wants . . . because they get free games and they want to sit back and watch the money pile up . . . If you get a feature when . . . you’ve spent five cents, it’s like embarrassment. You don’t want people to walk past and see you bet five cents and won a feature. Then you have to sit there for five minutes and you end up winning like 78 cents and you do all the math in your head, like what if I bet a dollar, I would have got eighty bucks. (Interviewee A, 2015) He also noted that the social context encourages players to stay with their machines: They believe that poker machines go in kind of valleys and peaks and . . . if they leave [their machine] somebody else will sit down and win their feature, which they think is impeding. So [they bet] $20, $20, $20, betting high because you’re expecting the big win. (Interviewee A, 2015) Related to this is his perception that People are embarrassed about poker machine losses because it’s deemed as like a low kind of gambling act. They’ll only tell you “I won 700 dollars” and [in response to] that age old question [about how they are going], they’d be like “Oh, I’m probably even or even a little bit up.” But nobody really does these kinds of honest calculations. (Interviewee A, 2015) What is striking about these reflections is the way a space dedicated to gambling on machines that allocate wins and losses through random number generation in favour of the house nevertheless produce expectations of “sound”

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decision-making. These expectations, in turn, inform social judgements about the self and others in the cultural space of the pokie lounge. As we will see, my participant-observation illuminated practices of care among and between players and staff in the cultural space of the pokie lounge.

Strategies and Tactics in the Pokie Lounge We have seen that, in contrast to the casino resort’s national and transnational orientation, which delivers a more cosmopolitan and anonymous experience to consumers, smaller, local spaces of gambling can be generative of practices of social welfare, community, and intimacy. This section returns to Certeau’s (1984) account of how power is materialized on the ground of everyday life and considers his arguments about tactics within the broader strategies of power which organize social space. This theoretical framework produces a richer imagination of players and the spaces they inhabit. Certeau acknowledges, The products of . . . tactical consumption are difficult to study, they have no place, only the space of their moments of being . . . Their manoeuvres are the ancient art of “making do,” of constructing our space within and against their place, of speaking our meanings with their language. (Certeau, 1984, p. 47) Like a speech act, a specific tactic “cannot be parted from its immediate circumstances” (Certeau, 1984, p. 20). However, in contrast to the strategies encoded in maps of territories, he argues that it is at the level of the street that we can appraise “a social historicity in which systems of representation or processes of fabrication [not only] appear as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users” (Certeau, 1984, p. 21). Rather than viewing players from a distance as isolated human units of state-sanctioned corporate extraction, my participant-observation sensitized me to everyday tactics of consumers in the pokie lounge. If the pokie lounge’s strategic purpose is to enrich owners by extracting revenue from players, the latter’s tactical ambition is to extract maximum enjoyment from their visit at a minimum cost. While the most spectacular realization of this tactical ambition is to win money, several other satisfactions are afforded in the use of this space. Among these are material benefits including comfortable furnishings, friendly service, and climate-controlled conditions. The securitization of these spaces also makes them safer and more attractive for women at certain times of the evening, relative to comparable licensed establishments. However, immaterial gifts available in the space may be no less important. It is in this context that practices of sociality and care emerge among and between players and staff in venues. It is important to acknowledge, however, that these practices occur in spite of, rather than because of, the continuous algorithmic form of gambling that EGMs provide. The notion that tactics enable users to subvert the received language of power relates to everyday spaces of gambling in at least two ways. Firstly, we might

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understand the casino resort as a strategic blueprint and the pokie lounge as a tactical utterance of a finopolitical logic that literally exists at street level. Secondly, we can distinguish between the ways the pokie lounge is designed to be used by those who own the space and the uses that are made of it by those who inhabit it as staff members and consumers (and, not infrequently, as both). If venues are extracting more money and time from players than they can afford, why should the tactical practices of players and venue employees matter? These practices are important to investigate precisely because they make the pokie lounge a habitable and enjoyable cultural space. Examples of tactics in the pokie lounge I observed and participated in include appropriating the time of service workers in non-productive ways for individual ends; “poaching” venues for purposes unconnected with gambling, such as work meetings; and turning the tools of marketing (like free parking and free espresso, soft drinks, and snacks) to conveniences that may not increase or even deliver gambling consumption. With market saturation and increased awareness of gambling harms related to EGMs in Australia, venue owners and managers have become more aggressive to generate and sustain players’ expenditure. The limits of care that staff are authorized to deliver were recently exposed in leaks from former employees of pokie lounges detailing the pressure exerted by their managers. A weekly memo instructed staff: We have a massive weekly target to beat . . . we need to be out on the floor really pushing drinks—it’s tax time so people will have more money to spend. Do hand out drink cards, be out there as much as possible, do whatever you have to do to keep people in the room. (quoted in O’Malley, 2018) Whistle-blowers also reported the targeting of high-value customers whose preferences and behaviour were logged in journals so all staff across 400 venues could maximize their profitability, playing their favourite music and chatting about their sporting teams, family, and employers. A former pokie lounge staff member recalls that, previously, you’d talk to patrons in a genuine sense, but now . . . we’re actually writing it down so that we can get people to stay for as long as possible. You’d record that stuff so that any new gaming staff can easily get up to speed with our VIP customers . . . so you can easily strike up a conversation with them and build rapport really quickly . . . You know the ins-and-outs of their life . . . essentially you are looking over peoples’ shoulders, and documenting what people are doing and they don’t know that you are doing that. They think you are having a general chit-chat with them, but you are actually profiling it. (quoted in O’Malley, 2018) Genuine care for customers, in this context, becomes an ethical tactic at odds with the strategic aims of management.

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Tony, a regular gambler and hospitality worker, described a situation where he was playing pokies at a venue and saw an elderly woman he remembered from a liquor outlet where he used to work: “She came in to buy an enormous bottle of vodka or something and couldn’t remember her [debit card] number and she was shaking.” Over a year later, he saw her at a gambling venue: She’d won 400 bucks or something and I’m like “you should really just get out of here because you’re going to lose all that.” I was sitting next to her . . . and she told me some story, some sad story about her problem and her husband and I don’t know, whatever. (Interviewee A, 2015) Voices of workers within gambling industries provide a valuable perspective on their everyday spaces of labour. One of my focus group participants had a regular poker game with a group of friends, several of whom worked in casinos as dealers . . . “so I was reasonably immersed in that culture. They were all total speed addicts because they were kept up all night [and this] was basically encouraged by the casino” (Focus group B participant, 2014). The relatively high numbers of casino and other gambling venue staff who experience problems with gambling can be partly understood as related to the emotional labour they perform as professional service workers (Hing & Gainsbury, 2011). In addition to the emotional labour expended by staff to make players “feel at home” in the pokie lounge, machines are designed to continually offer affective experiences of winning through their sounds and iconography. While these experiences of winning are deceptive and tied to EGM’s capacity to draw and keep players attached to machines, they possess additional currency within the community of fellow players. Even a player who is known to have lost much more money than they can afford will often be surrounded by fellow players in the event that they are awarded an extensive sequence of “free games.” This treatment of fellow players “as if ” they are winners can be read in at least two ways. Most obviously, it can be read as evidence of a conspiracy of shared illusion between players in the grip of addictive machines. Certainly, there is a willing suspension of belief but, to the extent that this is collectively shared, the pokie lounge offers a social experience that may be absent from the everyday lives of players. The apparently irrational behaviour of celebrating small moments and experiences of winning amongst what can often be devastating losses might be understood as a cultural practice to collectively affirm the human dignity of fellow players. This inherently social practice confounds industry and government constructions of players as “irresponsible losers” on one hand and academic and therapeutic constructions of them as “problematic” or “pathological” individuals on the other. My participant-observation as a consumer did not end with the pokie lounge. Rather, my experiences in this space generated insights about broader technologies and marketing strategies that shaped this space. So, I want to end this chapter with a short description

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of aesthetic and functional similarities between everyday cultural spaces of gambling and finance. At the same time that I was conducting participant-observation in the pokie lounge, I visited the central office of my large bank which had undergone extensive renovations. I was greeted at the door by a staff member and guided into an area with comfortable lounge seats facing a café bar with a barista serving free espressos and providing a free printing service. On the other side of the wall were advertisements for global travel service, Flight Centre, exhorting me to live my dreams as well as an opportunity to donate to a bank-sponsored charity to help the less fortune in poor countries. The new branding of this banking space, with its emphasis on personalized hospitality and dreams of affluence, combined with loads of “free stuff ”, reminded me of the gambling spaces provided by casino resorts and pokie lounges. This new façade masked a finopolitical logic that was no less extractive than that of the pokie lounge. At the same time that I was experiencing the bank as an accommodating space of selfdevelopment, I was receiving online invitations to be a more active investor through a new platform allowing me to invest in stocks and property from within my online account. Rather than being dependent on professional advice, the new platform would allow me to monitor and control my finances in real time. Why did the bank want me to spend more time in its spaces and with its platforms? Why did this invitation feel like an incentive to gamble with hard-earned funds at my own risk?

Conclusion After an introduction to transforming spaces of gambling, I explored some of the ways that gambling spaces are “statey.” We saw how they are produced by and productive of certain kinds of states, even while their address to us is emphatically “state-phobic.” I demonstrated how casino resorts, as theatres of neoliberal finopower, shape and link local social identities to transnational flows of capital. In this way, they provide states with a free-market face. On one hand, their open doors appeal to values of democratic participation. On the other hand, their exceptional powers emanate a charismatic and sometimes threatening image of sovereignty. As monumental spaces within the urban landscape, they also function pedagogically, cultivating a sense of duty to consume responsibility within individuals and populations. Cultural spaces materialize the power of commercial gambling to displace existing laws as obstacles to its growth and conquest of new territories. In return for the benefits that casino resorts bring to spaces deemed unproductive, special zones are created to restrict competition from other businesses. Gambling spaces appear as sites of hyper-productivity; creating employment through servicing and building infrastructure of hospitality and entertainment around gambling. As such, they enjoin us to accept regimes of possession that facilitate the continued and extractive enjoyment of human and environmental resources. I argued that the accommodation between state and corporate institutions and actors required for frugal government is further evident in the dispersal of EGMs through many jurisdictions. The economic

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benefits for stretched state budgets, corporations, and small business owners often make this appear to be a rational development. However, the odds of most people of spending more money and time than intended in these venues are extremely high and the result of much research and experimentation on the part of EGM designers. While playing the pokies is rarely a rational decision, my participant-observation highlighted some reasons that individuals might choose to inhabit local spaces of gambling rather than other available spaces of leisure and recreation.

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McGuire, M. (2014). Last bets: A true story of gambling, morality and the law. Melbourne, Vic: University of Melbourne Press. Morris-Marr, L. (2016, January 8). James Packer security guard altercation at Crown Casino Melbourne. Herald Sun. Retrieved from www.news.com.au/national/victoria/ james-packer-security-guard-altercation-at-crown-casino-melbourne/news-story/ ab0f6436ed2ee5b4d5048a9c1cf41839 Nicoll, F. (2011). On blowing up the pokies: The pokie lounge as a cultural site of neoliberal governmentality in Australia. Cultural Studies Review, 17(2), 219–256. Nicoll, F. (2018). Beyond the figure of the problem gambler: Locating race and sovereignty struggles in everyday spaces of gambling. Law and Social Policy, 30, 127–149. NT News. (2012, May 14). Casino bid for tourist dollar. NT News. Retrieved from www.territorystories.nt.gov.au/bitstream/10070/240037/3/ntn14may12003x.pdf O’Malley, N. (2018, February 27). “Do whatever you have to”: Woolworths staff rewarded for spying on pokie players. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from www.smh.com.au/business/companies/do-whatever-you-have-to-woolworths-staffrewarded-for-spying-on-pokie-players-20180227-p4z1zw.html Peck, J., Theodore, N., & Brenner, N. (2009). Neoliberal urbanism: Models, moments, mutations. SAIS Review of International Affairs, 29(1), 49–66. Riding, C., & Llewellyn, N. (2013, January). British art and the sublime. In N. Llewellyn & C. Riding (Eds.), The art of the sublime. Tate Research Publication. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/christine-ridingand-nigel-llewellyn-british-art-and-the-sublime-r1109418 Russell, M. (2012, June 20). Guards restrained casino patron with “shut down” tactic. The Age. Retrieved from www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/guards-restrainedcasino-patron-with-shut-down-tactic-20120619-20m82.html Schutz, J. (Director). (2010, May 13). World’s biggest casino [Television series episode]. In L. Eng and C. Humphrey (Producers), Megastructures. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Sedgwick, E. K. (1995). Gosh, Boy George, you must be awfully secure in your masculinity! In M. Berger, B. Wallis, & S. Watson (Eds.), Constructing masculinities (pp. 11–20). New York, NY: Routledge. Simpson, T. (2015). Tourist utopias: Biopolitics and the genealogy of the post-world tourist city. Current Issues in Tourism, 19, 27–59. doi:10.1080/13683500.2015.1005 579 Spanier, D. (2006). Easy money: Inside the gambler’s mind. London, UK: Penguin. Stack, J. (Director). (2004, December 1). Inside a super casino [Television series episode]. In J. Stack (Producer), Megastructures. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Tabakoff, N. (2017, December 14). Revealed: Packer’s $60m pad in the sky [Front page]. The Australian, p. 1. Tasker, S.-J. (2017, December 15). Crown to sell $700m assets to cut debt [Business section]. The Australian, p. 19. Vedelago, C., & Houston, C. (2015, May 17). Crown’s wheel of misfortune. The Sunday Age, p. 6. Venturi, R. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wardill, S. (2006, August 4). Pokies’ house value. The Courier Mail, p. 3. White, S., Garton, S., Robertson, S., & White, G. (2010). Playing the numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, M. (2011). Towards a critical geography of gambling spaces: The Australian experience. Human Geography, 4(3), 33–47.

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Introduction It was late December in a Canadian city and I had just settled into the adjacent restaurant for a meal when an announcement blasted in from the casino speakers. A weekly “members’ draw” was underway for a prize of $1000. A casino employee projected a sense of urgency across the gambling floor as he announced the number: “You have three minutes to collect or we will redraw.” While waiting for the lucky winner to present themselves, he explained the terms of the competition and marked the calendar: “You need to be a permanent member to participate. Earn points before Christmas by stamping your [members’] card daily.” The casino was closed on Christmas day so I recommenced my participant-observation on Boxing Day, after noting an advertisement for “Christmas Cash Back,” which afforded an opportunity for members of the loyalty scheme to win up to 2500 dollars. December 26 was a cold night but my taxi was unable to park in front of the casino; an ambulance and police car were blocking the entrance. As I walked from the frigid street into the lobby, I saw a young woman being restrained by police officers who were trying to assist ambulance officers to place her on a gurney. She called out to me and others in the area: “Please, you gotta help me. They’re going to KILL me!” When I proceeded into the gaming area, staff were talking to one another and shaking their heads, leaving me with the impression that this kind of scene was not uncommon. I walked around the casino space for a while before taking a short walk to a nearby public sporting facility where fathers and children were playing a game of ice hockey. I enjoyed watching the seemingly effortless skill with which players transported themselves in a fluid dance around the rink, in pursuit of the puck. I returned to the casino in time for the announcement of the “5 o’clock Christmas cashback draw.” There were no winners in the house. In fact, the venue was virtually empty, apart from small groups of Chinese players at the table and a few people scattered along the rows of slot machines. My intention had been to play craps for an hour or so but the table was closed so I settled at a Playboy-themed slot machine which played smooth jazz music and vibrated when frequent but low-paying “features” were triggered. An elderly Chinese woman sat next to me at the adjoining Playboy machine and proceeded to try to use a ticket with less value than the minimum bet. She pushed the service button but

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Figure 3.1 Close-up of Playboy EGM machine, Canada, 2017 Source: Photograph by author.

no one came. We communicated about her frustration in sign language for a while. She then took two banknotes from her purse and proceeded to play another Playboy machine. I went to the bar to purchase a beer. I requested a small glass but was informed by the barman that there were only large glasses available. I discussed the merit of different brews on tap and requested a sample of the one he recommended. He sighed with envy and recalled the days when he could have joined me with a drink on the job. I said flirtatiously, “You don’t look old enough to remember those days.” He laughed and asked about my accent. On discovering I was Australian, he told me of a holiday he was planning after university graduation and asked for advice about where to visit. At the same time as we were having this conversation, a circulating drinks waitress returned to the bar, complaining that one of the slot players was insisting in having her complimentary non-alcoholic soda from a bottle instead of a bar mix. I returned to the Playboy slot machine where I was neither winning nor losing credits. I noticed something written in small print at the top of the machine that surprised and annoyed me. The jackpots, valued at several thousand dollars, were only eligible to players who made the maximum bet. The elderly Chinese woman and I were only playing the minimum bet of 50 cents per spin. Two Aboriginal men, apparently a father and a son, came over to join us. The Chinese woman lost her

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money and they took her place. The father was explaining the rules of the game and the relative value of the symbols to his son. I was surprised by the way he discussed the rules of the machines, as though slots were a fair game, rather than an expensive, algorithmic form of entertainment. I noted they were playing the maximum bets and I was glad to see them win a little. I thought about how videos of players winning provide good promotion for EGM producers. Notwithstanding the prohibition of photography on the floors of most casinos, there is a large body of YouTube videos uploaded by players recording the lucky appearance of jackpots in real time. With my money spent, I went on another walk around the casino and spoke with volunteers in the cashier booth who were members of a Christian charity that would use the night’s profit to sustain their programmes. I also visited a dedicated “Sensible Gaming space” where a sign informed me that there would be no support for consumers over the holiday period and that if gamblers had any concerns they should speak with security personnel. I examined the console created to present facts about different games and their odds to help customers make rational decisions about their gambling. This “interactive” device was not functioning. Instead of a menu, the screen featured programming script showing the console was offline. It seemed wrong that charity volunteers were locked in a cage collecting winnings when they could have been available to provide basic face-to-face support (requiring minimal training) to gamblers in trouble. Considering how much revenue is raised by problem gamblers in such venues, I wondered why there wasn’t someone for them to speak to during all casino operating hours. These extracts from my fieldnotes illustrate that gambling moments cannot be understood in a vacuum; they are integrally connected to the other facets of gambling explored in this book, space, products, and regulation. This chapter will link gambling’s reinforcement and disruption of the time of everyday life to the sense of having or belonging to a gender, class, and nation. I address the following questions: How is gambling connected to the organization and regulation of time in everyday life? What does it mean to understand certain historical moments as being more or less shaped by gambling? How does gambling accentuate certain moments in everyday life? What happens to time when spaces and products of gambling become continuously available? How does gambling mark both ordinary and extraordinary moments within our daily, weekly, and annual calendars? We will see that gambling moments can be more or less inclusive and more or less extractive in their joining and enjoining functions. I will also provide a glimpse of their capacity to produce joys that exceed the frugal vision of society and the limited understanding of what it means to be human that neoliberal finopower promotes. Case studies of gambling moments include lotteries, sports wagering and advertising, Australia’s Melbourne Cup Day celebrations, and gambling in the workplace. Participant-observation and social research are used to illustrate connections between objective moments and subjective experiences of gambling. A point of entry to understand gambling moments in everyday life is the ubiquitous presence of online prize scams and lottery-related marketing. For

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example, Readers Digest magazine targets potential subscribers with packages of items resembling lottery products—including scratch tickets and lists of “your ticket numbers entered into draw,” as well as what appear to be signed cheques inscribed with readers’ names. These “lucky” materials arrive by mail in between issues of the magazine to persuade readers to buy other products such as books related to gardening, cooking, or health. Non-cash prizes are also advertised in considerable detail, such as replica “keys” to “your luxury vehicle.” This kind of marketing bypasses the individual decision to “take a gamble” with materials designed to emulate the surprising experience of “being a winner” for the householder who opens the envelope. This is not dissimilar from the way that visual and audio signs are integrated within gambling products to evoke winning feelings. A sound composer for an EGM company interviewed for an Australian documentary was shown in his office with computer screens on one side and an electronic keyboard on the other. He used the keyboard to illustrate his statements: “Everything is in a major key . . . if you lose there’ll be no sound. Because you don’t want to reinforce that you’ve lost. The winning sounds [make the players] feel good about what they’ve done and they keep plugging away” (composer for EGMs quoted in Ka-Ching). My social research participants conveyed different ways that gambling moments were experienced and integrated within their everyday lives. Their stories were not always positive. For example, a mother reported on the experience of taking her daughter to Crown Casino for the first time when she turned 18 (the legal age of gambling in gambling in Australia). “[My daughter] was proud, look I’m 18, you know. We were [there] five minutes and she said, ‘oh, this is awful’ and turned around and came out” (Focus Group A (FGA), 2014). Another focus group participant recalled the intensity of gambling moments witnessed as a small child: I remember my neighbour was heavily into racing and spent the entire Saturday studying the guides and you couldn’t talk around him and all that kind of stuff. Seriously. He had this little transistor radio on the tabletop and his wife would just bring him a beer now and then and he’d be going through [the guides]. The only time he stopped was to go and place bets down at the [betting shop]. (FGA, 2014) Another participant, who identified as a non-gambler, once worked in the visual arts industry and had a surprising exchange with a friend who asked her for a gambling tip about the likely winner of a large national portrait prize competition: I’m like, since when did you become interested in art? They said because I’ve got a bet on who’s going to win. I said, it will be the runner up from last year that wins this year, and sure enough, it was because it’s always the

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person who should have got it last year with the best painting that gets it the year after. So that’s not really gambling as far as I can see . . . because you can read the judges’ mind. (FGA, 2014) This is an interesting case of commercial gambling extending wagering opportunities to a competition occurring in a sphere of culture, which is not regarded by “insiders” as comparable to organized sport and racing. My interviewees also reflected on their observations and experience of gambling moments. Helen, a professional woman and regular EGM player in her 50s, provided a detailed description: I find if I need to think about something, I will go to a venue and play for two or three hours. I do not find it addictive . . . I do not play to win, I presume I will lose and allow myself a certain amount . . . I select a machine and stay at that one if it gives a reasonable play back. I wear noise cancelling over-the-ear headphones. I listen to music and podcasts. I drink wine. I rarely interact with other players. It is a solitary time. I like the ice-cold air conditioning and drinking in a public (rather than at home alone) space. Generally, I only go on the way home from work usually for one hour to unwind and have a glass of wine. If, however, I have a win, I will stay longer . . . When writing a book . . . I would write from 4 am until about 11 am and then I would visit a venue, have lunch and gamble for two–three hours—I would return to write from about 4 pm until about 11 pm. After two hours I’m generally bored. (Interviewee J, 2016) And John, a regular online sports gambler, described his experience: “if I’m on the train on the way home tonight . . . and I get bored I might have a quick look to see if there’s any good specials . . . If there’s something that catches my eye then I’ll . . . make sure I jump back in and have a look.” At times, the availability of gambling moments clashes with his family commitments. He describes Friday nights as a moment when there are multiple sporting events on which betting companies offer special offers: I was out for dinner with my wife last night because it was our wedding anniversary, on the weekend. We went out for dinner and saw a movie which is a very rare, once a year type treat . . . So while I was waiting for [my wife] I called [a betting company] about a bet I had won . . . [they owed me $60] and then my wife showed up so we had dinner. By the time dinner had finished [X team] had come in from nearly $4 to $2 . . . and I wanted to chuck my $60 on because [Y player] wasn’t playing for the other team . . . With a chance I could get it all back . . . I had to bloody go and have dinner instead and then forgot about it until the next morning. (Interviewee M, 2015)

Figure 3.2 Poster in Winnipeg airport, Canada, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

Figure 3.3 Screen featuring jackpot timing information, Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

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What kind of experience was John missing out on when he elected to be fully present with his wife for the duration of his wedding anniversary?

Transforming Gambling Moments I am in transit at Winnipeg airport, returning home from a research trip in another Canadian province. I arrive at the baggage claim area to prepare for my transfer and notice a large sign. Depicting jack-in-the box with a lucky number 7 jumping forward, the sign advertising the province’s gambling amenities entices me with the promise “Your Moment Awaits.” One month later I visit a large Australian casino which has invested in large cylindrical screens that display the precise date and the time by which jackpots must be won in the venue.

What do moments of gambling contribute within the flow of everyday life? What is the quality of transformation that such moments effect for individuals and communities? I will use the term “transforming” in two senses: to register changes in the provision and consumption of gambling moments over time and to convey the significance of gambling moments for individuals (Reith and Dobbie, 2013). With the industrialization of Europe and its colonies in the nineteenth century came significant transformations in class relations and new ways of experiencing, demarcating, and governing time (Downes, Davies, David, & Stone, 1976, p. 38). For example, betting on horse racing shifted from being the exclusive domain of industry insiders and aristocrats to a form of mass entertainment on which men, in particular, were invited to spend their leisure time. With the introduction of annual racing calendars, illegal off-course betting exploded. As everyday life was rationalized to profit and productivity, citizens participated in sciences of probability by using available information about the fitness and skills of horse and jockey and conditions on track to predict favourable outcomes. Transformations in gambling are inextricably linked to modernist frameworks of understanding everyday life. This is most evident in Walter Benjamin’s study of the Parisian arcades built to celebrate leisure and consumption and in which gambling and prostitution contributed to new kinds of enjoyment. He elaborated upon the continuous oscillation of gamblers’ affect as they shifted between states of winning and loss: the loser tends to indulge in a certain feeling of lightness . . . Conversely the experience of having won weighs on the gambler’s mind . . . (after the game, not during it). We may say of the winner that he has to do battle with the feeling of hubris which threatens to overwhelm him. He falls . . . into a state of depression. (1929/2006, p. 211)

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This capacity of gambling to alter our subjective relationship to time is inextricable from the unique form of enjoyment it offers. To illustrate his claim that “gambling converts time into a narcotic,” Benjamin describes a gambling moment on a roulette table: the genuine gambler places his most important bets . . . at the last possible moment. He could be said to be inspired by a certain characteristic sound made by the roulette ball just before it falls on a specific number . . . [or] one could also argue that is only at the last moment, when everything is pressing towards a conclusion, at the critical moment of danger (of missing his chance), that a gambler discovers the trick of . . . reading the table. (1929/2006, p. 211) This frustrating and seductive attempt to pre-empt fate underscores his point that the danger which coexists with pleasure in gambling arises “not so much from the threat of losing as that of not winning. The particular danger that threatens the gambler lies in the fateful category of arriving ‘too late’, of having ‘missed the opportunity’ ” (p. 212). The threat of late arrival and the fear of the missed opportunity at the heart of the roulette player’s experience seem especially relevant to the experience of time in neoliberal societies. Like Benjamin observing the emergences of new moments of consumption and gambling in the Parisian arcades, we are observing a rapid expansion of gambling moments through digital affordances and territorial deregulation. As we negotiate emerging intersections between gambling, finance, and play, we are continuously located and dislocated as winners and losers, as prescient and belated, in the face of parading and receding opportunities that we are exhorted to grasp for fear of missing out. Sociologist Erving Goffman perhaps comes closer than any other researcher to producing a theory of gambling moments in everyday life. His essay, “Where the Action Is,” takes gambling as a model for social action. A former croupier, Goffman pointed to gambling contexts as the origin for popular understandings of “action” itself. Gambling manufactures “chancy” events which can be fateful for players. Arguing that “gambling is the prototype of action, he provides an anatomy of gambling moments, he identifies four aspects of time involved: . . . span of play, pauses between play, length of sessions and rates of completed play” (Goffman, 1967/2006, p. 247). These are intimately linked with our sense of what is “consequential,” making gambling moments an arena within which our character is both tested and proven as we face the outcomes that its chancy events deliver to us. Moments of gambling enhance the texture of everyday lives in which we are often enjoined to minimize eventful and fateful moments through habitual practices, including taking physical care of ourselves, buying insurance, and practicing courtesies to avoid social conflict (Goffman, 1967/2006, p. 241).

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To the extent that a non-gambling life is defined by the absence of such moments, that life might be perceived as less consequential than a gambler’s life where character has been achieved through resilience in the face of innumerable fateful and consequential events (2005, p. 96). We see this speculative spirit invoked today in online invitations to players to bet on an array of indices, from sporting tournaments to stock market shifts. Gambling may have a unique capacity to construct us socially as “players,” as subjects at the heart of “the action.” However, as Downes et al. point out, while Goffman constructs an opposition between prudential (Calvinist) and action-orientated subjects, he “does not allow himself to be drawn as to the likely distribution of such choices throughout the social system .  .  . for whom action as he describes it is likely to be most attractive” (1976, p. 18). This criticism matters because everyday life is the domain of subjects within contexts that are socially stratified. Aaron Brown’s account of cultural intersections between poker and high finance in The Poker Face of Wall Street is more explicit about the socio-cultural functions of gambling “action.” He notes how the language of poker play infiltrates everyday financial terminology, from admiring references to a colleague’s “poker face” to exhortations to “up the ante” or wait for “the kicker” (2011). He links the centrality of gambling to American financial life to deeper historical currents that formed colonial societies and, in particular, to everyday frontier life where banking was rudimentary and unstable and the poker game functioned as an economic institution (A. Brown, 2011, pp. 119–144). The Poker Face of Wall Street raises questions about specific contexts in which certain kinds of gambling “action” are seen and experienced by individuals as more or less legible and affordable. These aspects are briefly explored by Bourdieu, whose concept of the illusio was presented in the introduction to this book. Citing gambling as an example of the limits of habitus sustained in neoliberal societies, he argues that a new “sub-proletariat” class has emerged within global capitalism. This has created growing numbers of citizens who are disenfranchised from the game of society and lack a “coherent sense of the future” (2000, p. 232). In contrast to the busy-ness of those who are busy getting ahead or trying to maintain position within the game of society, Bourdieu argues that members of the sub-proletariat have nothing but time: Excluded from the game, dispossessed of the vital illusion of having a function or a mission, of having to be or do something, these people may, in order to escape from the non-time of a life in which nothing happens and where there is nothing to expect, and in order to feel they exist, resort to activities which, like the French tiercé, or totocalcio, jogo de bicho or all the other lotteries or gambling systems . . . of the world, offer an escape from the negated time of a life without justification or possible investment. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 222)

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Here gambling appears as an everyday cultural practice through which subproletarian subjects manage the pain of their social exclusion. Their fantasy is no longer one of moving from the bottom to the top rungs of the social order but rather of gaining an entry ticket to the game of society, or the illusio, itself. This suggests that gambling moments might function as a tactical response to feelings of disposability cultivated among citizens of late capitalist societies. Smith and Abt link gambling moments to the cultural belief systems and institutions which provide meaning in everyday life: play and games continue to function as an important dimension of culture, providing release from the restrictions of everyday life while simultaneously reflecting the very myths that hold the culture together. The world of play and games offers a varied menu of rituals, myths, icons, and heroes that articulate, reinforce, and transmit cultural values in a manner very similar to that of religion. (Smith & Abt, 1984, p. 123) They reflect on the sense of certainty or resolution that gambling moments deliver to players, however fleetingly: “Too often life does not tell us whether we are right or wrong, whether we have won or lost; by the end of a game, we have no room for doubt” (Smith & Abt, 1984, p. 125). In this way, gambling moments punctuate everyday life, creating and keeping score of our successes and failures in the arena of luck. We will recall the invigorating powers of gambling moments evoked by Keynes when he suggested that a regulated state lottery with many small prizes “would add to the cheerfulness of life if punctually everyone in the country was to wake up each Sunday morning, stretching out for the Sunday papers with just a possibility that they had won a small fortune.” We note his emphasis on the temporal rhythms of everyday day life in industrial societies on one hand and the contribution to “the cheerfulness of life” that lottery gambling provides by allowing individuals to imagine alternative futures on the other. As global gambling industries seep into previously unclaimed territories of everyday life, there is something appealingly innocent about this vision of synchronized and hopeful Sunday morning lottery players. Drawing on Roger Caillois’s typology of games, Reith identifies several aspects of the experience of gambling which distinguish its moments within the arena of everyday life. The excitement of gambling moments narrows the field of our attention to focus on immediate action; we might experience a sense of vertigo in “taking the plunge,” a sense of losing control, being oblivious to the external world, feeling hyper-stimulated and oblivious to fatigue; we might experience in gambling moments a transcendence of our social identity—a capacity to become other through our risk-taking

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agency and/or performance of skill; we might turn to gambling to produce interest in an otherwise boring situation or predicament; and our gambling must be repeated in order to experience the tension and expectation of a game. Since the game is virtually over as soon as it begins, we are invited to continually repeat the moment of play: “The gambling sites reverberate to the drum of this steady repetition . . . bets are made, cards shuffled, dealt and collected over and over again: dice are shaken and rolled ad infinitum” (Reith, 2006 p. 265). Some of the most vivid accounts of gambling moments can be found in Dostoevsky’s short novel The Gambler (Dostoevsky, 1866/1966; Kingma, 2017). He describes one of these moments in the following scene, set in a casino: After ten o’clock at night those left round the tables are the genuine, desperate gamblers, for whom nothing exists in any health resort but roulette, who have come for nothing else, who hardly notice what is going on around them, and take no interest in anything else all the season, only play from morning till night and would perhaps be ready to play all through the night as well if it were possible. (p. 128) After putting all his money on the line covering numbers 19–26, the protagonist wins. He then continues to stake the original amount and the winnings. After winning there, he moves his pile of money to the middle of the board and wins again. With his original stake multiplied by 10, he describes his next decision: Feeling as though I was delirious with fever, I moved the whole pile of money to the red—and suddenly came to my senses! For the only time in the course of the whole evening, fear laid its icy finger on me and my arms and legs began to shake. With horror I saw and for an instant fully realized what it would mean to me to lose now! My whole life depended on that stake! Rouge! Cried the croupier, and I drew a deep breath, while my whole body tingled with fire. (Dostoevsky, 1866/1966, p. 129) After losing a considerable portion of these winnings in a “frenzy . . . haphazard, at random, without stopping to think!” he compares the sensation to plummeting to earth from a hot air balloon. He describes the feeling once he is winning again: “I already had the air of a conqueror. I no longer feared anything, whatever it might be, and I flung down [my money]” (p. 130). The remainder of the evening he describes as dreamlike; his feelings became progressively numbed with an obsessive belief that he could discern a pattern in the roulette ball’s destination. As he continues to experience this extraordinary

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winning streak, he forgets about the distressed woman he has left waiting in his hotel room. He leaves the gambling room with pockets overflowing with money and barely able to think: “I only felt a sort of terrible delight in success, victory, power—I don’t know how to express it” (p. 133). These passages capture the power of gambling moments to transform the subjective perceptions and judgements of individuals in everyday life. With the emergence of “the zone” as a framework for understanding the effects of EGM play, a significant body of research has been produced in which gambling moments are seen as a portal of escape from the burdens imposed by social expectations in everyday life. For example, Reith emphasizes the loss of self that gambling moments embody and enable: “In the gambling arena players close off the outside world, shed their personality and forget their past, thus freezing themselves in a present which, without reference to the past and without enjoying real change, is empty” (2006, pp. 271–272). What follows will depart from this emphasis on subjective escape; instead, I will focus on how social identities are produced and sustained through gambling moments in everyday life.

Gender, Time, and Gambling in Everyday Life Sporting events provide a continuously regenerating ground of scripts for individual and social dramas, and these are relentlessly exploited by commercial gambling industries. In Australia, gambling is integrated within most major sporting events through sponsorship and advertising and is tied closely to representations and expectations of masculinity. Online gambling is promoted through screen advertisements at live games, continuous advertising on television, sponsorship, player uniforms, and stadium banners. In one commercial for an Australian online gambling provider, a young man walks to collect his winnings from the counter in a pub. This is shown in slow-motion replay, synchronized to the soundtrack of an iconic song from the Platters’ “This Magic Moment.” On route to the cash collection, he flirts with young women and kisses a man on the lips, while his mates look on with amusement from nearby tables. Like the beer advertisements with which they often alternate in live sporting broadcasts, the majority of online gambling ads are variations on the simple theme that “boys will be boys.” In the universe depicted in these ads, women apparently exist for the sole purpose of applauding the punting expertise of very tipsy young men, or as wives and girlfriends demanding that they spend less time with their friends drinking and gambling and otherwise evading romantic and family responsibilities. This gendered marketing seems to have been remarkably effective in increasing gambling participation as well as problems; the number of 18- to 25-year-old men presenting to a Sydney treatment clinic for gambling addiction doubled between 2012 and 2015 (Kerin, 2015). In this context, we can consider an advertisement from a different online gambling provider, also set in a pub but presenting a different representation of

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gambling moments. It advertises a cooling-off feature which users can activate to prevent themselves from placing bets for a designated period. A young man sits at a table with male friends while an event is being screened and he begins to visibly tremble with such intensity that the glasses at the bar clink together and the ball on the nearby pool table starts to shake. The excited voiceover proclaims the virtue of the product: You know mates can tell when their mates are getting a bit shaky on the punt. Here’s one! With Sportsbet’s new “take a break feature” you or your mates can take a break for as little or as long as you want. Yeah, good call! Take a break with Sportsbet. The final shot shows the young man relaxed, head turned away from the screen, and engaged in conversation with his friend. Another feature advertised by the company enables players to “cash out” by controlling their losses during bets that comprise multiple competitions. If a player sees his winnings decreasing during an event, the feature allows him to cut his losses in real time (Chameleon Casting, 2015; awards, 2018). In these ads, taking time out from gambling is associated with losing the “jitters,” and cashing out restores players’ capacity to enjoy the moment of sporting events (awards, 2018). These examples suggest that, rather than providing an avenue through which individuals might escape from the onerous demands of social expectations, gambling is an important arena within which these roles are quite literally played out. This is evident in gendered marketing beyond the sporting arena. For example, a Mother’s Day version of a scratch lotto product offers a loving child the opportunity to “give mum the chance to win a weekly fun fund,” with a top prize of $5000 a week for five years. Encased with a hand offering a bouquet of flowers, this text and product denote a future where maternal drudgery is supplemented by a weekly budget for enjoyment. There is a tension between social and individual benefits in both cases: in the first case the iconography of celebration implies shared joy while the reference to scratching suggests individual relief, if not addiction; there is an implicit suggestion in the second case that mum would benefit from financial resources to enhance her capacity for individual enjoyment. De Goede (2005) explains how a masculine sphere of finance and security was constructed in opposition to a feminized sphere of “Fortuna” which included gambling and prostitution (2005, p. 173). Notwithstanding the emergence of “post-feminist” discourses to be discussed later in this chapter, gendered distinctions between finance and gambling continue to shape subjective and intersubjective experiences of gambling moments. Up to the later part of the twentieth century, the greater part of men’s everyday lives was played out within the public domain of work, politics, and recreational pursuits, while women’s everyday lives were primarily defined in relation to the private or domestic spheres of the home and family. Cultural economies of

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Figure 3.4 Advertisement for scratch lottery ticket, Brisbane, 2014 Source: Photograph by author.

public and private spheres were framed within broader social hierarchies of national identity and belonging. We will recall Rita Felski’s phenomenological theory of everyday life as grounded in the social values of “repetition,” “home,” and “habit” so denigrated

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by modernist and masculinist values of novelty, mobility, and rupture (1999). She argued that “the temporality of the everyday . . . is that of repetition, the spatial ordering of the everyday is anchored in a sense of home and the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of habit” (1999, p. 18). In this context, we can revisit accounts of gambling moments provided by Benjamin and Goffman cited earlier. Goffman’s theory of gambling as and through “action” is dependent on gendered figures. He begins his explication with a narrative of two small boys tossing a coin and uses the pronoun “he” throughout. However, towards the end of his argument, he makes an explicit comparison between searching for the action of gambling and a prostitute’s search for valuable customers: Thus, when [the gambler] asks where the action is, he is not merely seeking situations of action but also situations in which he can practice his trade. Something similar is found in the thief and the prostitute’s conception of where the action is—namely, where the risks to earn one’s living by are currently and amply available. Here, compressed pridefully into one word, is a claim to a very special relationship to the work world. (Goffman, 1967/2006, p. 248) This account illuminates the social logic giving rise to euphemistic descriptions of sex work as “being on the game.” A feminization of prostitution and masculinization of gambling work are implicit in Goffman’s account of action, reflecting the social organization of spaces and moments of gambling and prostitution when he was writing. If male prostitution and female gambling are invisible in this account, it is not because the latter do not exist, but because gambling and prostitution are tied to a tension in patriarchal societies between the enjoyment of property and romantic love. Benjamin explores the association between gambling success and sexual pleasure in gambling moments. He compares “the highly remarkable feeling of elation, of being rewarded by fate, of having seized control of destiny” with “the expression of love by a woman who has been truly satisfied by a man” (Benjamin, 2006/1929, p. 212). He links this erotic enjoyment, in turn, to capitalist values, pointing out that, in the moment of winning, “Money and property, normally the most massive and cumbersome things, here come directly from the hands of fate, as if they were the caressing response to a perfect embrace” (p. 212). “Lady luck” is figured here as both benefactor and beneficiary of gambling’s unique enjoyment. For Benjamin, “Gambling and prostitution meet in their investment in the speculative gaze . . . [in] a Messianic moment that breaks free from history’s predestined path of liberal progress” (Buse, Hirschkop, McCracken, & Tiathe, 2005, p. 139). Money is divested of its “cumbersome” form as representative of property and sexual relations are liberated from social obligations of labour and reproduction in the purchase of the prostitute’s time.

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However, if gambling moments promise to deliver money without work and sex without responsibility, the prostitute’s time—her performance of “being truly satisfied by a man”—remains the time of labour. Conversely, the gambler who loses money not only forfeits the means to purchase the prostitute’s labour but also a potential loss of face before those for whom he is financially responsible. I have highlighted the relationship between the enjoyment offered by gambling and prostitution as gendered forms of social “action” and consumption in Benjamin and Goffman. Later I will examine how poker and lottery gambling moments carve out possibilities for status, morality, and self-possession while making and unmaking masculine and feminine identities. Women’s gambling moments are often experienced and understood in relation to broader practices of consumption, whether restrained and socially respectable or excessive and socially problematic. In contrast, more ostensibly “active” forms of gambling—in particular wagering and poker—continue to be understood through the lens of production and associated with masculine values. This point comes into relief when we look at contemporary narratives about poker, especially as it has become professionalized and promoted as a semi-respectable career path. Brown (2011) recalls how Californian poker venues where he was initiated into the game supported a subculture of mostly young, heterosexual male regulars and more occasional married male players. Roles for women were primarily limited to sex-workers, owners/managers, service staff, or female partners (Brown, 2011, p. 106). As subcultural spaces, these venues provided a space for individuals to perform the hyper-masculine identity of the “player.” Gambling appears as a form of recreation that sutured men to aggressive, calculating, and manipulative forms of masculine play required in their day jobs. To participate in poker games as a “pastime” is to extend the work of being a man in a context that embodies the mythical American Dream of reward for risk. As Brown puts it, taking risk just makes sense. If there is literal gold in them thar hills, or figurative gold in new technologies, the more risk, the better. If you win, great. If you lose, you pick up the next option. That’s gambling and it’s not a problem. (2011, p. 324) A fine-grained cultural analysis of poker in everyday life is provided by participant-observation of friendly poker games by Louis Zurcher in the 1970s. His research suggested that these social games constructed a valued “ephemeral role” for men, in addition to their ordinary responsibilities within institutions of work and family. Playing poker for money at different members’ homes every fortnight made gambling moments available to men throughout the year. His account of how he and the other men adopted and inhabited this ephemeral role demarcates the time of the poker game as a temporary appropriation of domestic space for men’s entertainment and performance:

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The evening’s leisure was divided into three major components: (1) the informal discussion while waiting for all the players to arrive and the poker chips to be distributed; (2) the game itself; (3) the meal following the game. During the game it was understood that there were to be no “outside” interruptions. There were no radios or television sets playing, no wives serving beverages, no children looking over shoulders. (Zurcher, 1970, p. 175) The friendly poker game, then, provided a cultural moment through which men claimed space and time in domestic suburban space otherwise coded as feminine. As we have seen, gender continues to inflect the marketing of slot machines, bingo, and lotteries as feminized forms of play, in contrast to table games like poker and blackjack which afford greater opportunities for masculine role play through dramatized risk-taking and performances of “skill.” However, these distinctions are complicated with “post-feminist” frameworks for understanding, performing, and analyzing gender (see McRobbie, 2004). Within these frameworks women’s equality with men is taken as already achieved, and the onus is placed on women to enjoy this equality by participating fully within— or “leaning into”—male-dominated domains and definitions of success. Victoria Coren’s (2009) memoir of her successful career in national and international poker tournaments in the early 2000s highlights the challenges as well as the transgressive pleasures of succeeding in a male-dominated sphere. Poker tournaments specifically for women are now established fixtures in venues and online, and social research has been dedicated to understanding women’s experience as poker players (Abarbanel & Bernhard, 2012). Prominent Hollywood celebrities, including Mimi Rogers, appear in the World Poker Tour and single mothers can win reality television competitions based on poker (The Poker Star) (Hachem, 2009). In The Poker Face of Wall Street, Brown demonstrates post-feminist savvy, couching his advice on tactics to readers: “You also don’t know for sure what your chances of winning are or what another player thinks about her chances. A raise might make her fold; a fold might save you money” (2011, p. 48, emphasis added). His use of the third person female pronoun in describing poker tactics illustrates and responds to a post-feminist political context, where the game has become celebrated as a route to individual empowerment. While changes over the past two decades highlight the transformation of gendered moments of gambling, it would be a mistake to conclude that gender no longer matters for gamblers in everyday life. Emma Casey’s (2008) ethnographic study of working-class women lottery players explores the entanglement of gambling with gender politics in the home. She found that for many women, regular lottery participation provided a form of entertainment that was consistent with patriarchal definitions of their responsibilities as a good parent, partner/ wife, worker, and friend. Consumed in moderation, national lottery tickets and scratch cards offered these women an accessible and low-cost gambling product

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with minimal time commitments. Just as the men in Zurcher’s study purchased time, space, and workplace capital through participating in social poker games, Casey’s women reinforced their reputation as “respectable” women through prudent and social practices of lottery expenditure, in contrast to women whose gambling they perceived as being out of control (Casey, 2008). Zurcher’s account emphasized poker’s role in creating a social community of men within the home within a delimited timeframe, while Casey presents gambling on the lottery as less about escaping the identity of working-class woman than about celebrating it. The women she studied saw their voluntary choice to gamble as an unremarkable part of everyday life; they demonstrated that their gambling was routine and not obsessive by eschewing superstitious practices like having “my numbers”; they emphasized that the money used for the lottery was “spare cash,” not part of housekeeping funds; they presented winning as helping them to support male partners/husbands and children; they enjoyed gambling as a leisure experience that didn’t take time away from their domestic responsibilities; and they referred to “irresponsible other” women who gambled excessively as failing to uphold respectable working-class feminine identities (Casey, 2008). Post-feminist frameworks of understanding gender also obscure the gendered labour of producing gambling moments in everyday life. Susan Chandler and Jill Jones (2011) study the experience of women whose labour is indispensable to the daily functioning of Las Vegas casino resorts. Their interviews with unionized and non-unionized workers and with unskilled and corporate women told a story of women moving, and sometimes not moving, in the context of enormous corporate power . . . In the lives of women who remained silent [about bad labor conditions]—like the dealers who kept their heads down at work and chose instead to pursue happiness individually or management women who cast their lot with the corporation—the cost seemed very high. In the lives they led, money flowed more easily, but so did sadness and despair. (p. 174) In contrast, women who acted to improve their conditions collectively had healthy suspicions of corporate power, including the knowledge that those in charge may speak one way and act another, and were outraged that profit generation in gaming corporations regularly trumped any concern for workers and families . . . They knew what it was like to be in battle mode, and self-hatred rarely asserted itself. The women found joy in comradeship, in struggling and laughing together, in keeping on keeping on for a very long time, and knew at their core that workers, consigned to the bottom, may yet have a role in history. (p. 174)

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Using a similar social research methodology, Ellen Mutari and Ellen Figart (2015) investigated working conditions in Atlantic City. Noting that the workers who attend guests’ rooms are predominantly female immigrants, they argue, hotels as a “a home away from home,” mirror traditional gender roles in how work is allocated . . . The reasons for the stratification of casino employment are complicated, involving the preferences of individual workers, language skills, the influence of cultural norms and employer hiring practices. (p. 122) Referring to information provided in a lawsuit by the Borgata casino, revealing that 46 males worked as cocktail servers compared to 646 between 2005 and 2010, they argue, “The work of serving cocktails is gendered female” (Mutari & Figart, 2015, p. 123). One of the workers they interviewed described the atmosphere in her work space while serving all-male tables: “Here I am, I’m like half naked, and I’m dolled up, and I’m here to serve. And the outfits, you see how short they are. I have to bend over to pour drinks. I have to bend in front of them. They see me like that. And they look and treat me like they see me, which is like a piece of meat.” Her job was to say, “Here’s your menu; just let me know what you would like.” She said a common response was “Are you on the menu?.” Touching the servers was formally against club rules. So [she] would report this behavior— grabbing her butt or brushing her breasts—at least once or twice a week. Then one of the managers told her that she was the server who had most people kicked out of the club. It seemed more like a warning than an innocent comment. More like, “Just loosen up.” (p. 129) The performance of rigid gender roles here is an expectation of employers which women are required to satisfy. This is not just an issue for women. I spoke with several professional online poker players while researching this book, all of whom were white men under 30 years old. One of the players I met socially was initially employed by a casino subsequently as a trainer of new online players. He learned to adapt his play to different skill levels and individual styles of play and found that this work honed his capacity for fast decision-making. Assisted by analytics provided by casino software which recorded previous games of incoming players, he was able to make good money working normal hours. However, this was by no means a universal experience. The trainer also noted that several players in each cohort were so affected by emotional fluctuations, sleeplessness, or legal or illegal medications that they could

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not perform their job consistently over time. This underscores the harms that post-feminist frameworks for understanding gambling in everyday life pose for men. If being a player and seizing the action is synonymous with masculinity, failures to perform on the poker table are easily translated into feelings of individual inadequacy. Transforming gendered contexts of gambling examined earlier can be encapsulated as follows. On one hand, women are increasingly recognized as “players” in the widest sense of being eligible to participate in formerly masculine spaces and practices embodied in the poker game, the boardroom, and the staff room. On the other hand, the presence of women does not necessarily entail any significant transformation of gender politics within these spaces. We have seen that gambling moments can offer recognition and respect to individual women, but this is not, in itself, evidence of gender equality. The inclusive gestures of post-feminist politics often fail to account for much of the unpaid work that women do as parents and carers as well as the lack of legal protections against gambling-related violence at home and in the workplace. There are parallels and intersections with the situation of some Indigenous people in North America. While casinos have provided considerable wealth to some tribes and nations in the US and Canada, they have not threatened nationstate sovereignty or encroached on the privileges afforded to non-Indigenous people in everyday life as inheritors of the stolen gift of Indigenous lands, often developed through the unpaid labour of African-American and Caribbean slaves. The legitimacy of the liberal project of frugal government is continually challenged by those whose lands and labour created its material foundations. As we will see in chapter 5, gambling is an important part of this challenge. Gambling on the outcome of competitions is not the only way in which sporting moments are inflected (or infected) by gambling. The capacity of large crowds to generate revenue through many small donations is often leveraged by gambling interests. For example, the Canadian province of Alberta doesn’t allow legal betting on single sporting events, but it provides a gambling moment for live spectators in 50/50 raffles run by charitable organizations at the venues. Half of the proceeds go to the winner and the other half are retained by the charitable organization. With hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake in popular games, these gambling moments have been incorporated into the marketing of sporting teams. The website for ice hockey team the Edmonton’s Oilers promotes the virtues of this gambling: The opportunity for our fans to leave the game with an unexpected payout is a very enticing draw and knowing that the net proceeds support local charitable organizations, minor hockey & ringette associations in Northern Alberta and the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation is just another great reason to support the program! (Edmonton Oilers, n.d.)

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The 50/50 draw has become thoroughly embedded into the spectacle of the game itself, with fans often staying in the arena during games that are one-sided or boring to find out whether they have a winning ticket. Concerns surrounding gambling and sports are not simply moral panics, they also raise deeper ontological questions. What becomes of a game when it is substantially owned by gambling interests? What happens to the integrity of sport when a fumbled ball or a missed goal can provide a player on the low-to-middle range of salary with an income stream commensurate with his team’s stars? The intimacy of gambling and sporting moments became a matter of public debate in Australia when an online bookmaker and member of one of Australia’s celebrity racing families began to appear on the sidelines of live sporting events. Reporting in this space had previously been the privilege of established and respected sporting journalists, many of whom brought extensive experience as former players of the game. After the bookmaker appeared engaging in discussions on a major Rugby League game on a television panel of veteran sporting commentators, calls for new media legislation quickly followed (Nicoll, 2013). A veteran sports journalist characterized the penetration of gambling into live televised sports as nothing less than a “corruption of the soul of sport.” This was echoed in interviews with other public figures worried about conflicts of interest when sporting, media, and gambling industries converge. When the money generated by live televised sport is so substantial that club officials and individual players turn to performance-enhancing drugs to stay at the top of their game, perhaps the very soul of sport is in danger. We will see that, while gambling has become part of the everyday work of sports in Australia, gambling moments can also form an important aspect of belonging at work.

Gambling at Work My social research explored some of the ways that time was carved out for gambling in a large public sector workplace. Two of the most common forms of workplace gambling were tipping competitions and punters’ clubs. Tipping competitions are sometimes closely related to the work of specific industries. For example, one focus group participant had worked in a media organization which ran a “death book,” where of members of the tipping competition would bet on the celebrities most likely to die within a given timeframe. However, the most common tipping competitions are on sporting events. Sports tipping is a seasonal activity; in its most basic form, a group of people contribute a fixed amount of money each week on the outcome of weekly games and receive a score based on the accuracy of their predictions. At the end of the season, prizes are awarded to those with the highest score.

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In the large public sector workplace where I held focus groups, members of the tipping competition attended a live game together and also held a lunchtime celebration at the end of the football season when humorous prizes and trophies were distributed. As one participant explained, I think it might have been partly an excuse to have a drink together actually. It seems as though talking about some of these [sporting] activities [is] combined with other things. Social gambling [can result in] spinning off into more frequent interaction with whatever you’re gambling on to [relating] on a more individual basis. (FGA, 2014) A recent arrival to the workplace used gambling moments to establish relationships with his new colleagues: So, for me it was a kind of assimilation that I knew would help me to meet people on staff, because . . . it was very difficult to socialise, there are no other avenues to socialise . . . In the end I stopped actually doing the tipping, but I came to the game that we all went to and am going to go to the lunch tomorrow and so I am participating purely from a social reason. (FGA, 2014) Others in the workplace who weren’t involved in these competitions observed participants with more or less equanimity. One said, I notice that [members] love talking about the match over the weekend, what happened Friday, Saturday, Sunday . . . so I was totally out of the conversation on Monday morning. But the footy tipping gives them another avenue to talk and discuss and how “Oh, I got it this week.” I think it is about that, the socialising. (FGA, 2014) I also interviewed John, a young man who worked in the finance industry. He described a “punters club” into which his boss recruited him. This club had hundreds of members including employees working in several different industries from banking and finance to the Defence forces. All were men and the club itself was somewhat secret within the workplaces of members. Membership involved a system where members would vouch for potential members as “mates”: As far as getting in there and the type of people—by and large it’s a pretty clear profile. There’s not a whole lot of diversity as such in there. It’s pretty much what you’d think about your stereotypical Aussie . . . a mix between,

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not low-educated but not super, super high class. Just educated enough with careers. A lot of tradespeople, a lot of white collar. Not too many dumb arses as such but plenty of pretty rough-around-the-edges types. (Interviewee M, 2015) The club came with considerable perks, including box seats at major sporting events and a big end-of-season trip. This was a major organizational feat, with thousands of dollars allocated to expenditure on alcoholic beverages alone. After getting married, returning to graduate studies, and having several young children, John dropped out of the punters club and turned to online gambling as an activity that could be slotted into his shrinking moments of free time. Sports betting for members of tipping competitions provides a valuable and reliable joining function, bringing together individuals at work who would perhaps otherwise have little in common, as well as creating opportunities to socialize outside of the workplace. Gender roles were a prominent theme in my social research on gambling moments at work. I interviewed Gail, a professional woman in her 50s who was not a sports lover and experienced some pressure to join in at her workplace, observing, People in the footie thing seemed to make friends with people who might otherwise not have been a friend. There was mock (I think it was mock) rivalry among the people involved. A bit of resentment if the “wrong” person won. People talked even more about sport . . . which was tedious. (Interviewee C, 2016) Asked whether the competitions felt coercive, Gail responded, it is more the sport spectatorship than the gambling that is coercive. People honestly will NOT allow me to know nothing about sport and be happy about it. If it was music, or film, or art, no one would be incredulous when I said I didn’t participate. But not watching sport is considered as some kind of moral failing or worse . . . The gambling seems like a way to try to make watching sport interesting . . . And I don’t find gambling interesting either. So unAustralian! . . . It’s the male sport spectatorship, especially by feminist colleagues, that I find intriguing. I find watching men run into each other uninteresting at best, repugnant at worst. And I honestly do not understand why it is exciting . . . I am entirely mystified by sports spectatorship and gambling on sports spectatorship. Mystified. (Interviewee C, 2016) I also interviewed Chloe, an administrative worker in her late 50s and organizer of a football tipping competition and office sweeps on Melbourne Cup

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Day (to be discussed later in this chapter). I asked her about some of the merits of these events as well as some of their drawbacks: It is important for staff to have opportunities to socialise together. Positive outcomes would be establishing relationships with other staff members [and] relaxation with colleagues. [But] staff who don’t participate may feel that the time taken to organise events could be better spent. It can be very time consuming to organize events which means that other tasks need to be completed outside work hours. Staff are looking for some light relief to [the] work atmosphere or could be looking to share their knowledge of particular activities with like-minded colleagues. [While some] would be seeking inclusion in a particular group, others may feel unwelcome pressure to join in. (Interviewee F, 2016) Note here that the social benefits of organizing gambling events in the workplace are produced at some cost for the women, primarily in administrative roles, who organize them. Their labour is unrecognized and uncompensated and there is a risk that they may suffer consequences for their unpaid production of conviviality in the workplace. Intersections of gender and class were a significant theme in my interviews with two men involved with “punters clubs” in different organizations. Geoff, a professional knowledge worker in his early 30s, had worked in a call centre as a university student for five years and worked his way to a management position. He described the work on the floor as Intensely monitored . . . bosses would routinely listen in on your calls without you knowing and then follow up if you made mistakes. Every minute was accounted for . . . it was mostly older women and uni students who worked there . . . After a couple of years, I got a kind of “promotion” in the team that monitored the workers on the floor. What a betrayal! Workers on the floor got absolutely no privileges. But, workers on the human resources team .  .  . got certain privileges. Firstly, we could talk to each other while working but we also got staff development days, and training sessions, a Christmas party even. And we did “team building” type things including running a footy tipping comp. I thought it was kind of mean that workers on the floor were not to know about our footy tipping comp and were certainly not invited to participate because management didn’t want them wasting work time. But we could bugger about for an hour or so a week tallying and talking about the results. I remember there was one older lady on the floor who I used to chat to when the call volumes dropped down to late at night, a huge football fan, and we’d talk footy for ages. But I wouldn’t have been able to invite her into the office tipping comp . . . the tally board was up in our offices where the other staff didn’t go. (Interviewee B, 2016)

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Figure 3.5 Selection of lottery products on display at casino in Canada, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

We’ll note some of the powerful affects circulating around the tipping competition, including guilt related to class and gender privilege as well as the office hierarchy that allocated time for gambling as a mode of “team-building.”

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Figure 3.6 Lottery ticket checking device, Edmonton, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

On Winning the Lottery It is a weekday afternoon and I have gone out to buy milk at my local 24/7 grocery store located in a Canadian suburb. When I arrive at the counter, there is a growing queue and only two people available to serve. As I move closer to the counter I see

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a middle-aged woman feeding lottery tickets and scratch tickets to the clerk from a small pile. At close quarters I recognize the woman as one of several homeless people who occupy the streets in my neighbourhood. She doesn’t seem to feel rushed by the queue of other shoppers building behind her; she is enjoying a gambling moment in relationship with the store clerk who processes each ticket. Finally, the transaction is completed and she receives a small amount of banknotes and leaves promptly. The next time I visit that store, several months later, an automated machine for checking tickets has been installed. Customers simply scan the barcode and one of two messages appears on the screen. I am amused at the apologetic and uncertain wording of the message that appears to communicate the fact that I am, on this occasion, a loser: “Sorry. Appears to be a Non-Winner.” Later that year I visit the store and notice that among the themed scratch lottery tickets is one closely modelled on an advent calendar of the kind that usually contains sweets or chocolates. In the days leading up to Christmas, players can scratch a panel each day and discover whether they have won a large or small fortune. Sometime later, I’m involved in a conversation with a work colleague who is complaining about never having enough money to cover the expenses of raising a young family. I light-heartedly suggest that maybe he should buy a lottery ticket. He replies with considerable emphasis, “I feel like a winner every time I don’t buy a lottery ticket. That’s money in my pocket!” Lotteries are one of the oldest recorded gambling forms, however their modern history is closely entangled with the rise of liberal states. Lotteries funded many of the large projects of colonial expansion from Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. They were used to fund wars against Indigenous peoples and rival colonial powers and to establish some of the most important modern infrastructure and institutions, from roads, bridges, and churches to America’s Ivy League universities, including Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. Concerns about lotteries’ impact on the poor also saw them prohibited or highly restricted in industrial societies in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Religious groups criticized their morally corrosive qualities, manufacturers worried about their impact on workers’ productivity, and labour organizations were concerned about their cultivation of false hopes of class mobility in deeply unequal societies. Lotteries provide one of the clearest examples of how gambling moments link together the interests of capital and states. One of the most infamous gambling scams was the Louisiana Lottery, established in the mid-nineteenth century. Characterized as the “Octopus,” it was available throughout American states. Familiar aspects of commercial gambling were present in this scam, including massive profits for its owners and operators, combined with low returns to players, as well as routine bribery of governors to purchase approvals and avoid onerous taxation. Also familiar is the successful marketing campaigns which emphasized the small component of revenue donated to charities and the integration of representatives from respectable society for the purpose of popular legitimation. The organizers of the Louisiana Lottery addressed (correct) allegations of corruption by recruiting two former Civil War generals fallen on hard financial times to certify the fairness of the lottery. As leading characters in a performance of rectitude, the generals would place blindfolds over the eyes of two

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young boys from an orphanage who were led onto the stage by nuns to pull the winning numbers from the ticket enclosure (Robbins, 1980, p. 116). Insurance was built into lottery competitions from the nineteenth century through variations of “policy” or “numbers” games. These underground forms of gambling were essentially “side bets” on the outcomes of state lotteries or stock market trading figures which allowed individuals to participate with smaller stakes (Sweeney, 2009, p. 41). Sciences of probability were applied to develop insurance products to secure the investment of those who sponsored risky sea journeys to continents that subsequently became European colonies (see Hacking, 1990). As “precursors to today’s bond issuances,” Matthew Sweeney argues, “lotteries provided a valuable service to municipalities and states in need of finance” (2009, pp. 37–38). One of the greatest threats to private and public lotteries came from the development of private banking services for individuals from the late nineteenth century. For example, the New York bank for savings held nearly half of the city’s debt by 1828 (Sweeney, 2009, pp. 52–53). The porosity of borders between gambling and finance is evident in the career trajectory of the founder of Chase Manhattan Bank, John Thompson, a former maths teacher and lottery ticket seller (Sweeney, 2009, p. 39). From the late twentieth century, with the rise of post-industrial service economies dominated by finance capital, lotteries were deregulated and diversified. They were also increasingly presented as the only means through which to fund a range of social goods, including education, arts, public hospital equipment and buildings, as well as charitable organizations. As David Nibert explains, contemporary financial institutions, shaped by the forces of monopoly and global capitalism, serve the interest of private businesses far better than they serve the public sector . . . Instead, during a time of corporate restructuring and increasing concentration of privately held wealth, lotteries have been created to support strapped governments . . . the managed but largely unrestrained capitalism of today precludes adequate funding of . . . public needs . . . Today’s powerful individuals—increasingly, with the use of the business corporation—have been able to exert a strong influence of economic, social, and political arrangements, not the least of which has been tax policy. (2000, pp. 45–46) As corporate and income tax minimization and evasion have become increasingly ordinary, lotteries have provided a reliable way for states to keep revenue within their jurisdictions. However, as borders between previously demarcated and policed gambling zones are progressively relaxed, competition has forced state lotteries to compete in national and global markets, offering enormous jackpots and requiring huge budgets for advertising and targeted social marketing.

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One of the most significant changes to the lottery has been to their schedules. Rather than providing the focus of weekly television events, the introduction of scratch tickets and Keno are transforming lotteries into a continuous form of gambling. Gambling moments proliferate in jurisdictions where lottery tickets are sold in spaces of everyday consumption, including petrol stations, news agencies, and supermarkets. Lottery products are also available online where they are liked to interactive games that appear to require skill and are similar to those engaged in social media platforms and in some EGM products. This has made the experience of some lottery products more akin to playing EGMs than to the scheduled Sunday morning anticipation of a big win described by Keynes, cited earlier. Winning a large amount of money in the lottery is an extraordinary event that can rupture the fabric of everyday life. As such, it is a gambling moment that casts the finopolitical circuits that link gambling, work, finance, and play into stark relief. Lottery winners reliably generate news for media organizations (Binde, 2007). We read of a homeless person receiving a windfall jackpot and feel heartened by the second chance this seems to offer them to enjoy life. Or we read of comfortable but very elderly winners and wonder whether they have time to truly enjoy their winnings. We hear of other winners who squander their money in a short period of time and are left worse off than before. We may be inspired by those who give their winnings away to a charity or establish a philanthropic enterprise. Some stories are especially poignant. Consider, for example, Charlie Charger, an Indigenous Australian man from Queensland who bet with the same numbers for a decade and won one million dollars. His family had been forcibly removed from his country when he was a boy to make room for a Bauxite mine. Police burned the buildings that had housed his community; he wept viewing the remains after he returned many years later. He planned to spend his winnings on a small home in the area, joining other members of his community who were returning to their country (Andersen, 2013). Other stories are ironic or humorous. Like Glenda Blackwell, a woman who claimed to have purchased a scratch lottery ticket as a demonstration to her husband of the futility of gambling (Pereira, 2016). Also appealing are stories that appear that lightning can strike twice, encapsulated in this headline from a Canadian newspaper announcing, “Man wins $2 million— five months after winning 1.5 million” (The Canadian Press, 12 September 2018). Others are melodramatic, such as the woman who brought a lucky lottery ticket for her nephew and then refused to share the winnings with him (The Canadian Press, 13 July 2018). We also find stories that focus on near misses, like the man who found an old but winning lottery ticket in an old jacket shortly before the expiry date (CBC News, 06 October 2018). The priceless publicity provided by these stories helps to sustain public support for commercial gambling operations in the jurisdictions from which lucky winners regularly emerge.

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My focus group participants were asked to imagine how they would respond to a win of over one million dollars and, specifically, whether they would return to work the following day: Yeah, because I don’t think you’d get paid straight away. So, you’d kind of have to [go to back to work]. No. I wouldn’t come back to work. Yeah but I would come back to work but I’d tell everybody. [With] only a million dollars they’re not going to expect handouts. I’m buying a house. It depends on how drunk I got the night before. I might be hungover but I’d come to work playing it cool and not tell anyone. No, I’d not go the next day, or if I did, it would be to hand in my resignation. I don’t think I’d go back the very next day, it’d be a celebration day, but I would go back on the following days [after thinking] about what I wanted to do. I’d go back the next day and pretend nothing had happened because I’d want time to think, just like you don’t immediately respond to an email that stirs you up. Whether I would go back the second day is debatable. (FGA, 2014) These responses to the anticipated enjoyment of winning the lottery highlight gambling’s capacity to strengthen or to sever the bonds that connect individuals to work in everyday life. I interviewed Graeme, an office worker in his mid-40s and member of a workplace lottery syndicate. He was one in a group of ten employees who worked in a unit within a large public sector organization and described himself as a very occasional gambler. He recalled that the syndicate had been formed by a staff member who had “some kind of number crunching idea, which I thought was complete nonsense.” The syndicate was limited to ten people and as some dropped out, others would join in. I asked Graeme whether he had ever felt pressured to join. “No, not at all . . . I was a willing participant. It was fun, and it was a dollar or something a week.” He never expected to win and describes the experience as a kind of shock. He didn’t quite believe the news after being informed in the evening by phone calls from two other syndicate members. He went into work the following day to discover that he had been appointed the media spokesperson for the group: all hell broke loose. Bloody TV crews started appearing and all that stuff  .  .  . I was worried about the work that had to be done that day because I knew it wasn’t . . . likely to happen. So, I spoke to my manager . . . and said . . . “Look, I’ve got a bit of a problem here.” I told him what the problem was and he sat back in his chair and said: “Graeme, go to the pub.” Well, it was hard to get out of the place because radio people

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were turning up . . . there was a lot of interest and a lot of excitement. The lottery people came and that had this big, huge enormous cheque. Someone hung it up over the reception area in the lobby. I asked him to recall the feelings that accompanied winning the lottery and he was surprised that the closest comparable experience was a death in the family: It’s always something that happens to someone else. It doesn’t happen to you. It’s something you’re used to observing rather than experiencing  .  .  . it’s a more pleasant experience than bereavement, but on that sort of scale . . . That weird few days after winning was like being in that bubble . . . You see the world going on around you, but you can’t understand how it’s not affected like your little world is, your little bubble. You’re just doing what you’ve got to do. It’s that weird feeling . . . there’s all this excitement and chaos . . . There’s all this stuff going on that you weren’t expecting to go on. You just deal with it, but you can see that life for everyone else is just normal around you. Eventually, it just settles down again . . . Until I was told, look get out of here, enjoy the moment, I was still trying to focus on what I needed to do . . . it was almost like a slap in the face, like for god’s sake Graeme, wake up, just enjoy the moment. (Interviewee N, 2015) He describes a very different response from another member of the syndicate, a regular gambler: The day it happened—before he even had his money—it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen actually. He took the big cheque that was hanging over the reception desk [and] went to the bank where he had an account. He wanted them to give him a cash advance [of several thousands of dollars] [But] they wouldn’t. They said he’d need proof. So, he took this big cheque to the bank . . . he was obviously [at] the start of a slippery slope. He went down to the casino that night . . . with some guy who wasn’t a great influence on him. I think they dropped six thousand dollars in one night. So, the first day six per cent of his winnings has gone straight away. (Interviewee N, 2015) Graeme describes the financial logic that guided his expenditure of the winnings: I was about 10 years married at the time, up to here in debt, so it helped with that . . . but it certainly didn’t put me or most of the [other syndicate] people in the situation where they could consider leaving their job . . . it helped . . . towards a mortgage and I’d never had a new car before. Then suddenly I could afford it . . . it made life a lot more comfortable . . . I mean in retrospect you probably would have done some things differently, but nothing terrible happened to me. In retrospect I probably would have

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Figure 3.7 Advertisement for Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in a hotel Source: Brisbane, 2014.

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I asked him how the event of winning the lottery had affected relationships within the syndicate as well as with others in the office where he worked. He said there had been some discontent about one of the syndicate winners who had previously requested and repaid loans to them in the past. There was a feeling that this person, in particular, could have been more generous with his sudden windfall. In response to my question about how the winning affected relationships within the group of syndicate members, Graeme became reflective. For “nine people it was balloons and happiness” but it . . . “certainly helped to destroy one life, which is tragic.” He described “a lovely, lovely bloke” with personality and addiction issues who was adversely affected by the win. He explained, “[The lottery] can compound your problems—it can make more of what you shouldn’t be doing more available, and the people who operate in that sort of environment tend to be lecherous, self-serving individuals” (Interviewee N, 2015). The “descent into hell” of this person moderated Graeme’s enjoyment of the win. He said, I would gladly not have won [the lottery] for that not to happen. It probably would have happened to him more slowly anyway, but mean I would gladly not have won it if it meant that this guy wasn’t in the situation he’s in now, because I like him . . . But if someone walked in through the door and handed me another hundred grand I’d take it! (Interviewee N, 2015) I will return later in the book to unpack some of the ethical issues these reflections pose. For the moment, I want to note the potential for the experience of winning to dislocate individuals from the workplaces that previously joined them in social and professional pursuits.

National Gambling Moments: Melbourne Cup Day Celebrations In the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery in Brisbane in the early 2000s, I asked a man in his ninth decade whether he had celebrated Melbourne Cup Day at school. He said that sweepstakes were held every year at the Catholic school he attended to celebrate the iconic race. Sometime later, I asked a woman of the same age from Melbourne (where a public holiday is held on the day of the race) to recall experiences of Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in her lifetime. A professional woman who had never married or had children, she remembered the day fondly as a time that her close-knit group of single professional women would enjoy a public holiday and travel somewhere for a picnic. She looked back fondly on humorous stories about the times shared at these picnics. In particular, she related a story about how one year they forgot a bottle opener for the wine and one of the women was so determined to open it that she trekked several kilometres to the nearest shop to have it opened. In later life, this same friend was afflicted by dementia and my narrator visited her in a

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nursing home, from which she was a frequent escapee. She related a sad memory of visiting one Melbourne Cup Day and watching her friend who had, by then, lost all sense of her personal identity be cajoled by the staff to wear a silly hat and participate in the festivities. Monarchs’ birthdays, independence days, commemorations of war and peace, religious celebrations, and days that recognize the contribution of working people form part of annual national calendars in different parts of the world. These moments are normalized through cultural practices that might include taking a holiday, going to church, watching a live televised event, wearing ceremonial clothes, and eating or refraining from special foods and liquids. And gambling. How are gambling moments generated by and framed within nations and the institutions that constitute them? American readers will recognize a familiar national gambling moment in the “March madness” legal betting festival on 32 college basketball games, 64 teams, and $1 billion prize. Prizes go for picking “First 32,” “Sweet 16,” “Elite Eight,” “Final Four” and the winning team. The picks of President Barack Obama for the 2014 season were publicized by journalists who dubbed him “fan-in-chief,” noting his success in tipping the 2009 NBA champions (Frizell, 2014). Obama was recognized as an enthusiastic and skillful gambler. An article in The Economist introduced a story on foreign policy thus: He calls himself a “pretty good” poker player. Barack Obama’s pokerbuddies, including Illinois politicians who played with him weekly when he was a state senator, tend to agree. Quizzed by profile-writers, they have described a cautious, canny card player. Mr Obama would bluff only if he had halfway-decent cards, they recalled. When opponents bet high, Mr Obama would not engage unless he held a strong hand of his own. As president, he is said to favour a more demure card game, spades. That may be just as well. At a bumpy moment in history, Mr Obama is strikingly, even confoundingly, reluctant to bluff. (The Economist, 2014) There are two points to draw from these examples. Firstly, they underscore how gambling during “March Madness” is a national thing to do for individuals in the US. Secondly, as the embodiment of the American Republic, Obama’s involvement in iconic cultural practices of gambling highlights everyday moments of gambling as a kind of social glue. We will see how these moments bind individuals together within the nation and associated social institutions including the family, the business, the friendship circle, and the workplace. What follows will focus on a national gambling moment that is specific to Australia: Melbourne Cup Day. I will show how this cultural moment conjures a particular understanding of the nation and its history, character traits, and values.

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The Melbourne Cup is a national thoroughbred horse race that occurs on the first Tuesday every November. First run in 1861 at Flemington, it features horses of three years or over competing over a 3200-metre course. The race quickly became a popular theatre for social mixing of classes and display of the latest fashions in colonial Melbourne. By 1895, visiting American writer Mark Twain was connecting this gambling moment to the broader theme of nationalism: “Nowhere in the world have I encountered a festival of people that has such a magnificent appeal to the whole nation. The Cup astonishes me” (quoted in Dunlop, 2016). In 1920, a visiting US academic was struck by the nation-defining power of this event. Writing in the New York Times, he described an “Orgy of Betting”: The Australian likes a good horse—I was about to say, he loves a good horse . . . Good horses are bred on the plains of Australia and of New Zealand. They are raced in every city. The Melbourne Cup represents a week of races. It is the “Fourth of July” celebration continued for a week . . . To the orgy of 1920, on the borders of which I stood, about 200,000 people flocked. The occasion assembles one of the crowds of the world. Prizes amounting to hundreds of pounds are offered, and bets to the millions are made, lost, gained . . . The contagion is hot in the atmosphere. The passion is hot. Australia, from Darwin to Hobart, from Brisbane to Perth, holds its breath, whether the victim or agent be a spectator on the bench or a native of the “bush.” (Thwing, 1922, p. 90) The qualities Thwing observes in the event have been remarkably consistent over two centuries. The annual race is still the occasion of a public holiday in its host city, and different kinds of celebrations in its honour continue to ripple throughout the country. These involve gambling—both commercial and informal sweepstakes—and activities like fundraising, social gatherings at work, attending local races, consuming alcohol, and showcasing Australian fashion. Melbourne Cup Day is also an established media event. Each year on the first Tuesday of November, newspaper headlines and broadcast journalists will excitedly claim “It’s Melbourne Cup Day: The Race That Stops a Nation.” News organizations will also represent and strengthen links between gambling and finance on Melbourne Cup Day with special reports on the latest Reserve Bank decision on interest rates. The popularity of the race, in conjunction with its promotion by all levels of government in Australia, makes it challenging to generate public debate about its merits. Those who point to animal cruelty or the misleading promotion of gambling as a harmless form of entertainment are given short shrift. Even seasoned campaigners against gambling deregulation feel obliged to preface criticisms with variations on this theme “Like every Australian I enjoy a

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bet on the Melbourne Cup” (see conversation between gambling regulation campaigner Tim Costello and journalist Royce Millar in Costello & Millar, 2000, pp. 17, 244–245). We are told that “Australians will bet on two flies crawling up a wall,” and the coin-tossing game “Two Up” is sometimes cited as part of the nation’s cultural heritage. Gambling is regularly used as a metaphor for the risky endeavours that “made the nation,” and its popularity as a cultural practice in the maledominated environments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is often presented through the lens of nostalgia. The formation of Australia as a British penal colony was followed by gold rushes that drove immigration from the mid- to late 1800s. Australian nationalism is strongly inflected by egalitarian myths that promise a good life and upward mobility for white citizens, and gambling has often formed part of these myths. As a Commonwealth nation, Australia is also shaped by strong ties to British institutions and cultural practices, within which thoroughbred horse racing signifies aristocratic roots as well as popular culture. Melbourne Cup Day celebrations, then, highlight tensions between mono/ multicultural articulations of Australian-ness. The heritage of Chinese and Afghani immigrants involved in the gold rushes and the establishment of frontier trading routes (for example) are mostly invisible within Melbourne Cup Day celebrations, while British and white Australian racing pundits and fashion labels are prominent. But if Melbourne Cup Day seems to celebrate a traditional British “sport of kings,” everyday spaces and moments of gambling, from nineteenth-century opium dens to casino resorts today, provide contexts for different ethnic groups to mingle and participate in a mythical “democracy of chance.” Australian casinos are visibly multicultural spaces today. Chinese New Year celebrations are a major occasion celebrated in gambling spaces in Australia and Canada. With prominent decorations and special offers, these are often organized and facilitated by Mandarin- or Cantonese-speaking staff. A casino in Cairns in Northern Queensland features a photographic exhibition about the Chinese heritage of the town in its foyer, which also contains an upscale Chinese restaurant. The narrow racial and ethnic framing of national identity and heritage that appears in media representations and is celebrated by popular cultural practices on Melbourne Cup Day can be understood with reference to two of Australia’s other public holidays. Held on April 25 each year, Anzac Day is a commemoration of the landing of troops on the Gallipoli peninsula in 2015 from which, it was argued, a distinctive national character emerged (Nicoll, 2001). Anzac Day and gambling are regularly linked in narratives of white national identity. While gambling works as a metaphor for the sacrifice of lives in warfare, the attachment of war to gambling, in turn, invests its moments with sacred national values. Consider, for example, calls to name a race in Australia’s Melbourne Cup after a legendary war horse known as “Bill the Bastard” who saved many lives in World War One and on whose capacity to survive enemy fire many soldiers laid bets (Presnell, 2015).

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Held on January 26, Australia Day celebrates the landing of the first fleet in 1788 to establish a British penal colony. Anzac Day, Australia Day, and Melbourne Cup Day are all cultural moments marked by excessive alcohol consumption and, not infrequently, violence. One of my focus group participants left a small rural community to work as a domestic violence counsellor in a large Australian city. Horse races were a regular joining activity in her hometown and the focus of local entertainment and small business. It was only after moving to the city that she participated in Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in her workplace. She noted that the day after the race, there was a sharp increase in calls from distressed gamblers and family members experiencing domestic violence (FGA, 2014). Anzac Day and Australia Day are both marked by official and informal ceremonies and celebratory practices. In contrast to the national scope of the other two national cultural moments, Melbourne Cup Day is only a dedicated public holiday in Melbourne. There it is an event that is important for urban branding and is successfully used to sell the city’s fashion industry, through “Spring Carnival” fashion parades as well as its restaurants, art, and entertainment to international tourists. In spite of this local focus, I suspect the race is celebrated in some way by millions of citizens throughout the nation. My research found that many people across a wide social spectrum did stop whatever they would otherwise be doing to watch and wager on a horse race on the first Tuesday of November each year. It is not just the case that ordinary activities cease for the race’s duration. I also found that, in one large Australian state at least, more or less elaborate forms of celebration, socializing, and fund-raising displace business as usual, sometimes for several hours before and after the race itself. What follows will present the results of a research project on Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in three different organizational units of a large public workplace employing nearly 5000 people. My research questions included, What happens when the nation stops to watch a horse race? How does the running of the Melbourne Cup become a cultural moment in national spaces beyond the site of the event itself? My research assistant described two celebrations in different organizational units. The first event was an elaborate fund-raiser organized by a committee of nine people. It featured seven long tables decorated with paper chains of cardboard horses, paper flowers, and cut-out gold cups. There were 10–20 people on each table where a meal was served after much alcohol had been consumed. People were dressed up. Most of the women were wearing “fascinators”—a small hat with a partial veil—and one man had a sparkling gold hat with a plastic horse stuck onto the front. There were three people presiding over the festivities—a master of ceremonies, a sweepstake coordinator, and an “auctioneer, dressed up as a cowgirl: The horse auction consisted of people bidding for individual horses in the Cup. They received a wooden horse on a stand with a name on it.

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Cultural Moments of Gambling The stakes were relatively high [with] people paying as much as $50 for a horse, although mainly they went from $25–$40 each. Bidding started off at $5 and people were eager to participate. One man told me afterwards that the bids were much lower than the previous year where [some] horses went for $100 . . . He wondered if that was partly due to the fact that their unit had been told that their budget was being slashed in the coming year. (Research Assistant (2015) Fieldnotes on Melbourne Cup Day)

In addition to prizes for winners of the first-, second-, and third-placed runners, there was also a prize for the best dressed male and the best dressed female attending. The winners of the horse races won up to $400, but a portion of all the money raised in the auction was given to a charity for retired racehorses, which received $80. My research assistant asked some new arrivals to Australia to share their perceptions of the event. Both were recent immigrants to Australia, one from the UK and the other from Italy. The practice of dressing up and running special events for charity was familiar to the UK participant, but she was surprised to see such excessive alcohol consumption in the workplace. She also noted that although Britain features high-profile racing events like the Ascot and the Grand National, there is no equivalent, nation-stopping, event to the Melbourne Cup. The Italian participant enjoyed the festivities and expressed surprise at the scale and character of the Melbourne Cup Day event, noting that lotteries were much more popular than horse racing in Italy, especially since the global financial crisis. The second event she documented was much smaller and more subdued. Around 25 people attended in a meeting room, gathered around a table. Everyone had brought a contribution to lunch, and alcohol was not obviously consumed. A sweepstake was held, but no one dressed up. A TV was brought into the room to broadcast the race, and expressions of enjoyment by participants were relatively muted; they returned to their work stations quite promptly after the race. The contrast between these events demonstrates that while there is a broad template of what should or could happen when the nation stops for the Melbourne Cup, this is not prescriptive. As we will see, this indeterminacy opens a space for various kinds of creative interventions into workplace culture. As part of my social research I administered surveys to older and younger members of this large public sector organization. Most of the mature participants (aged 31 and over) rarely gambled outside Melbourne Cup Day. Of these who did, a very small minority wagered on animals or sports, and most consumed lotteries (including “scratchies”) and EGMs. The majority said they experienced a sense of national pride on the day, and many of them emphasized horizontal bonding between staff who are otherwise in hierarchical relationships based on classifications and seniority. Several participants expressed reluctance to read deeper meanings into the festivities, underscoring its role as providing just “a bit of fun.” Participants

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were asked to enumerate the workplaces in which they had previously celebrated the occasion excluding their current one. A majority of them had participated in annual MCD celebrations throughout their working lives in a diverse range of industries, from government, to corporate, to media, education, and cultural industry workplaces. In Queensland, at least, it seemed unusual for people in workplaces of a certain scale not to have celebrated Melbourne Cup Day. The figure for participation in the older cohort revealed the power of Melbourne Cup Day as a strong cultural tradition, with some people celebrating the event at work almost every single year of their working lives. While a clear majority within both cohorts described themselves as gambling “rarely,” it is unsurprising that the older group included fewer people who had “never” gambled. But, while just under 50 percent of the older group claimed that Melbourne Cup Day was the only day they gambled, this was true of only 10 percent of the younger cohort, many of whom preferred online sports gambling. Ninety percent of the younger group who gambled had gambled on days other than Melbourne Cup Day, and nearly 20 percent experienced gambling as part of birthday celebrations when they reached the legal gambling age of 18. The high rates of gambling participation likely reflect many options and products available to them. The fact that fewer people in the younger cohort had participated in Melbourne Cup Celebrations at work did not mean that it was unfamiliar to them. Around 70 percent had participated in these celebrations organized by teachers while they were at school. Activities led by their teachers included fashion parades, watching the race on television, and participating in sweepstakes with non-cash prizes. My research provides some basis for speculation that Melbourne Cup Day celebrations at work may be less important for younger generations of Australians. Firstly, the casualization of work for many younger people and the availability of remote working options often make their sense of belonging to a workplace or office culture more tenuous than previous generations. Secondly, the availability of multiple online gambling platforms, which now incorporate social functions such as “chat” and can be enjoyed with friendship groups, has untethered some kinds of gambling from offline spaces. Thirdly, the issue of animal cruelty within racing industries has enjoyed significant media exposure—partly due to deaths of wellloved horses before, during, or after the race. Fourthly, debates about pokies (EGMs) have publicized broader risks of problem gambling. Finally, the circulation of photographs and videos every year on social media of people at the event behaving badly after consuming too much alcohol may discourage them from participating. Taken together, these factors have introduced a sense of ambivalence within many younger people about celebrating “the race that stops the nation.” My research with people involved in gambling at work revealed an important aspect of these moments, regardless of whether the gambling in question involved lotteries, sports tipping competitions, punters clubs, or Melbourne

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Cup Day celebrations. The existence and persistence of these activities was rarely, if ever, formally approved by the organization, even when it was used by those in positions of authority for “team building.” As a corollary, these events were dependent on the good will and energy of individual employees who sometimes had to work overtime to deliver a fun and social experience of gambling at work for their colleagues. The discovery of a very tenuous connection between gambling on Melbourne Cup Day and gambling at other moments in everyday life is interesting. It suggests that, for a significant proportion of people, in white-collar professions at least, gambling on Melbourne Cup Day is an exceptional departure from everyday lives in which gambling does not feature prominently. This can create ambivalence about celebrations in the workplace among employees. I found that the most enthusiastic participants emphasized the importance of the event as a national tradition and were resistant to reflecting on deeper questions related to the celebrations. However, several people in the focus groups and interviews described feeling somewhat coerced to “join in.” If gambling is not the primary purpose of Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in workplaces across the nation, how are we to understand its ubiquity and social force? There are, after all, alternative and, arguably, more inclusive ways to build teams and encourage socializing at work. An interview with Susan, a retired university professor who worked in the same place for nearly 40 years, provided some insights. At the beginning of her career, Susan was familiar with horse racing culture, having migrated from Ireland to take up an academic post in Brisbane, Australia. However, she was shocked and surprised by the impact of Melbourne Cup Day on her colleagues. She recalls being in the office one day and finding it uncharacteristically quiet. In response to her question about where everyone was, a member of the office staff informed her that many of her colleagues would be in their offices listening to the call of the Melbourne Cup on portable radios. Susan was later appointed in a new role created by her department titled “social convenor” due to a perception that there was a lack of social connection between members of the department and that this was bad for morale. “We just never got together in one room and it was a pity not to. I’m a great believer in community and supporting each other. Sharing terrible anecdotes which reveal that we’ve all got the same problems and you’re not the only one doing it badly” (Interviewee G, 2015). Susan saw an opportunity to mobilize Melbourne Cup Day to bring staff at all levels of the department together in a qualitatively different experience of the workplace. She proceeded to design elaborate events each year, with invented games with highly specific rules and ridiculous prizes on offer. While the race was still screened, it played second fiddle to the activities surrounding it: So, I thought, why don’t we have an event in one of the big seminar rooms . . . we have one television in there and we all watch it. We weren’t

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catering or anything . . . somebody brought in a Two-Up game . . . The office staff, brilliantly, made some false money with . . . copies of head of department’s head [and named after him]. I also instigated . . . a hat competition . . . You can’t come in unless you’ve got a hat . . . The prize . . . was probably a bottle of wine . . . Some people just brought their ordinary hats and then realised that other people were making more of an effort. [One person] wore two wine glasses, one dangling from each ear . . . somebody won . . . with just an ordinary sunhat with tonnes of false fruit on the top of it . . . One year I won the hat competition because I had brought myself a push scooter [and] put a horse’s head on it and I wore a jockey’s hat. . . . Then everybody tried to ride it around the building. Someone fell over and scraped themselves but we said they couldn’t claim workers’ [compensation] because it was a Melbourne Cup Day. (Interviewee G, 2015) Susan’s favourite memory of organizing these events was People wearing funny hats and talking seriously. I remember X who is a serious person—lovely, but he is a serious worker—and Y talking really earnestly about something. One of them had a flowery hat on and the other one had a sailors’ hat on and they’d forgotten. It just looked so funny. The incongruity of it. (Interviewee G, 2015) In later years, Susan exploited the event’s potential for fundraising; for example, she asked academic staff to bring their used academic books to the event for resale to support a newly formed graduate student association. This event brought graduate students, often the most socially isolated cohort in a university, into the social heart of her department. Susan had interesting reflections on the political functions of her work as organizer of Melbourne Cup Day celebrations over several decades. She identified two different threats to the sense of group solidarity that the events helped to cement among individual members of her university department. The first was authoritarianism and the second was managerialism. Authoritarianism had taken hold in the state of Queensland under a government which was violently opposed to the social moments of the late 1970s and 1980s, including Aboriginal rights, feminism, gay and lesbian activism, trade unions, anti-nuclear movements, and different varieties of socialism. One of the laws passed by this government made it illegal to gather in public for the purpose of political demonstration. These laws were routinely abused by police and provoked massive demonstrations by coalitions of those who were their target (Evans, Ferrier, & Rickertt, 2004). University staff were routinely arrested for protesting during this time, and Susan spent considerable time “bailing out my colleagues or teaching their classes because they were in the [police] watch house.” One of her colleagues was given the task of

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recording arrests but was arrested herself by some particularly vigilant police: “Do you know there [was] a charge called loitering with intent? [This colleague] was arrested [for] hesitating with intent to loiter” (Interviewee G, 2015). In this authoritarian political context, Melbourne Cup Day celebrations became one way to sustain solidarity and resistance among colleagues who were under immense pressure to keep their heads down and be silent. While this excessive and highly visible political repression of dissent had subsided in the decades prior to my interview with Susan, she argued that managerialism was an even greater threat to social solidarity within her university and department. By managerialism, she referred to the erosion of academics’ power to self-govern by highly paid, non-academic experts with no interest in collective traditions and practices that were not directly translatable into dollars for the university. She observed that the university campus had ceased to be a social space of organized political protest: “No one’s got the time. There’s no value added to your CV. On the contrary” (Interviewee G, 2015). In reference to Melbourne Cup Day celebrations and other informal social events, Susan reflected, I think it’s almost impossible now to do [these things]. The accusations you would get from the managers. They would not see the camaraderie, friendship, interconnection as valuable at all. They might talk it. You know, “we are a team.” Rubbish. You don’t want that team to interact with each other. You don’t want anything different. (Interviewee G, 2015) Susan reinforced and elaborated a strong finding from my social research about the tenuous relationship between gambling on Melbourne Cup Day and gambling at other times of the year. Rather than being a “gateway” to other kinds of gambling, she saw it as a nationally authorized pretext for sociality in the workplace: So, it’s just another social event but a big one and it’s kind of authorised because you know that everybody’s doing it . . . [Like if ] anybody came to your office and you weren’t there and you said “It was Melbourne Cup Day, where the hell did you think I was going to be?” So, it’s an excuse not to be working. It’s a release and that’s great and it’s a social event. I spoke to . . . colleagues I hardly had anything to do with otherwise [in] a big, big department and that was good. (Interviewee G, 2015) Here we see gambling moments being harnessed as a social glue to join workers together against specific external threats—from authoritarian governments to managerialism. In Susan’s story and those of the other participants who contributed to the research we see the investment of employees in improving their social experience of work—an activity that consumes much of their

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everyday lives—and we see that, when the nation stops, in Australia at least, gambling moments are available as one means of achieving this improvement.

Conclusion This chapter explored how gambling moments have changed and been theorized over the past two centuries. We saw how gambling moments generate, reproduce, and sometimes challenge everyday experiences of social identity and belonging. My analysis of gendered aspects of gambling moments complicated arguments that gambling provides escape to players from the demands of social roles. Drawing on literature, advertising, social research, and participantobservation, I showed how local, national, and gendered identities are often constituted through everyday practices of gambling—from lottery and sports tipping syndicates through to wagering and poker. My social research demonstrated how gambling moments facilitated a kind of enjoyment that briefly transformed how time is experienced and spent at work. Gambling at work could be a strategic activity, encouraged by management, or a tactical one used by individuals or groups to subvert the objectives of power. Competitions, including those dedicated to sports tipping, were often produced through the labour of lower-status women and emphasized the value of social solidarity in the workplace. These gambling activities seemed to perform a “civilizing” function for employees otherwise divided by individualistic goals and competition for status and promotions. The final part of the chapter provided a close analysis of a gambling moment: Melbourne Cup Day celebrations. This not only demonstrated how gambling moments can create and sustain myths of national identity, it also showed how individuals sometimes experience and manipulate these moments in pursuit of non-gambling-related goals.

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4

Cultural Products of Gambling

Introduction I visit an old casino in the downtown area of a Canadian city which seems to be using the latest EGM products to distract consumers from its drab and depressing interior spaces. There is a product launch for a new machine featuring the celebrity talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. It features built-in surround sound and a seating unit similar to the kind used in motor racing games designed for gaming arcades. On the back of each machine is a promotional panel reading, “Laugh. Dance. Play. Ellen Video Slots.” The iconography of the game is directly adapted from Ellen’s branded merchandise: sunglasses, boxer shorts, shopping bags, coffee cups, stylish shoes, and the show’s logo. At the top of the machine are rotating scenes of some of Ellen’s goofiest performances and, at eye level, close-up photographs of the celebrity in her signature red chair. The red chair operates as the “substitute symbol” in the Ellen game. This symbol has special power within slot games as it can multiply small wins or even trigger “free games.” Delivering cash or cards into the machine triggers Ellen’s voice: “Hi! Can I offer you a beverage?” More interventions from the daytime talk show host continue as players engage the game, including “I feel so alive!” and “Mmmm. This is nice!” There seems to be something monstrous about the exploitation of Ellen’s celebrity value in a game designed to extract time and money from consumers. With deregulation in many jurisdictions over the past two decades, the scope and variety of gambling products has increased exponentially. The electronic gaming machine industry has become a leading player in entertainment licensing and celebrity branding; wagering products have expanded from sports and racing to encompass political, economic, and entertainment events, including live videogame tournaments; new lottery products have been developed, enabling continuous play. Digital forms of culture have encompassed and transformed gambling products and spaces; information sources on players have proliferated and data analytics have emerged to make sense of them; and artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly significant component of online play. In addition, a suite of products has emerged at the borderlands that previously separated gambling from financial and recreational goods and services. The integration of micropayments into online games, the

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incorporation of gambling mechanics, such as “loot boxes,” into video games, together with the emergence of interactive financial products for individual investors has considerably blurred the borders between work, play, gambling, and finance in everyday life. This chapter investigates to what extent and in which ways cultural products of gambling remain distinctive from products for leisure, finance, and recreational play. Readers may be wondering why I have dedicated a chapter of this book to products. Surely the variety and availability of gambling products is of more interest to scholars of business, law, and marketing than to students of culture and everyday life? To understand why products are the focus of this chapter, it is useful to return to Reith’s landmark book The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture, which in 1999 defined gambling “as a ritual which is strictly demarcated from the everyday world around it and within which chance is deliberately courted as a mechanism which governs a redistribution of wealth among players as well as a commercial interest or ‘house’” (p. 1). Reith employs the anthropological concept of “ritual” at the beginning of her definition of gambling and emphasizes its social demarcating function. I don’t want to dispense with ritual aspects of gambling, but I do want to underscore a shift that has occurred as deregulated markets for gambling have expanded in many jurisdictions. To account for these changes, I suggest a revision of her definition as follows: gambling is a ritual linked to products and services which are partially integrated within the everyday world and through which chance is inadvertently or deliberately courted as a mechanism which governs a redistribution of wealth among players as well as a commercial interest or “house.” This better captures the shifting boundaries between finance, work, and play which gambling products currently exploit and exacerbate. Before approaching gambling through the lens of consumer products, it is important to consider its role as providing a public service to citizens within jurisdictions that allow it. This is evident in the benefits that taxation of gambling revenue contributes to a range of necessary social goods, from hospitals and highways to arts organizations and charities. For example, in the Canadian province of Alberta, a proportion of gambling proceeds go directly to charities which, in turn, supply volunteers to work in its casinos or bingo halls for designated days each year. In other jurisdictions, cultural productions like film, theatre, and television series are sponsored by state lotteries. This understanding of gambling as a public service and social good often exists in tension with an expanding competitive marketplace for commodified chance. The latter is the focus of the gambling products I will discuss in this chapter. What is a commercial gambling product and what is at stake in demarcating and policing distinctions between gambling and non-gambling products? To answer this question, it is important to understand the role of consumers within neoliberal societies (Mukerjee & Weiser, 2012, p. 9). A shift from labour and production as grounds of political resistance to consumercitizenship has made “commodity activism” an increasingly important way of addressing questions of social justice. But gambling products have not only

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become thoroughly entangled with broader questions related to consumption in neoliberal societies, they also unsettle some key concepts of both liberal and Marxist economic theories, including “the consumer’s surplus” and “commodification” respectively. While behavioural economists and neuroscientists offer insights on the design of gambling products, critical cultural theorists have developed new concepts to account for gambling’s role in a broader consumer culture, including “digital gamble-play” (Albarrán-Torres, 2018) and “coercive commodities” (Young & Markham, 2017). The previous two chapters connected gambling with spaces and moments of everyday life that were more or less extraordinary. When we turn to consider gambling products and services, we see two strong developments. On one hand, gambling is being concentrated in ever larger and more extraordinary spaces and moments, like Las Vegas and Macau, with iconic sporting competitions like World Cup Football and richly sponsored tennis competitions attracting global gambling investment. On the other hand, gambling is being diffused into ordinary activities and everyday processes like videogaming and selecting investment options for retirement funds. Products existing between these poles can be the source of considerable confusion among consumers and regulators. If online gambling is not allowed in your country, there are often international providers who will accept your wagers. And if there is not a major sporting tournament to bet on happening in your country at a particular moment in time, it is likely that you can find betting action on fixtures elsewhere in the world. Later I will present a brief selection of illustrative examples, including sports betting, licensed EGM products, social games and video games, and wagering on finance. Considerable cultural reframing was required for online sports betting to become a normalized practice in Australia. One of the first advertisements for Sportsbet illustrates the transition between a practice of gambling anchored in specific places, events, and times and the de-territorialized gambling opportunities now available to consumers. In the mid-2000s, transnational advertising company Leo-Burnett was tasked with promoting digital wagering in a country where state totalizer agency boards (TAB) had provided dedicated spaces of betting from the 1960s. Burnett’s campaign, “Say Hello to Freaked_Out,” created humorous scenarios by placing an “everyman” character in various “traditional” gambling venues as a foil against which to highlight the convenience and affordances of online betting. The “Freaked_Out” character was inscribed with several signifiers of an Australian middle-class male at leisure: polo shirt, slightly unshaven face, and whiteness. At the time of its broadcast, the character also evoked connotations of digital life such as tweeting, Web 2.0, social networking, and youth. His encounter with a “freak show” of TAB patrons was denoted by physical deformations, demonic spirit possession, and ambiguous gender and sexual identities. The final shot of the ad showed a panicked expression on the protagonist’s face after accidentally grasping the hairy breast of a man blocking his exit. Painting the cultural space of the TAB as dangerous and degenerate enabled this campaign to celebrate ordinary people

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“who like to bet on the net.” The success of this campaign (and many others like it) saw an explosive growth of this sector in Australia from the turn of the millennium. Today sports gamblers are no longer associated with particular venues or undesirable populations but, instead, with individuals who “like a punt” or enjoy “working an angle.” Online sports betting companies have become increasingly visible as sponsors of teams across the main sporting codes, and the convenience, security, and capacity of sports betting platforms have embedded gambling more deeply into everyday life. The previous chapter showed how stories linked to gambling were as important as details of sporting competitions in bonding members of workplaces and friendship groups together. Having considered the joining function of online sports gambling, it is important to acknowledge its enjoining function. That is, How does not betting mark an individual out as “a bad sport,” or a “wowser”? As online gambling platforms enjoined young men to a fuller, deeper participation in fandom and spectatorship, a former politician and president of a Melbourne football club expressed his concern that saturation of televised sport by gambling sponsorship was sending a dangerous message: “not only is it alright to bet but you’re a mug if you don’t” (Jeff Kennett quoted in Wilkinson & Everett, 2013). A distinctive feature of the latest electronic gaming machines to be discussed later in this chapter is branding and licensing deals. Following the tradition of adapting Hollywood film and television brands and personalities to merchandise and media extensions, considerable resources have been dedicated to create consoles for games based on popular television shows including Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad; brands, such as Playboy; and celebrities, including popular talk show host Ellen and country music legend Dolly Parton. Such adaptations are not always approved. In 2012, the Tolkien estate, along with publisher HarperCollins, sued Warner Bros for the unauthorized use of characters, imagery, and other intellectual property associated with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit novels. The Tolkien estate argued that the deal covered only the sale of “tangible” merchandise and not the “morally questionable (and decidedly non-literary) world of online and casino gambling” (Stempel, 2017). Microgaming, who had licensed the game from Warner Bros, quickly removed it, but the Tolkien estate sought an immediate halt to any further gambling licenses as well as damages of $80 million for having allegedly “outraged Tolkien’s devoted fan base” (Stempel, 2017). This example highlights some of the legal and cultural issues related to adaptations of existing literary and cinema properties to gambling products. The infrastructure provided by media platforms has become an important feature of gambling products in everyday life. In addition to enabling gambling at players’ convenience, these platforms are designed to sort, connect, attract, and retain players. Players’ interactive exchanges, in turn, create distinct cultures within platforms described by Cesar Albarrán-Torres as “gamble-play media” (2018). Data analytics and automation used in these platforms have changed the ways that gambling is marketed, as well as the experience of play.

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Designers are tasked with creating “sticky” interfaces to keep players attached to their sites. Online poker players will likely encounter “bots” or algorithms which play in the place of human players. The strategic application of technology highlights the unequal power of gambling corporations and players, as well as profitable loopholes in gambling regulations. It should be noted, however, that the absence of surveillance technology can be as important as its presence. For example, casinos might use data analytics to track customers’ preferences and patterns of play through loyalty card schemes but refuse to install facial recognition technologies to support the decision of individuals who elect to self-exclude from venues (Priest, 2009). Another feature of the changing landscape of global leisure and entertainment is the blurring of lines between gambling and monetized play, with new types of “social games” offering in-game gambling opportunities as well as the spectacle of competitive videogame competitions, or eSports, which provide opportunities to gamble either directly on the outcome of tournaments or by wagering on valuable items (skins) earned by players within games. Games made for children increasingly incorporate design mechanics, including addictive reinforcement schedules and iconography drawn from slot machines; these are sometimes linked to “loot boxes” or other devices requiring payment to unlock treasure chests or to spin wheels of fortune. This convergence between gambling and gaming design has made video games produced for children and adults the object of legal scrutiny in some jurisdictions. The past two decades have also seen growing legal ambiguity about where financial products end and gambling products begin. The global financial crisis of 2008–9 was due, in part, to the development of a suite of new financial products based on the trade of packaged derivatives from bank loans. The most disastrous of these was the global trade in sub-prime mortgages marketed to consumers in the United States with no or poor credit ratings. In 2012, the Australian Federal Court decision found in favour of a Shire Council on the basis that Grange (now Lehman brothers) sold them SCDOs (synthetic collateralized debt obligations) described in the judgement as “a sophisticated bet” against a range of possible “credit events” occurring. This led financial experts and reporters to call for certain financial products to be reclassified as “gambling products.” As Australian financial analyst and reporter Alan Kholer put it, Sometimes financial derivatives are used by those who have a genuine trade or credit exposure to hedge or offset, but most of the time—the vast majority of the time, in fact—they simply involve a bet, made by a punter, often online. When they are not traded online, and are instead sold by liars masquerading as financial advisers, the “advisers” should be licensed as croupiers, and the “products” regulated as crap shoots and taxed accordingly. (2012)

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The definitional uncertainty alluded to here can be exacerbated by the design features of financial trading software. In a collection of short stories written by people identifying as problem gamblers, an author describes her experience of gambling with an online stock market trading platform: I gamble on CFDs. Contracts for a Difference. Win or Lose—the difference between your point of entry and your closing out, whether you bet on the market going up or going down . . . Oh bliss, oh joy, names, numbers. Like a plane or spaceship . . . Immersion. Escape. Total focus. Thrilling, intuitive, and infinitely hard and easy. Charts! Running live! . . . I rode the ebb and flow between fear, greed and hope. Later . . . I showed the platform and live charts to a young lawyer, a video gamer. His eyes bugged, after two minutes he whispered, “I could watch this all night—so good and so terrible.’ The [platform providers] make more and more each year. They get awards. They are on the other side of the bet and they always win overall. I paid all sorts of analysts and readers of entrails to give me sure thing betting tips. They couldn’t do it. The chat rooms are full of people complaining and the trolls employed by the “sure thing best tipsters” are extolling their virtues. I haven’t a clue but I am betting. They are just names and numbers and charts running with the bets . . . I watch the market for twelve hours at a time, then I sit there from morning to the next morning when it closes in the US. Make breakfast, take kids to the train, then back to the computer. I chat online. Twenty-eight hours and still going. I shake if I move away from my charts, I cannot do anything else. (Blossom, 2013, p. 52) The author connects the appeal of this trading platform to her post-traumatic stress disorder, acquired from years of domestic violence and a divorce that left her in financial difficulties. She is aware that, as an individual trader, her capacity for profitable decision-making is no match for that of investment banks. However, the trading platform itself provides an experience of enjoyment, amidst the chaotic impact of forces beyond her control. As she writes, “the deep focus of the enthralling computer screen was a reprieve and safety” (Blossom, 2013, p. 52). There is very little to distinguish her account from those of the EGM players whose stories are included in the same volume of short stories. The examples I have discussed earlier highlight the importance of products and services as a lens for investigating gambling in everyday life. They also suggest how the enjoyment offered by many products on the market both depends upon and exacerbates already porous borders between gambling, finance, work, and play. After a discussion of gambling systems, I will discuss some of the challenges that online wagering platforms pose for effective regulation and investigate forms of monetized play for adults and children, which resemble gambling. The final part of the chapter will examine financial products and

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consider how trading simulators within banking platforms embed gambling within projects of financial literacy.

Gambling Systems Systems in aleatory games initially seem baffling. While visiting a large casino in North America, I reflect on the “gambler’s fallacy” as I survey various games of chance on the floor. These include the wheel of fortune, the dice games craps and sic bo, and, of course, roulette. The gambler’s fallacy is a phenomenon described by mathematicians in reference to beliefs formed through players’ subjective experience of the random events that constitute a gambling session. For example, in a sequence of coin tosses which has only uncovered tails, we incorrectly expect that the next toss is more likely to be a head than a tail. Roulette is a game which explicitly incorporates the gambler’s fallacy into the enjoyment it provides. Beside each table, there are pencils and paper provided for players to record the result of each game. Often there is also an illuminated board displaying previous numbers. Players who join the table are enjoined by this system to track and record the history of play to predict their selection of numbers. Thus, a game of chance masquerades as a game of skill, to which players can bring a systematic approach to choosing numbers, while fooling nobody (except perhaps themselves). How should we understand the willful suspension of belief among those who diligently fill out their cards and “strategically” place their chips? While this system defies mathematical logic, following the history of “lucky numbers” is apparently part of roulette’s cultural appeal and enjoyment. Dostoevsky writes about the irrationality and irresistibility of systems in The Gambler. He observes numerous obsessive recorders of numbers and colours in his first experience of playing roulette (1866/1966, pp. 3–9) and later describes how an elderly woman in his party becomes obsessed with her own system of placing bets on zero, notwithstanding many wise cautions against this “strategy” by the novel’s protagonist (1866/1966, pp. 91–93). I wonder about the enjoyment that is provided through the process of inscribing results itself. Does it stem from joining a community of similarly “mindful” gamblers? Or is there a special joy that comes from winning after having applied a conscious strategy to choose a winning number? Before considering the role of products in gambling enjoyment, I want to briefly discuss a growing sub-category of products that are parasitical on certain games of gambling and finance. These are systems for prediction, calculation, and analysis which are built into gambling games or supplement them. I classify these systems as gambling products because they depend on gambling for their existence. And they are important for an understanding of gambling in everyday life for several reasons. They straddle boundaries between agonistic and aleatory games; they create an additional interest, both for individual players and groups; and they are a site of everyday “sense making” through which participation in gambling is rationalized, and, in some cases, made profitable. The forms that gambling systems take are numerous and include books, professional tipping products, software analysis, and algorithms. I will begin

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with the oldest and simplest of these and move onto more recent and complex commercial gambling systems. Two of the oldest casino table game systems are the martingale and reverse martingale. While these do not necessarily guarantee winning over time, the strategies they use of doubling one’s stake, either when winning or losing, are advocated by serious gamblers as a way to impose order on play, to minimize losses, and to enhance players’ enjoyment of gambling moments and spaces. Another system for calculation and prediction in aleatory games involves products that claim to maximize success in lottery events. While glitches in the design of lottery games have created wealth for a handful of individuals and teams with mathematical expertise, lotteries for the most part distribute winnings regardless of the skill of players. This has not prevented a market in lottery systems from emerging where individuals who claim to have experienced success in particular lotteries sell their secrets. Typical lottery schemes advise consumers on the most advantageous ways of spreading their selection of numbers across cards, which they claim will maximize probabilities of winning small and large prizes (Fagone, 2016). During my participant-observation, I regularly met men in the betting areas of Australian clubs and hotels who boasted of success in horse racing through systems they had purchased from professional gamblers. These systems seemed to provide them with confidence that novices, often referred to as “mug punters” in Australia, lacked. They also provided a convenient rationalization for spending many hours and dollars on gambling while drinking beer with their “mates” in hotels. In his memoir dedicated to capturing and explaining a life committed to gambling on horses titled Something for the Pain, novelist Gerald Murnane describes the marketing of betting systems in Australia from the 1960s to assist gamblers to make more profitable selections (2015). He explains that these systems built upon and extended “the form,” a brief, written explanation of the rationale for the odds placed on different horses, which includes several factors, including previous race performances, conditions of the turf, starting barrier number, jockeys, trainers/stables, and meeting places. Murnane gives an example of a deceptive system he purchased: [It] . . . provided . . . a plan for backing one or another of the three horses uppermost in the so-called newspaper poll. In those days, several newspapers . . . provided detailed coverage of racing. This included selections from up to ten tipsters and a poll ranking horses according to their popularity with the tipsters. If the deviser of the system had told purchasers which of the various polls he had used to obtain his lucrative past results, then the results could easily have been checked from old newspapers. But the deviser of the system claimed that each user should make up his or her own poll, using the selections of six or seven so-called leading tipsters. This, he assured his hopeful clients, was what he had done in the past. In other words, no one testing the system could claim that certain

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Cultural Products of Gambling winners supposedly backed in the past had not been among the top three in any popularity poll; the deviser of the system could simply claim that his own privately assembled poll had most certainly included the said horses. Likewise, if the poor purchaser failed to show a profit from the first few months of betting, he might be told, or he might himself believe, that his choice of tipsters was at fault. (Murnane, 2015, p. 94)

Similarities between this type of system and current systems incorporating algorithms can be understood with reference to what researchers in science and technology studies—drawing on cybernetics—call a “black box.” That is, a system too complex to fully understand or explain in which only inputs and outputs count. Algorithmic gambling systems use data to make lightning speed calculations. While these systems promise to minimise the role of human error in predicting the outcomes of single events such as horse races, the relationship between inputs and outputs remains subject to the vagaries of programmers and users. While individuals with advanced mathematical skills, such as former blackjack card counter Bill Benter (Chellel, 2018), professional gambler Zeljko Ranogajec (McClymont, 2018), and his former business partner Australian gambler and arts entrepreneur David Walsh (Joyce, 2013), have amassed fortunes by programming effective systems of prediction, they caution online gamblers against trying to replicate their success. Algorithmic betting requires large teams of mathematical experts and computer scientists working around the clock to generate profits. Individuals and companies that develop and own these systems often receive large discounts on bulk betting trade and their resources are deep enough to purchase most of the available lottery tickets in some markets. The profoundly asymmetrical field on which commercial organizations and private individuals compete has not prevented the development of systems for sale for ordinary gamblers. For example, GoalProfit, a football trading community platform, features reviews of numerous betting systems on the market (https://review.goalprofits.com/). Norwegian company Trademate is a product developed by a team of online gamblers and computer scientists, marketed as “an entry-level value betting tool” available for individuals who pay a subscription. Their pitch is seductive: We love sports, challenges and winning. Finding value is what we are all about whether it is in sports markets or getting a discount at the supermarket. We get that it doesn’t always makes sense why we would sell such a thing if it works as good as we are claiming. The problem with sports trading and exploiting value on the European bookmakers is that they will eventually limit anyone who wins over time. This has happened to all of us, so one way to look at it is that through providing this service to you we are able to get back the at the bookies and at the same time indirectly

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getting a cut of the profits through our subscription fee. Or in other words it’s a win-win. (Trademate Sports, n.d.) Here, ordinary punters are offered an algorithmic edge to compete with the “big boys” by placing bets that are supercharged with added information and intelligence. Like the Netflix recommendation algorithm, these systems use knowledge about consumers’ betting history to make customized suggestions about the most enjoyable games and type of bets for individual players (Nott, 2018). While systems previously provided gamblers with neutral (if deceptive or ineffective) tools to improve their chances of winning, they now analyze the gambler’s record to nudge them towards choices that seem compatible with their previously recorded skill level. These new gambling systems are part of broader social transformations theorized by scholars of finance and new media who emphasize the cultural and economic work of media platforms. For Langley and Leyshon, “the neologism of ‘platform capitalism’ foregrounds the holding together of the infrastructural and intermediary qualities of the platform” (2017, p. 19). As they explain, The platform mobilize[s] the infrastructures of participation that are immanent to the new digital economic circulation . . . Contrary to the meanings that might be implied by the metaphor of “infrastructure,” however, platforms are not utilities or conduits that simply channel circulations. Platforms actively induce, produce and programme circulations. (Langley & Leyshon, 2017, p. 19) Gambling companies use media platforms for the recruitment of armies of online poker players who “grind” millions of hands for miniscule gains as well to deploy “poker bots” that can defeat human players. And these platforms are changing what it means to gamble. Albarrán-Torres (2018) explains how digital interfaces allow for “the expansion of [gambling] consumption beyond the bet” (p. 121). He writes, Gamble-play media are multiplatform, convergent media where gamblers bet, converse and sustain a public presence. These activities become practice, routinised behaviours. In online casinos, shiny lights and alluring characters invite gamblers to partake in a game and take a shortcut to financial plenitude but also to engage in continuous, possibly lifelong consumption. (p. 121) By reproducing the aesthetics and functionality of social media feeds through which many people play and communicate in everyday life, gamble-play media are attracting and sustaining new markets for gambling products.

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In addition to systems for predicting outcomes of aleatory games and wagering based on calculation of variables linked to the likely performance of a horse and jockey on a race track under given conditions on a particular day are systems which straddle the borders of gambling, work, finance, and play. One example of this is the genre of financial self-help literature, which offers seductive promises to conflate finance with Fortuna. Later in this chapter I will discuss the marketing of Robert Kiyosaki’s (2000) popular Rich Dad/Poor Dad system which promotes leveraging and property investment as paths to fiscal liberation. We will see how gambling is used by Kiyosaki as a metaphor for individuals who find the courage to abandon dreams of financial security through wage-earning and small business ownership and embark on a journey to financial independence. Values of leisure and play within this journey are emphasized in his board game titled “Cashflow,” designed to teach individuals how to maximize our wealth-producing potential in everyday life.

Transforming Gambling Products: The Rise of the Electronic Gambling Machine For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gambling products remained relatively simple and distinctive at the level of aesthetics, design, and play. In the past decade, however, the distinctiveness of gambling’s iconography, material culture, and spaces has been progressively eroded by EGMs. These have morphed into products more like video games and Hollywood film and television shows, with surround sound and dedicated consoles made to accommodate fans of popular entertainment brands. The rise of “quality television,” combined with the ubiquity of “celebrity culture,” (McCabe & Akass, 2007; Bonner, 2011; Turner, 2013) has driven the transformation of casino floors into a marketplace of competing media brands, creating new synergies between previously distinct entertainment sectors. EGMs that adapt blockbuster television hits, such as Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, address consumers in the first instance as fans; gambling design features are supported by the strong connection to visual and audio cues from the shows—including memorable scenes and sound bites delivered by actors. Prior to playing the machines, consumers are already joined as lovers of the television and cinema brands, which form part of their everyday exchanges with friends, workmates, and family members. The language used to promote and review these television shows celebrates their “addictive” powers, arguably immunizing consumers against awareness of the risks to financial health when these entertainment brands are redeployed as gambling products. Manufacturers are also experimenting with new ergonomic features such as enormous screens with bench seats, where friends and couples can sit together and play, as though they were watching a film or television show. Celebrities have been used to sell gambling since Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the “rat pack” were installed as regular Las Vegas entertainers. As a partner in the film production company RatPac Entertainment, which

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finances movies for Warner Bros, James Packer pursued a vision of an integrated Hollywood gaming experience, using his Macau and Australian casinos as locations for blockbusters and signing up movie, sports, and music celebrities as “ambassadors” to promote his ventures, including exclusive VIP events planned for his new Barangaroo casino (Lehmann, 2013). A clear example of the value of celebrity for gambling industries is the Ellen slot machine with which I opened this chapter. Ellen DeGeneres embodies many of the values of celebrity culture; she harnesses her persona as a brand that can be diversified to generate multiple revenue streams, including gambling. From stand-up comedian, to creator of a failed sitcom with explicitly lesbian themes, to host of a daytime talk show, DeGeneres has become one of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in Hollywood. The production and sustenance of intimacy is a key component of celebrity culture in a social media age, and Ellen excels in this, using a popular Twitter account through which she informs her audience about her daily life. As feminist media scholar Jennifer Reed argues, part of Ellen’s appeal lies in the performance of an entertaining loveable lesbian who embraces the values and lifestyles of a heteronormative audience of male and female viewers of daytime television. One of the ways Ellen does this is through presenting extravagant gifts to audience members to recognize their daily struggles and celebrate their ordinariness (Reed, 2005). The Ellen EGM machine evokes and capitalizes on this “fairy godmother” function. Already joined as members of a massive global audience for the celebrity, players are enjoined through various design features of the game to “make themselves at home” within a product which literally surrounds them. If viewers watching the Ellen show at home are entertained and given hope that they might one day be recipients of celebrity gifts, viewers playing the Ellen machine are involved in a very different kind of transaction. Rather than promising recognition from the star, the celebrity value of Ellen, in its EGM adaptation, seems to underscore the anonymity and disposability of players. As a sector of the global economy characterized by continual innovation, EGMs are designed to simultaneously sustain and intensify profit from existing players, while creating new markets in jurisdictions where strong regulations do not yet exist. The transformation of gambling products over half a century is mirrored in the evolution of EGM company Aristocrat, founded by one of the wealthiest people in Australia, Australian entrepreneur Len Ainsworth. After a prototype was created by an employee in his father’s dental equipment manufacturing business in the mid-1950s, Aristocrat went on to supply the clubs of New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. “One-armed bandits” were legalized in that state, partly due to the difficulties of policing illegal gambling, and they rapidly became a popular form of entertainment in sporting and social clubs. Tourist buses carried thousands of people over the border to gamble on these machines through to the early 1990s when legalization occurred in adjacent states and territories. As a company with products in

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most Australian jurisdictions, Aristocrat products generate considerable taxation revenue for state and territory governments. Increasing profits saw Aristocrat floated on the stock exchange in 1996, and in 2007, Ainsworth established a new company to compete with its products called Ainsworth Game Technology. While Aristocrat continued to dominate the Australian market, its success grew with aggressive investment into other frugally regulated national markets. The global scope of the enterprise is evident, with production for export of gaming machines now outstripping that for domestic markets (Durkin, 2015). As it has expanded globally, Aristocrat has become a major employer of graduates with training in computer science, psychology, and creative industries. The company also requires game designers and artists who are sensitive to nuances of cultural meaning. For example, CEO Jamie Odell explained, Many Asian people love gambling, but the great games there look and feel like Asian games: the graphics, the language, even the sounds. Lucky dragons are common themes in Macau and Chinese character symbols like “good fortune.” What didn’t work for us was trying to take an Australian or American game, say Outback Jack with kangaroos and Ayers Rock, and stick that into Asia. (quoted in Kelly, 2013) Drawing on the iconography of popular culture within the jurisdictions of their licenses allows EGMs to appear as harmless entertainment within the everyday lives of their consumers. Corporations’ access to “planet Hollywood” (Olsen, 1999), together with localized iconography, provides an efficient way to reach consumers as citizens in an era of global casino resort entertainment. Recent moves into the arena of social gaming highlight the company’s role in blurring distinctions between finance, gambling, and play. Aristocrat purchased the online platform Product Madness in 2012 to expand its scope into casino games and slots played with virtual currency. And five years later, it purchased the social gaming company Big Fish—creator of social casino, social gaming, and premium-paid games—to make it the world’s second largest social casino platform (Aristocrat, 2017). The case study of Aristocrat shows that EGMs embody commercial and cultural powers, extending far beyond game design and manufacture. Intellectual property (IP)—licensed and original—is a core component of gambling businesses today. There is significant scope for large gambling corporations in possession of substantial mathematical, legal, and design capacities to extend their activities into broader processes of IP creation and licensing. As Odell recently predicted, his company is likely to ultimately shift focus from gambling provision: “it will be an ideas company” (quoted in Williams, 2015). My final chapter will explore the implications of this statement for the way that EGMs are classified and regulated by governments.

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Online Wagering Platforms The intimate relationship between EGMs and algorithmic media platforms which rely on data analytics has radically transformed our experience and understanding of even the most “agonistic” forms of gambling. And this raises some important questions about human and non-human agency in emerging gambling forms. When poker players must run data analytics on each opponent who, in turn, has access to data about every game that we have played, what does the gambling experience consist of? Who or what is joined in gambling action? Who or what is enjoined? Where is the joy? The interactive capacity of computers, tablets, and mobile phones enables online gaming consumers to bet on all kinds of events, from elections to global stock market movements. How does gambling transform the values we attach to events as participants and spectators? In many jurisdictions, gambling has become one more form of media interactivity—an exciting way to participate in live screen spectacles watched by millions worldwide. Sociological research on videogaming over the past two decades has seen a shift away from a focus on subcultures of consumption to considering gamers as users of media platforms where they labour (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019). This is also true of sports gambling. We will recall the marketing for online sports gambling through my earlier discussion of Leo Burnett’s Freaked_Out advertisement. If the consumer in search of convenient wagering options during his leisure was the focus of early online sports gambling advertisements, current marketing presents gambling as a kind of labour within primarily male communities in which wagering is joined to the broader experience of sports spectatorship. The rise of sports betting in deregulated markets such as Australia and the UK is due, at least in part, to the stimulation of demand by effective genderbased marketing undertaken by large brands such as Sportsbet, William Hill, Betfair, and Bet365. These brands produce expensive advertisements for broadcast media during televised sporting coverage as well as on screens located at large sporting events, designed to be spread virally through social media networks. As we have seen in previous examples, humour is the dominant mode of address to a target market of young male sports fans. Gambling brands embed wagering in everyday sociality while disavowing the serious consequences of gambling as a regular cultural practice. Playing for laughs, these advertisements supplement the message that “boys will be boys” with scenarios suggesting that gambling is “just a bit of fun.” Even uncontrolled or addictive gambling is reduced to humorous manifestations of a “shaky” and “stressed out” mate who is being cared for by the latest responsible gambling app. Unsurprisingly, the promotion and ease of betting, in conjunction with the availability of credit that is sometimes provided by or in partnership with gambling platforms, is never addressed as a problem in itself. Gambling was advertised in 95 percent of advertisements shown on broadcasts of live football in 2017 in the UK (Reed, 2017). In that country, the

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majority of problem gamblers are men who watch twice as much football over their lifetime as women (Hemmings, 2018). Raymen and Smith describe the rise of “lifestyle betting” among men targeted through sports betting promotion in the UK: From debit cards, to contactless payment, to Apple Pay mechanisms . . . [debt] can be acquired by simply tapping in numbers to a phone—the stake of a bet decided by sliding one’s thumb up and down a screen . . . In combination with payday loans, overdrafts and other forms of credit that our participants utilise regularly, we can see the relationship between the gambler and money becoming distorted . . . For the men at the centre of this research, the gambling transaction becomes more than a matter of winning or losing, but provides access to a temporary form of ontological security through the group dynamic reflected in advertising campaigns. (Raymen & Smith, 2017, pp. 15–16) As with the example of pokie lounge discussed in chapter 2, online sports betting has become a powerful joining force, offering belonging to imagined communities of fellow punters, as well as strengthening bonds within existing friendship groups. As with online poker, sports betting has created problems in the everyday lives of individuals who can find themselves in serious financial difficulties or stuck in a routine of “grinding” a basic income by betting on platforms against increasingly sophisticated commercial products. Whether joined by a gendered sense of peer pressure or enjoined by addictively designed interfaces, such players are more like the raw resources from which EGMs extract profits than masters of their finopolitical destinies. As gambling shifts from a subcultural practice and occasional leisure activity to become part of everyday media practices, it provokes new questions among consumers such as, What kind of gambling products do I prefer? What is my gambling style? Am I satisfied with just trying to pick a winner or am I someone who prefers more “exotic” choices? Should I be concerned about the exposure of my children to gambling through their participation and spectatorship of televised sports? How can corruption be avoided when professional sport is bankrolled by gambling industries? Most online gambling platforms offer “specials” to encourage bargain hunting and access to credit lines. Financial Counselling Australia reported on “the provision of unregulated credit” involving amounts between 200 and tens of thousands of dollars to consumers of online wagering operators. Credit often appears as a service extended by a gambling provider rather than an aspect of a very risky product. FCA found, moreover, that personal details of consumers who self-excluded from one operator were being passed onto other operators who then lured them with new credit offers. Several reforms were suggested, ranging from banning operators from extending credit to the creation of a national self-exclusion register. However, the FCA report noted that the service of upholding consumer’s decisions to

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self-exclude is unlikely to be effective if businesses work together to maximize revenue that can be extracted from each individual (Financial Counselling Australia, 2015). Having pointed to issues experienced by online wagering, I don’t want to deny the unique satisfactions that it provides for some very savvy consumers. Below are reflections from John, whom I interviewed as part of my social research. An enthusiastic sports bettor as well as an employee of a large financial institution, he describes his exploitation of “specials” offered by different online providers during Rugby League season as “arbitrage”: I think I’ve got about 11 accounts. A lot of them are with the same thing, so your William Hill, it owns Tom Waterhouse, Williams Hills, Centrebet, it’s the same thing they’re just different front ends. Of late I’ve managed to get a few of them where—[my player] actually went and scored first thankfully so you get some good money . . . You can hit that stuff pretty hard and I think I put about $500 through each game. The absolute worst that could have happened . . . to me was to be down $50, which I can live with . . . So to play them off against each other—say something like you’ve got two teams playing each other, one of them is $1.50 as a favourite, the other one might be $2.70 or something like that. One provider might go, we’ll offer the favourite at $2.50 and a maximum bet of $50. So you just go—say that’s on the William Hills—put $50 on every one of them and you know that you’ve got $150 at $2.50 so whatever happens you could get up a certain amount there. Then you just go and look elsewhere and you could go, alright the underdog might have been paid $2.50 or $2.70 so then you go alright who do I actually reckon is going to win? Do I reckon the favourite is going to win? Then base your bets off they should win but I’ll just put enough on so that if they do screw it up I’ll get my $150 back. Or you could just round it up and go look I’m not sure, I’ll put more on so no matter what happens I’ll make X profit, which usually gets smaller and smaller. Or you could do it the other way and go well I think the underdog is going to win so I know I’ve got the favourite covering but I’m going to hit the opposite hard. You just always base it on worst case so you come out where you started, break even. Middle ground would be you make the same profit regardless but it’s usually pretty boring. You’d be like regardless of what happens in this game I’m going to make $20. Cool I’m going to take that now and put $10 each on two first try scorers at 21 to 1 and hopefully one gets up. (Interviewee M, 2015) I asked him how he understood the relationship between his sports betting hobby and his day job for a large financial institution: The work I do there’s obviously a lot of numbers, a lot of modelling, a lot of optimising things if you know what I mean, just certain traits of

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Cultural Products of Gambling things. Like getting best bang for buck for example, or the best [return on investment] or spreading resources the best, it’s the highest priority . . . [Sportsbetting] is not foreign, it’s not like if I was a labourer and then I jump on and try to crunch numbers about that. I work in numbers all day. A lot of my other hobbies like your fantasy football, super coach type things, much the same. Again it’s looking for angles, buy low, sell high, plan things out, and try to get the best bang for buck, stuff like that. Playing the percentages on things, that sort of stuff. Calculated risks. So yeah it’s—for me it’s . . . the same skillset, same interest. It’s just that, I just go in there looking to make sure I’ve kind of got—I don’t know, my insurance or making sure I feel I’m getting a good angle out of a deal. Everyone wants to be on the winning side of a deal. I just try to make sure . . . I’ve got some insurance or got some upside like that. Just one of those things, if something unlikely happens to come off then it comes off big. (Interviewee M, 2015)

However, John found that bargain shopping among wagering companies was discouraged when consumers are too successful in playing the specials against one another: Interestingly I actually went to put a promo on [unclear] origin two and they offered Queensland at $2 or whatever and I had $20 so I just put $20 on them anyway and it wouldn’t let me do it. It wouldn’t let me do it for one of the other NRL games, so I called them up and said it wouldn’t let me do it and they said my account had been barred. I said what’s going on there? I sussed out that maybe I’ve been hitting the promos the too much. They went and checked it out and they said, yeah that’s our mistake, we shouldn’t have done that so we’ll lift it, you’re alright to go. So, then I had a chat with them for a bit and I said so what’s the thinking around that? They said the bookies won’t tell them why specifically, I thought yeah whatever. But they just say look if an account is getting used almost exclusively on promotions then they’ll stop the access to promotions. But even within the promotions—they kind of view them differently. (Interviewee M, 2015) He discussed his frustration when the expiry date to reuse credit from his successful bets passed. In the midst of a busy life as a father, worker, and part-time student, there were occasions where his winnings were forfeited because he didn’t collect in time. In order to make savvy decisions about his bets, John studied the terms and conditions statements of each provider very carefully and wasn’t reluctant to call companies when they failed to follow through on these. In many ways, John seemed to approach online betting as one more financial product in the market rather than as a practice that was distinct from everyday business and leisure. Gambling was engaging and fun only to

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the extent that there was a good possibility of financial return, but his primary focus remained on his job, wife, and family.

Gaming or Gambling? Capitalizing on Play I am at a social gathering and spend a few hours in conversation with the son of the host who has just completed a certificate in gaming design. He is doing quite well, receiving contracts to design games for large global corporations and hoping to be able to string enough work together to make a livelihood until establishing his own business. I ask him about recent controversies surrounding loot boxes and about how he views connections between gaming and gambling more generally. His response is passionate. He HATES gambling. He knows that graduates of his course may find employment designing gambling products and this upsets him. I ask what he has been taught about EGMs during his course. He is equally passionate in defending gambling as a legal form of entertainment in Australia; he understands that individuals are free to consume EGMs to the point of their self-destruction and that the only solution is for them to gamble more responsibly. I present some arguments by public health advocates which point to the challenges of gambling responsibly on EGMs, but he is not interested. I realize he is bored and irritated with the direction of our conversation. He understands and enjoys gaming as a creative process and wants to show me what he has achieved using artificial reality and virtual reality technologies. I agree, hoping I will not become too nauseous to appreciate his work. After fitting me with an AR headset and giving me instructions on its use, he reveals several virtual objects he has placed around the living room. I am impressed and slightly unsettled. Next, we move to the VR headset; in the crowded space of his study, amidst discarded soft drink containers and posters, he creates a landscape which unfolds before me in real time. This is an experience I will never forget. I begin to understand his distaste for adaptations of game design for gambling purposes. I recognize a joy in digital game creation in a young man that, for this moment at least, is evading capture by the powers of commercial gambling industries. New hybrid digital games are reconfiguring the sporting events around which gambling has traditionally been organized. Most notable of these are fantasy sports betting (including daily versions) and eSports. Fantasy sports betting involves choosing an ideal team within real salary caps based on actual sporting fixtures; the daily versions focus on specific contests which players pay to enter. eSports involves betting on large multi-player videogame tournaments such as League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Counter Strike. These competitions join players from all over the world through dedicated videogaming broadcasting platforms such as Twitch TV, and they raise some unique questions for regulation. These competitions reflect a growing intimacy of gambling and videogaming in products designed for play and leisure as well as the ability to generate income from the labour of play. Viewed from the perspective of the past three decades, the entanglement of gaming and gambling we are witnessing today seems highly novel. It is easy to forget that early gambling machines and video arcade games developed at

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the same time and share many design features and mechanics (Smith & Abt, 1984, p. 130). And the immensely popular game of Pachinko in Japan continues to share features of pinball. Until very recently, many of these Pachinko machines were supplied by the Australian EGM manufacturer Aristocrat. The Japanese company Konami produces EGMs for casinos, as well as video games for arcades and individual consumers. Gaming and gambling products often share aesthetic features, reward reinforcement schedules, competition structures (whether with the house or other players), near-miss ratios, and illusions of player control (Harrigan, Collins, Dixon, & Fugelsang, 2010). There is also a significant exchange of information, technologies, and personnel between gambling and gaming industries. On one level, this can be accurately understood as an example of what Henry Jenkins describes as “convergence culture” (2006). However, Rebecca Cassidy’s research on social gaming developers and online gambling executives suggests that important cultural distinctions persist. She found that apps developed for social gamers were more likely to offer expansionary spaces of self-development and collaboration, with world-making and fun rather than winning and financial gain as the primary focus. She concludes, “The encounter between social gaming and gambling is framed by social and organizational differences [and] profoundly different understandings of player motivation” (2013, p. 82). Albarrán-Torres’ (2018) concept of “digital gamble-play media” also registers a tension between gambling as traditionally associated with exploitative adult entertainment, greed, and vice and gaming’s connotations of creativity, childhood, and wonder (Albarrán-Torres, 2018, p. 1). Digital gamble-play media leverage platform capitalism’s success in monetizing new forms of entertainment across a spectrum of target markets, from games designed to entertain toddlers to those designed to keep Alzheimer’s at bay. The business model for social games and gambling is one where research and development is often crowd-sourced; players are offered free play in the process of “beta testing” games, but “in-game” purchases are often required to progress once these games are commercialized. Many of the issues related to the intimate but fraught relationship between gambling and gaming explored earlier are highlighted in debates surrounding the release of a Hollywood blockbuster film and the accompanying video game. Video games based on Star Wars have been released by different companies since the late 1970s. However, the 2016 title The Last Jedi was the first where gambling was both prominent within the narrative and problematized by audiences, experts, and media commentators. To save their resistance movement, two members of the Rebel Alliance journey to find a lock-breaker in Canto Bight, a city that looks like Monaco. One of the characters explains the depravity (arms trading, child slavery, animal cruelty) that the city is built on to her companion who is momentarily bewitched by the glamour. Comedic moments include a small furry character representing a slot addict. Depicted as obsessed with the machines, he scrambles after spilled coins, even when

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the casino establishment is being destroyed by rampaging animals and raucous fight scenes (Abrams & Johnson, 2017). The casino planet of Canto Bight was described by Pablo Hidalgo, the head of Lucasfilm Story Group, as a way to explore: some people who have managed to carve out a life for themselves where they can live apart from the galactic struggle. They found a way to live above it or beyond it. There’s a class of wealthy that have helped build all sorts of loopholes in society that will always ensure that they’ll survive or even thrive no matter what else is happening out there. (quoted in Robinson, 2017) Rian Johnson, screenwriter and director, told Vanity Fair magazine that he wanted to introduce a new type of environment within the series: a Star Wars Monte Carlo–type environment, a little James Bond-ish, a little To Catch a Thief . . . It was an interesting challenge, portraying luxury and wealth in this universe . . . I was thinking, O.K., let’s go ultraglamour. Let’s create a playground, basically, for rich assholes. (quoted in Kamp, 2017) Canto Bight also provided a way for the director to balance the heavy themes of aging, death, and betrayal explored by this chapter in the Star Wars franchise: “I’ve tried really hard to . . . keep the humor in there, to maintain the feeling, amid all the heavy operatic moments, that you’re on a fun ride” (quoted in Kamp, 2017). Special effects, exotic costumes, and sci-fi morphologies are used to create “a fun ride” through the environment softening the film’s critique of social elitism and corporate corruption to resonate with audiences concerned about the “1 percent” of citizens with whom wealth is concentrated globally. Related tensions were registered in social, print, and broadcast media responses to Star Wars Battlefront 2, the video game released prior to the film (Park, 2017). One issue was that the main characters of the story were “locked,” requiring a lot of work and credits from consumers to release into the gameplay. A related issue was the use of loot boxes to extract payments from players for resources to advance in the game. While loot boxes are an established part of the economy of videogame production where micropayments are used to pay for the labour of creating and maintaining complex interactive digital platforms with millions of subscribers, there were concerns that the joy of play itself was being corrupted (Horti, 2017). Electronic Arts, the game’s developer, experienced a deluge of complaints so serious that the company’s share price fell. As one player complained, we have to work at it like it’s a full-time job to unlock one hero. Let alone all of the others we want to unlock whilst completely ignoring progressing

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Another player felt the loot boxes were exclusionary: “This type of stuff is not targeted at the average gamer. This type of stuff is targeted at the non-average, the ‘whales’” (quoted in Hester, 2017). Here the language of gambling is used, evoking the language of online sites where professional players go “fishing” for the “whales”—big spenders and big losers—who generate the majority of revenue. This feeling, that corporate drives for profit were penetrating the enjoyment of average gamers and creating unnecessary expense and labour for them, underscores gamers’ determination to maintain cultural distinctions between gambling and gaming products.

Figure 4.1 Advertisement for Storm Financial investment product, Brisbane, 2005 Source: Photograph by author.

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As these distinctions become harder to make with the monetization of online videogaming, we see a constant discussion on players’ forums about where the lines dividing labour, gambling, and play are and should be drawn. This can be seen in a selection of threads where players discuss the comparative merits of computerized and human selection of opponents in competitions that offer monetary prizes to winners of the immensely popular game Angry Birds. Following complaints about having their opponents chosen algorithmically, the designers allowed players to use in-game items called “gems” to pay for the choice of whom they played. One player who chose his opponent wrote, This has actually helped me with the current Super Streak weekend. I wouldn’t normally consider spending gems like this, especially not during a normal arena streak, but having the chance to face an opponent of lower flock power (eg to reduce a ridiculously large gap) it’s been useful. I haven’t seen it give me an opponent of higher FP yet though . . . 15 gems isn’t so bad. If it were something like 60 or more, I certainly wouldn’t. (Angry Birds 2 Forum, 2018) Another gamer was less sanguine: “The real question is: why should we have to pay extra gems to try to be matched with a more fair opponent? It feels a little like extortion” (Angry Birds 2 Forum, 2018). This everyday exchange on a gaming discussion forum raises the question of where the boundary lies between games that you can make money from playing and gambling. What is the difference between making purchases within online social games to compete in competitions and buying chips from a casino dealer to place on the table?

Gambling on Financial Products In 2005, I was presented with a brochure by an employee of a pop-up stall in a shopping mall in Brisbane inviting me to invest with a company called Storm Financial. This beautifully produced brochure encouraged would-be investors to open themselves to the blessings of fortune without regard for risks of exposure to global market fluctuations. I was urged to simply allow good fortune to “rain down” on me. The terms of Storm’s appeal evoke the concept of mana used to embody “cultures of chance” in Lears’ cultural history of luck in America as “a first principle of potentiality, it is suffused with hope and foreboding. It is luck made material, palpable, and accessible” (2003, p. 26). Several years later, I discovered that this business sold financial products to mostly older Australians, a significant number of whom invested their life savings and were devastated when the global financial crisis hit and confounded expectations of continued growth in credit and housing markets. In conjunction with conflicted and poor advice provided by participating financial institutions, the company placed its investors in the eye of a perfectly terrible Storm. I read media stories of parents so

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impoverished that they have had to live out their retirement years in the homes of their adult children. While Maynard Keynes saw stock markets as engines of liberal economic development, his endorsement of them was as qualified as his endorsement of a national lottery. An active and (mostly) successful investor throughout his life, he reflected on the excesses of Wall Street, “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprises. [But] When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done” (Keynes cited in Clarke, 2009, p. 155). Expanding intersections between gambling and finance have created problems as individuals are given responsibility by financial institutions and retirement funds for making more active investment decisions. Many of our everyday investment decisions exhibit what Wai Mun Fong (2014) calls the “lottery mindset,” characterized by overconfidence, sensation seeking, and a willingness to gamble. Fong found that this mindset is more common among young men than women and older men (2014, p. 9; see also Arthur, Delfabbro, & Williams, 2015). Systems for investing can be no less risky than those designed to pick horses or predict lottery success. While ordinary citizens are enjoined to step up and become active investors, the reality is that failure in stock markets is much more common than success. A feature article in Australia’s daily broadsheet the Australian Financial Review offered some light-hearted advice in an article titled “How to Turn Yourself Into a Real Share Trader”: Successful traders .  .  . know that there are some ways to make money that are based on playing the probabilities. Everyone knows that a casino cannot lose, because the odds are set in its favour. A good trader [finds] something that works more often than it doesn’t. If they then apply risk management and discipline, they can exploit the odds. This is not unlike a gambler compared with an insurer. Gamblers have a method which they hope will predict the outcome of a bet. Insurers employ actuaries to calculate the odds of certain outcomes and give you a price for assuming the risk. The gamblers think like a losing trader. The insurers think like a winning trader. (Nicholson, 2006, pp. 42–43) Underscoring the professional skills required for success, the article presents a humorous list of “seven ways to lose money trading.” These include trade for the excitement, learn on the job, trade for the freedom, believe you were born to trade, bet big to win big, believe you can’t go broke taking a profit, and don’t take advice. We see here how the figure of the poor investor both parallels and shadows the figure of the problem gambler. It has become unremarkable for financial institutions to extend playful invitations to participate in offers that we would not otherwise consider as banking. For example, after I repay the balance outstanding on my credit card,

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my online banking application presents me with the following offer along with the receipt: “Apply and fund a Personal Loan by 31 March to enter the draw to win back your loan amount. Apply now.” Invited to “borrow to play,” this meta-communication cues me to participate in a game of chance auspiced by my bank. My bank also encourages me to be an active investor by providing an investment simulator. I can practice my trading skills using data from the previous day’s stock market trading. This gamification of financial literacy is arguably a gateway to stock market gambling. As Poon argues, Through the common application of algorithmic technology to betting, borrowing, and investing, the line is once again becoming blurry. There is, however, one important difference in the way each is being revamped by digital systems. In casinos, there is central control over the odds, and randomization is fixed in each digital product installed on the floor by game manufacturers. Things are significantly more complicated in distributed financial markets where numerous proprietary algorithms and products are contingently intertwined. (Poon, 2014, p. 521) Governance becomes more frugal when individuals can be recruited to actively participate in processes which determine our “creditworthiness.” However, considerable labour is required to secure financial “leverage” in everyday life (Allon, 2015). There are many products available to assist us with this task. For example, Credit Karma enables consumers to access our credit scores to assess and enhance our financial reputations (AAP, 2014). In addition to making individuals the subject of our own surveillance, this and other DIY credit rating apps remove some of the costs of due diligence that would otherwise fall upon financial institutions. The fragile membrane separating gambling and finance is illustrated in several popular cultural narratives that depict the unpredictability and velocity of finance in a digital age through metaphors of gambling and play. An example is the “eye of storm” perspective on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) depicted in Margin Call (2011), which focuses on the moments just before decisive action will be taken by individuals to precipitate enormous upheaval in the global economy. These characters are “masters of the universe,” not by virtue of the perfect knowledge provided by pricing signals, but because of their grasp of the blind spots that constitute knowledge of markets and their instincts about when to get out of the “game” (Jenckes et al., 2011). While Margin Call focuses on the imprecise art of timing a defensive exit from the market, Money Monster explores the imprecise line separating algorithmic from human agencies in financial events (Di Fiore, Kouf, Linden, & Foster, 2016). A white male protagonist (played by George Clooney) is a finance television presenter whose market predictions feature entertaining iconography and glitzy performances, featuring gambling animations and hyper-masculine choreography. He is taken hostage by a young white working-class man who has

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lost his small family inheritance in a stock believed to have suddenly plunged in value due to a “glitch” in the algorithm. His captor demands to know the truth. It falls to the show’s director (played by Julia Roberts) to guide the host through negotiations with the young man and determine what actually caused the value of his stocks to fall. It transpires that the “glitch” was not caused by an algorithm but by an ethical union leader in South Africa who refused to be bribed as part of a stock manipulation strategy devised by the CEO. While it is easy to believe that no individual is responsible for casualties that occur in the apparently “post-human” landscape of late capitalism, Money Monster suggests that human glitches like “ethics” can bring the machine to an entire halt, at least for a time. The discovery of “human fingerprints” behind price movements is the dramatic conclusion of the narrative and one that is provocative for arguments in this book. Investment analyst and former Bank of England economist Dan Davies argues that global financial markets are based on implicit and often unwarranted trust in institutions and social elites adhering to regulations (2018b). Professional auditing does not always guarantee oversight, and it is incredibly complicated to bring cases of fraud to legal trial. Such trials are long and difficult because so many liars are involved and .  .  . it takes time and evidence to establish that they are lying. This state of affairs is actually quite uncommon in the criminal justice system. Most trials only have a couple of liars in the witness box, and the question is a simple one of whether the accused did it or not. In a fraud trial, rather than denying responsibility for the actions involved, the defendant is often insisting that no crime was committed at all, that there is an innocent interpretation for everything. (Davies, 2018a) As a corollary, every successful fraud case potentially subjects the reputation of the financial industry as a whole to unwelcome scrutiny; this can have an impact on investors and markets more generally. While “confidence” is a necessary trait for actors across the networks that support the financial system, there are many situations—either due to incompetence or fraud—that demand performances which can be accurately characterized as “bluffing.” I will extend this discussion of financial products with reference to participant observations below. Several years ago, I was contacted via a Facebook advertisement with an invitation to a free seminar by Robert Kiyosaki to be held in a Canadian city. We were asked to arrive half an hour early at the Holiday Inn where the event was held to register and collect the free gift promised by the promotion. It was a harsh winter evening of well-below-zero temperatures. I noted that attendees were a diverse group, both in terms of ethnicity and gender. About one third were white Canadians; Caribbean, South Asian, and Indian Canadians were also well represented. We settled into our seats while inspirational music and quotes by celebrities, including Michael Jordan

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and different Wall Street personalities, were projected on a screen at the front of the room. This was followed by legal disclaimers. A short video featuring Kiyosaki and titled “Unfair Advantage” was then shown. It used slot machines as a visual device to introduce the credits. A voice over by Kiyosaki reminded the audience that “the rich will get richer and the poor and the middle class? Boom!” This latter point was emphasized with a short black-and-white video of a nuclear explosion. We were enjoined to “take responsibility for your own financial life” and told that the problem is not capitalism, the problem is “people who take more than they give,” and that “ignorance is the problem.” After the video, our presenter told us to turn our phones on silent and not to record or take photographs of slides in the presentation. We were also told to leave our questions to the very end so that she could explain the system clearly and without interruption. Our presenter asked whether anyone was disappointed to discover that Kiyosaki himself was not in the room; a few hands were raised. She proceeded to explain her qualifications to stand in his place, as a member of an elite group of followers of the Rich Dad/Poor Dad system. We learned that she hailed from the town where the seminar was being held and had recently been in Tuscany looking at properties and checking out some vineyards. She had been raised in a working-class family afflicted by divorce and illness, leaving her without family assistance to study at university. This did not prevent her from going on to study; she worked several menial jobs to support herself through a degree, during which time she discovered the power of Rich Dad to take “the blinders off that society puts on us.” She proudly claimed that she had only been fired once in her life, and that was as a contestant on Donald Trump’s Apprentice reality TV show. She then sought the audience’s agreement that the seminar should remain a “politics free zone.” So why did our presenter become an international investor in real estate? Because the majority of global wealth is generated through this resource. The value of Kiyosaki’s property investment system is “increased knowledge equals decreased risk.” She asked people in the room, “How many people like being surrounded by like-minded people?” Nearly every hand was raised. She then asked what holds people back from reaching their potential, and one very well-dressed and nervous looking woman sitting in the front row said, “fear of failure.” The presenter promised that this common fear would be addressed during the presentation. She went on to explain that “TIME is more important than money. Because it brings enjoyment of what you have” (emphasis added). The path to financial freedom is “owning your life.” If you are serious about financial freedom, you will put the work in. After acknowledging that “safety is important,” she enjoined us to acknowledge that “I am 100% responsible for the creation of my financial future and my personal destiny.” She then asked if there were any Tony Robbins fans in the audience. Several hands went up. She recalled how she participated in the motivational speaker’s famous exercise of walking over hot coals. While it needed a leap of faith to take the first step, once you are feeling the pain you are motivated to run out of there. By this time in the presentation, I had become aware that the older white man behind me had memorized much of the Kiyosaki doctrine and was citing it at places whenever the presenter emphasized certain points. The gathering felt a little like a church

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congregation. The presenter asked how many people had been fired or knew those who had. Many hands were raised, and we were cautioned, “There is no employment security today.” Our financial freedom needed to be driven by a detailed dream. Examples of this detailed dream included “Flying first class or even a private jet.” The presenter went on to emphasize the importance of “paying it forwards” by being able to help others. However, she was clear that generosity should not be without conditions. “We should teach others to fish rather than giving them a handout.” She then proceeded to explain that we should all have an “emotional why,” as this would make us more likely to succeed. Statistics were cited in evidence: 71% of people who inherit money go broke, as do many professional athletes who earned million-dollar salaries. The more we earn the more our lifestyle expectations increase: “But why use your own money when you can use someone else’s money to work while you are sleeping?” A projection of Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad quadrant formed the backdrop to her explanation of why property investment is the most reliable path to wealth. She elaborated, “Everyone starts on the left side of the quadrant [as an employee or self-employed]. Some stay there because they are negative and problem oriented, but there are solutions if you have courage. The secret is to focus not on ‘how much will this cost me?’ but ‘how much will this make me’? Time is the value that distinguishes the two groups in the quadrant. What you are getting versus what you are paying for. According to this criterion, she explained, formal education doesn’t deliver. It prepares you for the left side. To get a job.” And, to knowing laughter in the room, she pointed out that “Job is an acronym for Just Over Broke.” She explained that for our retirement we would need between one and two million dollars. And she told us not to forget that our pension funds also invest into real estate. They invest OUR money to make money. The presenter then confided that our local real estate market was one of the best in Canada. However, to benefit from this, we needed to be active investors at home and in other markets. She explained that depending on property appreciation was not a reliable strategy since markets go up and down. We therefore need to make money from the day that we buy. She claimed that Canada was considered the second-best property market (after the UK) in the world because of the relative stability of its law and currency. Because of this stability, she explained, Canadian property is preferred for hedging. After asking how many people in the room had a real estate license and seeing a few raised hands, she explained that the difference between licensed real estate professionals and investors is that the latter focus on returns. She then showed a picture of one of the properties she had recently purchased in the city. As the presentation drew to a close, she quoted from popular finance guru Suze Orman, “It is better to do nothing with your money than something you don’t understand.” Hence the importance of following the Kiyosaki system: “it is there to protect us.” The next step in our journey to financial freedom would be a three-day course for $697 provided by Elite Legacy education and we were encouraged to bring a friend for free! We were then given a taste of the content to be provided in the course. We would learn about different types of investment possibilities. These included distressed real estate, seller financing, and using retirement funds to invest through “creative finance.”

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After this, it was time to remind us that “There are two kinds of people. Those who believe in excuses and those who believe in solutions.” We were clearly in the latter group, because out of 182 who signed up for the seminar, only 80 made it through the bad weather to attend. Then we learned about three keys to wealth— opportunity, knowledge, and action. On cue, she held up a special prize of Kiyosaki resources and merchandise and said the first person to come to the front and grab it could keep it. The well-dressed, nervous woman ran to the front and nearly knocked the presenter over to take the prize. This triggered predictable jokes about national character, with the winner clearly not being a typically reserved and polite Canadian. Other prizes were given for the second and third people to run to the front of the room, and we were treated to final snippets of advice. “Real estate investors don’t pay tax on mortgages (unlike owner-occupiers)” and “the largest tax deductions are depreciation.” We were reminded that our accountants and legal team should always work together. And that nothing should be in our own names—that way we would avoid inheritance taxes. Then came the big sell. We were invited once again to join the 1 percent and enjoy a life like the presenter. We were exhorted to be self-made people and to remember that fear is temporary and regret is forever. As we left our seats, we were told that if we wanted to attend the course but couldn’t afford it, we should speak to staff at the back of the room. “Financing is available” for those who are committed to make an investment in themselves. But we should ACT NOW! There was a final invitation to join the ranks of successful investors embodied by the presenter. As most of us left the room without signing up for the course, we were enjoined to accept the consequences of our bad choices. The workshop would give us the tools to become someone who works hard, “pays it forward” by helping others to help themselves, and who makes the good choices that allow cash to flow. Reflecting on this presentation by a former Apprentice contestant, it is irresistible to reflect on the cross-promotional alliance between Kiyosaki and Donald Trump. Two years prior to the GFC, their joint book titled Why We Want You to Be Rich (Trump, Kiyosaki, McIver, & Lechter, 2006) called on readers to grasp their financial autonomy in the “frontier” environment of deregulated finance that directly preceded and arguably precipitated the crisis. Its cover features photographs of both entrepreneurs over a banner: “Two Men: One Message.” That message is the duty of ordinary Americans to join the ranks of the global 1 percent, through leveraging property and development opportunities. It is easy to see the appeal of their invitation. We are constantly being enjoined to transform ourselves and our property into valuable assets. In this context, cultural theorist of finance Fiona Allon notes, the multiple ways in which ordinary households have been increasingly exhorted to operate as everyday investors and to perform their own kinds of “calculative agencies” .  .  . [The] contemporary consumer-citizen has been enjoined, indeed is now required, to invest in their lives through asset-based wealth accumulation that necessarily depends on some kind of debt leverage. (2015, p. 689)

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By using debt to make our assets and money work for us, rather than us working for them, Trump and Kiyosaki promise political and economic freedom as the birthright of every American (or, in the case of the workshop above, Canadian) citizen. But only if we are willing to bet on ourselves. After two decades of deregulated gambling, a global financial crisis, and the ascent of Donald Trump to President of the United States, it is interesting to consider reflections by Abt and McGurrin at the beginning of the gambling boom: There is something wrong with a culture that lauds individual greed; makes an icon out of Donald Trump and his monument to exorbitance, the tacky Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City . . . [and] promotes extravagant expectations for personal happiness and hedonism; offers the promise of immediate gratification, the satisfaction of every impulse . . . Such a culture does not create the sustained interest or commitment necessary for the survival of self-governing adults in a democracy. (1991, p. 661) The salience of these concerns has become clearer with the passage of time.

Conclusion This chapter’s exploration of the marketplace for commodified chance addressed how gambling products are related to and distinguished from those of finance and play, and how “free” social gambling apps and gambling features within video games are unsettling borders between gambling and gaming. It also investigated how Hollywood entertainment brands and media platforms are changing the way that gambling products and services are developed, marketed, and used. I examined the innovation of gambling systems as well broader transformations of media which shape the platforms we use to trade, consume, work, and play. My final chapter will take stock of the relationship between gambling and governance in liberal democratic states. After a discussion of problem gamblers’ testimonies, I will explore the constitutional fragility of states where Indigenous sovereignty struggles continue and highlight the limitations of the neoliberal theories of humanity and economy through which white possessive (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) interests are rationalized and reproduced. This will embed debates about gambling regulation within deeper challenges of sustainability, which require urgent address.

References AAP. (2014, March 13). Google invests $100 million in Credit Karma. News.com.au. Retrieved from www.news.com.au/finance/business/google-invests-100-million-incredit-karma/news-story/7527018bf5ef9e10da2598c2cc9f8dfe Abrams, J. J. (Producer), & Johnson, R. (Director). (2017). Star wars: The last Jedi [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, USA.

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Abt, V., & McGurrin, M. C. (1991). The politics of problem gambling: Issues in the professionalization of addiction counseling. In W. R. Eadington & J. A. Cornelius (Eds.), Gambling and public policy: International perspectives (pp. 657–670). Reno: University of Nevada, Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gambling. Albarrán-Torres, C. (2018). Digital gambling: Theorizing gamble-play media. New York, NY: Routledge. Allon, F. (2015). Everyday leverage, or leveraging the everyday. Cultural Studies, 29, 687–706. doi:10.1080/09502386.2015.1017140 Angry Birds 2 Forum. (2018). What do you think about changes to the arena? Angry Birds Nest. Retrieved from www.angrybirdsnest.com/forums/topic/what-doyou-think-about-the-changes-to-the-arena/ Aristocrat. (2017, November 30). Aristocrat announces strategic acquisition of social gaming company Big Fish for US$990 million [Press release]. Retrieved from http://member.afraccess.com/media?id=CMN://2A1052602&filename=20171130/ ALL_01928306.pdf Arthur, J. N., Delfabbro, P., & Williams, R. J. (2015). Is there a relationship between participation in gambling activities and participation in high-risk stock trading? Journal of Gambling Business & Economics, 9(3), 34–54. Blossom. (2013). Risk/reward. In A. Zable (Ed.), From ruin to recovery: Gamblers share their stories (pp. 51–53). Melbourne: MonashLink. Retrieved from www.monash link.org.au Bonner, F. (2011). Personality presenters: Television’s intermediaries with viewers. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Cassidy, R. (2013). Partial convergence: Social gaming and real-money gambling. In R. Cassidy, A. Pisac, & C. Loussouarn (Eds.), Qualitative research in gambling: Exploring the production and consumption of risk (pp. 74–91). New York: Routledge. Chellel, K. (2018, May 3). The gambler who cracked the horse-racing code. Bloomberg Business Week. Retrieved from www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/ the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code Clarke, P. (2009). Keynes: The rise, fall, and return of the 20th century’s most influential economist. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Davies, D. (2018a, June 28). How to get away with financial fraud. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/28/how-to-get-away-withfinancial-fraud Davies, D. (2018b). Lying for money: How fraud makes the world go round. London, UK: Profile Books. Di Fiore, A., Kouf, J., Linden, J. (Producers), & Foster, J. (Director). (2016). Money monster [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, USA: TriStar Pictures. Dostoevsky, F. (1966). The gambler. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1866). Durkin, P. (2015, May 8). CEOS who deliver 2015: Len Ainsworth, the 91-year-old entrepreneur making his own luck. Australian Financial Review. Retrieved from www. afr.com/brand/boss/ceos-who-deliver-2015-len-ainsworth-the-91yearold-entre preneur-making-his-own-luck-20150507–1mow7i Fagone, J. (2016, January 3). Jerry and Marge go large. Huffpost. Retrieved from https:// highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/ Financial Counselling Australia. (2015). Duds, mugs and the A-list: The impact of uncontrolled sports betting. Financial Counselling Australia. Retrieved from www. financialcounsellingaustralia.org.au/

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Fong, W. (2014). The lottery mindset: Investors, gambling and the stock market. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrigan, K. A., Collins, K., Dixon, M. J., & Fugelsang, J. (2010). Addictive gameplay: What casual game designers can learn from slot machine research. Future Play 2010: Research, Play, Share: International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology, Vancouver, Canada, May 6–7, pp. 127–133. Hemmings, C. (2018, February 13). Why are most problem gamblers men? BBC News. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/uk-43002380 Hester, B. (2017, November 13). Reddit eviscerates EA’s latest defense of Star Wars unlockables. Rolling Stone Magazine. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/ web/20171223104336/www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/ea-takes-to-reddit-todefend-star-wars-battlefront-2-hero-unlocks-w511618 Horti, S. (2017, December 21). How the loot box controversy shaped gaming in 2017. PCGamer. Retrieved from www.pcgamer.com/how-the-loot-box-controversyshaped-gaming-in-2017/ Jenckes, J., Barnum, R. O., Moosa, C., Benaroya, M., Dodson, N., & Quinto, Z. (Producers), & Chandor, J. C. (Director). (2011). Margin call [Motion picture]. Los Angeles, USA: Lionsgate & Roadside Attractions. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. Johnson, M. R., & Woodcock, J. (2019). “It’s like the gold rush”: The lives and careers of professional video game streamers on Twitch.tv. Information, Communication & Society, 22(3), 336–351. Joyce, C. (2013, December 14). David Walsh’s wisdom beats the odds. Australian Financial Review. Retrieved from www.afr.com/opinion/columns/david-walshswisdom-beats-the-odds-20131213-ij8gn Kamp, D. (2017, May 24). Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the definitive preview. Vanity Fair. Retrieved from www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/star-wars-the-last-jedicover-portfolio Kelly, R. (2013, August 25). Aristocrat leisure hopes its bets pay off: Australian slot-machine maker’s CEO Jamie Odell discusses the next growth phase and how the company is harnessing the popularity of social media. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323665504579028420 024314700 Kholer, A. (2012, September 26). Financial bets belong under the gambling act. The Drum, ABC News. Retrieved from www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-26/kohlerfinancial-bets-belong-under-the-gambling-act/4281318 Kiyosaki, R. (2000). Rich Dad/Poor Dad: What the rich teach their kids about money that the poor and middle-class do not. New York: Warner Books. Langley, P., & Leyshon, A. (2017). Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation. Finance and society, 3(1), 11–31. Lears, J. (2003). Something for nothing: Luck in America. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Lehmann, J. (2013, November 11). James Packer reveals $60 million arts gift for Sydney as Barry O’Farrell gives Crown’s Barangaroo casino the final nod. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved from www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/james-packer-reveals-60-millionarts-gift-for-sydney-as-barry-ofarrell-gives-crowns-barangaroo-casino-the-final-nod/ news-story/36546311f329aeb180e6530cd1fef9ef McCabe, J., & Akass, K. (Eds.). (2007). Quality TV: Contemporary American television and beyond. London: I B Tauris.

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McClymont, K. (2018, May 17). Meet the Joker: The Australian who is the biggest gambler in the world. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from www.smh.com.au/ national/meet-the-joker-the-australian-who-is-the-biggest-gambler-in-the-world20180515-p4zfhi.html Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mukerjee, R., & Weiser, S. B. (2012). Commodity activism: Cultural resistance in neoliberal times. New York, NY: New York University Press. Murnane, G. (2015). Something for the pain: A memoir of the turf. Melbourne, Vic: Text Publishing. Nicholson, C. (2006, December 22–26). How to turn yourself into a real share trader. The Weekend Australian Financial Review, pp. 42–43. Nott, G. (2018, March 6). Rambo and the machine learning models helping Sportsbet up its games: Recommendations on ’roids and a Google beater give gambling giant winning edge. CIO. Retrieved from www.cio.com.au/article/634268/ rambo-machine-learning-models-helping-sportsbet-up-its-games/ Olsen, S. R. (1999). Hollywood planet: Global media and the competitive advantage of narrative transparency. New York: Routledge. Park, G. (2017, November 18). How a Star Wars video game faced charges that it was promoting gambling. Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/ news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/11/18/how-a-star-wars-video-game-faced-charges-that-itwas-promoting-gambling/?utm_term=.f6219e25e081 Poon, M. (2014). For financial certainty, try machine gambling. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(4), 516–523. Priest, L. (2009). What to do when your best customers have a problem. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved from www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/what-to-dowhen-your-best-customers-have-a-problem/article1203509/ Raymen, T., & Smith, O. (2017). Lifestyle gambling, indebtedness and anxiety: A deviant leisure perspective. Journal of Consumer Culture. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/1469540517736559 Reed, J. [ Jennifer]. (2005). Ellen DeGeneres: Public lesbian number one. Feminist Media Studies, 5, 23–30. Reed, J. [ Jim]. (2017, October 23). Gambling adverts “in 95% of TV matches”. BBC News. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/business-41693866 Reith, G. (1999). The age of chance: Gambling in western culture. London, UK: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2017, Summer). Last Jedi photos: Which secrets are revealed? Vanity Fair. Retrieved from www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/star-wars-the-last-jedisecrets-revealed Smith, J., & Abt, V. (1984). Gambling as play. The ANNALS of the American Academic of Political and Social Science, 474(1), 122–132. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0002716284474001011 Stempel, J. (2017, July 3). Tolkien estate, Warner Bros. settle “Hobbit” lawsuit. Reuters. Retrieved from www.reuters.com/article/us-time-warner-tolkien-hobbit/ tolkien-estate-warner-bros-settle-hobbit-lawsuit-idUSKBN19O26E Trademate Sports. (n.d.). About us. Retrieved from https://tradematesports.com/ about-us Trump, D. J., Kiyosaki, R. T., McIver, M., & Lechter, S. (2006). Why we want you to be rich: Two men, one message. Australia: Rich Press. Turner, G. (2013). Understanding celebrity. London, UK: Sage.

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Wilkinson, M. (Reporter), & Everett, D. (Director). (2013). The big gamble [Television series episode]. In S. Spencer (Executive Producer), Four Corners. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved from www.abc.net.au/4corners/the-big-gamble/ 4702664 Williams, P. (2015, June 26). Aristocrat Leisure’s best bet: Chief executive Jamie Odell. The Australian Financial Review. Retrieved from www.afr.com/business/gambling/ aristocrat-20150618-ghqy70 Young, M., & Markham, F. (2017). Coercive commodities and the political economy of involuntary consumption: The case of the gambling industries. Environment and Planning A, 49, 2762–2779.

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Introduction The previous chapters addressed a broad research question: How are spaces, moments, and products of everyday life currently formed by gambling? This chapter address some of the most intractable questions posed by gambling industries and the states which depend on them. Does the reliance of governments on gambling industries for revenue preclude ethical regulation of gambling products, spaces, moments, and practices? How has the figure of the “problem gambler” inhibited the development of alternative research paradigms and methods to those elaborated under the guise of “responsible gambling”? What are some of the grounds from which criticism of gambling’s seepage into everyday life have been articulated? After an introduction to key issues facing regulation in neoliberal societies, I examine how gamblers and activists have used testimony to challenge a psy-scientific focus on the individual subject of problem gambling and to highlight some of the damaging effects of commercial gambling industries. Five closely related case studies support my arguments in this chapter. The first rehearses debates over the legal status of EGMs and, specifically, whether it is correct to describe them as gambling products. The second explores testimonies provided by individuals harmed by their consumption of EGMs. The third examines campaigns against EGMs in local communities and the fourth links political arguments about neoliberalism and democracy to constitutional issues in settler-colonial nations. The final part of the chapter considers the role of researchers in sustaining and challenging current configurations of legal gambling.

Transforming Architectures of Regulation In this and subsequent sections, I will examine details of the political contract that makes gambling (along with other legal vices) a resource of enjoyment for both individuals and states. Before proceeding, it is important to qualify the claims that will be made in this chapter. It is impossible to do justice to the innumerable and often idiosyncratic forms of regulation

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that have been developed to govern gambling in jurisdictions all over the world. Different balances are struck between state and private investment and control and between more or less emphasis on responsible gambling and the rights of consumers. The entanglement of global, national, and sub-national organizations in gambling further complicates investigation of gambling regulation. When we consider gambling in everyday life, an individual may be engaging with multiple jurisdictions, using online casinos, betting on off-shore competitions, or consuming products delivered by Indigenous nations in North America. And businesses may be delivering products and services to citizens of jurisdictions where gambling is banned. Given the impossibility of addressing unique issues to each jurisdiction, the focus of this chapter is restricted to the values that guide gambling regulation in liberal democratic societies and their connection to wider questions, including social justice struggles and research ethics. As Ramp and Badgley argue: Gambling and responses to it, past and present allow a glimpse into struggles over what new versions of governance the social compact, and citizenship—as cultural and moral projects, as administrative and consumerist strategies, as frames of identity, or as a mixture of the three—will emerge in an era in which globalized, electronic commerce, rapid social transformation and the normalization of risk form the everyday matrix of postmodern social experience. (2009, pp. 42–43) To understand the dilemmas facing gamblers and governors in everyday life at this juncture, we need to understand how constitutions facilitate and limit the generation and flow of capital to projects and populations within and between nation states. Let us return for a moment to the contrast between liberal visions of gambling regulation respectively expressed by the Mills and J. M. Keynes at the beginning of this book. For the former, gambling, like prostitution and alcohol provision, was an evil attending individual liberty, and the best that could be done to ameliorate damage was to restrict its availability and impose taxes as a disincentive to consumers and a boon to government coffers (Mill, 1974, p. 112). In contrast, following a period of tightened restrictions on gambling from the late Victorian era, Keynes sought to persuade legislators of the benefits of introducing a lottery. He imagined it as a weekly event which joined members of the nation in a pleasant ritual of hope. Today gambling has been liberated in many countries, and industry providers and governments are the main beneficiaries of its growth. The freedom given to gambling industries to flourish and expand has had a profound impact on the rhetoric and practice of politics in many jurisdictions. The Mills’ notion of an implicit social contract between legal vice industries and government

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 195 is echoed several generations later by remarks attributed to Australian gambling entrepreneur James Packer in 2012: The total taxes we paid last year to the three levels of government— federal, state, and municipal—was well over double our net profit, after tax.  .  . . The government is doing very well being the silent majority partner of our company. (Guthrie, 2012, p. 21) In addition to liberal political philosophy, we need to consider the social influence of behavioural psychology from the 1970s to understand persistent dilemmas for gambling’s government today. One of the most important behavioural scientists and theorists of regulation was B. F. Skinner, whose experiments on pigeons were formative for psy-scientific understandings of addiction. He used the example of government-run lotteries to support his arguments about how social control could be achieved through positive inducements rather than prohibitions. Such lotteries, he writes, exist in order to raise revenue to reduce taxes. The government takes the same amount of money from its citizens [as previously] though not necessarily from the same citizens. By running a lottery, it avoids certain unwanted consequences: people escape from heavy taxation by moving away or they counterattack by throwing a government which imposes new taxes out of office. A lottery, taking advantage of a stretched variable ratio of reinforcement has neither of these effects. The only opposition comes from those who in general oppose gambling enterprises and who are themselves seldom gamblers. (Skinner, 1971, p. 43) It is not difficult to see the compatibility of this view with arguments of theorists linked to the Chicago School discussed in previous chapters, from Hayek’s political philosophy of markets and Csikszentmihalyi’s positive psychology to Richard Thaler’s more recent behavioural economics. If the bulk of peer-reviewed academic literature on gambling focuses on problem gambling, this is because many of the answers to questions raised by gambling’s governance are taken as already settled; the value of frugal government and a model of the virtuous individual figured as an autonomous, entrepreneurial, and responsible subject are often assumed from the outset of research investigations. As we saw in chapter 1, this consensus is refracted in various ways in the sphere of popular culture, from titillating stories reporting the excessive gambling consumption of global elites (including organized crime figures), to aspirational stories of ordinary individuals rising to poker stardom, to journalistic exposés of problem gamblers who play on, notwithstanding enjoinments in venues and websites to “gamble responsibly.”

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Legal theorist Lawrence Lessig (1998) reflects on the Chicago School’s influence on the theory and practice of regulation, both past and present. He argues that the first generation of classical neoliberal theorists discarded constitutional values, reducing the role of the state to a guarantor of legal decisions aimed to facilitate free trade. As with Skinner, cited earlier, Lessig is especially attentive to the architecture of regulation: I mean by “architecture” the world as I find it, understanding that as I find it, much of this world has been made. That I cannot see through walls is a constraint on my ability to snoop. That I cannot read your mind is a constraint on my ability to know whether you are telling me the truth. That I cannot lift large objects is a constraint on my ability to steal. That it takes 24 hours to drive to the closest abortion clinic is a constraint on a woman’s ability to have an abortion. That there is a highway or train tracks separating this neighborhood from that is a constraint on citizens to integrate. These features of the world—whether made, or found—restrict and enable in a way that directs or affects behavior. They are features of this world’s architecture, and they, in this sense, regulate. (Lessig, 1998, p. 663) Lessig argues that architecture should be seen as one among four modalities of regulation, together with law, markets, and social norms. The most important questions today are not whether there should be regulation but about the legal and constitutional status of direct and indirect regulation. For example, “It might be impossible directly to order the architecture of cyberspace in one way, but might nonetheless be possible, through a mix of direct and indirect regulation, to achieve the same end indirectly” (Lessig, 1998, p. 676). In this context, he argues that the aim of the second generation of Chicago theorists: is not only to understand the ways in which alternatives to law regulate, but to understand how law might be used to make selections among these alternatives .  .  . Our constitution was written with direct regulation in mind . . . But what then of a world where most regulation is indirect? How are constitutional values preserved there? [The] most developed aspects of constitutional law are in the context of direct regulation by law and less in the context of indirect regulation. Yet an increasing proportion of “regulation” is regulation through these other means. And if a constraint effected directly through law would be unconstitutional, we need a better understanding of whether that same constraint, effected indirectly through the market, norms, or architecture, should also be reckoned as unconstitutional. (Lessig, 1998, p. 688) Gambling’s “statey” qualities as a source of indirect, regressive taxation and beneficiary of various legal exemptions make these constitutional

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 197 questions particularly important. For whether laws take the direct form of total prohibition or the indirect form of enjoinments to gamble responsibly and to provide responsible service, the architecture of gambling regulation should—in theory at least—express the will of the people within a given jurisdiction. Applied to gambling in everyday life, the constitutional dilemmas posed by indirect regulation can be understood with reference to the “enjoinment” I have discussed in previous chapters. And the regulatory role of architecture can be understood in terms of specifically cultural aspects of this enjoinment. For example, in chapter 3 we saw how individuals occupying certain roles in the gendered workplaces of Australia are enjoined to participate in gambling moments; in chapter 2 we saw how “regulars” in the cultural space of the pokie lounge are enjoined to “gamble responsibly”; and in chapter 4 we saw how online sports bettors are enjoined to use responsible gambling features on their betting platforms to minimize their risk of losses. By modulating our behaviour in response to these enjoinments, individuals are rewarded with a sense of belonging to a “healthy” finopolitical community. While architectures of indirect regulation enable us to govern ourselves in everyday life as gamblers, they pose significant questions about the “powers of freedom” (Rose, 1999) that underpin liberal democratic rule (See also Fawcett, 2014). In particular, they raise the issue of whether freedom is possible if individuals are compelled to act (or refrain from acting) in conditions where the knowledge that would help us choose between possible alternatives is not only imperfect but also inaccessible to us. I will use the case study of EGMs in the next section to tease these issues out in more detail.

Are EGMs Gambling Products? By 2003, gambling machines were estimated by the American Gaming Association to generate over 85 percent of profits for casinos (Schull, 2012, p. 5), and they continue to occupy the vast majority of gambling real estate worldwide. This section investigates whether these products actually deliver gambling experiences and players. Is it accurate to describe the most popular casino game in three generations as a gambling product? And what would it mean to argue that it is not a gambling product? As we consider these questions, it is helpful to return to Goffman’s argument presented in the previous chapter about the role of gambling as social “action.” Schull notes the contempt with which early sociologists and anthropologists held gambling machines. Goffman (1967/2006) excluded them from his analysis of gambling as a theatre of social performance and risk management while Clifford Geertz, famous for his interpretation of gambling on Balinese cockfights, dismissed machine gambling as beneath the scope of sociological interest (Schull, 2012, pp. 10–11). That EGMs are of sociological interest is beyond dispute today, but whether they should be seen as devices that facilitate gambling remains an urgent question, since they are clearly connected to harms experienced both by individuals and communities. Later I consider the case for disaggregating

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EGMs from other gambling products and the implications of this for government regulation. As the most profitable gambling form for operators and for governments who benefit from their taxation as a form of legal vice, there is often significant resistance against proposals to reduce their intensity or numbers. For at least two decades, a vocal minority of scholars have been mounting persuasive critiques against the political and economic arguments used to justify the EGM industry. James Doughney dismisses the argument that EGMs are another product in the marketplace delivering social well-being through a “consumer surplus.” As an example of such arguments, he cites an industry consultant’s position that People use these machines because they derive benefits or pleasure from playing them. These benefits are in the form of the chance of a financial gain and the pleasure from the play itself, even if the player eventually loses. Their willingness to pay establishes the value that they put on enjoying an activity as opposed to what they actually had to pay to consume it. (ACIL Consulting submission to Victorian Casino and Gaming Authority quoted in Doughney, 2002, p. 143) Doughney argues that appeals to dated utilitarian theories cannot account for the consistent research finding that harms from EGMs are concentrated within a relatively small population of regular players and in venues often located in areas with the lowest socio-economic indicators. This leads him to argue against measuring their social benefit using Pareto optimization and demand curves to claim, instead, that “interpersonal comparisons of wellbeing” are needed to evaluate the impact of EGMs, since the loss of a specific dollar amount will have a dramatically different impact depending on the disposable income of a given player. He is also critical of industry representations of EGMs as “games of chance,” arguing, The house does not gamble because it bears no risk and sets its winnings by computer program. It is probably even wrong to call it gambling from the perspective of the individual user. An individual might win occasionally, but the longer any person puts money into the machines the more on average that person is programed to lose. This explains my preference for terms such as user over gambler or player. (Doughney, 2002, p. 37) These concerns reverberate in several lawsuits raising doubts about whether EGMs are appropriate delivery systems for gambling. Casinos have been charged of knowing that regular EGM players were addicts and of encouraging them to continue playing through free hospitality and other inducements.

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 199 The Atlantic reported on a US case titled the “Stevens lawsuit.” Stevens was a chief operating officer of an investment firm and an EGM addict who took his life in a meticulously planned and highly public manner. The lead attorney on the case acting for Stevens’ widow decided to include a products-liability claim . . . essentially arguing that slot-machines are knowingly designed to deceive players so that when they are used as intended, they cause harm. In focusing on the question of product liability, [Stevens’ lawyer] was borrowing from the rule book of early anti-tobacco litigation strategy, which, over the course of several decides and countless lawsuits, ultimately succeeded in getting courts to hold the industry liable for the damage it wrought on public health. (Rosengren, 2016, emphasis added) This case and others brought by affluent citizens or “pillars of the community” reveal a tension between psy-scientific and popular figurations of the problem gambler as an addicted “loser,” incapable of exercising responsible consumption, on one hand and a subset of players who have access to large funds precisely through a high social standing, anchored in professional qualifications and expertise in finance, on the other. While some harms related to EGMs afflict those with access to considerable funds through employer or personal wealth, others accrue to those with little income but who can be relied on to spend it regularly. The distinction between these groups is often effaced when the vulnerability of individuals to problem gambling needs to be demonstrated in law. Another line of legal argument recently tested in Australia and Canada relates to “deceptive,” “misleading,” or “unconscionable” features of EGM designs. A case heard in the Australian Federal Court argued that a casino and a gambling manufacturer had acted unconscionably by supplying a machine which gave misleading impressions to players about their likelihood of winning on certain virtual “reels” and that this was known by both parties to cause harm to those who had an existing EGM addiction (Guy v. Crown, 2016). A current class action in Canada alleges that video lottery terminals are inherently deceptive and violate the nation’s Criminal Code (MacDonald, 2018). As the EGM sector continues to innovate, issues will arise in consumer law about whether EGMs are an ordinary gambling product that adult consumers find “fit for purpose” or whether they are generators of harm—as Schull puts it—“by design” (2012). The proposition that EGMs aren’t simply devices for delivering chancebased gambling to consumers was advanced in my interview with former designer Stanley: I wonder about the nature of the randomness generated by the machines. In programming there is actually no way to generate a truly random number. What you are really looking for is a pseudo-random sequence that

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life appears random enough for a particular purpose . . . It is easy enough to generate a sequence of numbers that feels random but is entirely repeatable and predictable. A successful formula for randomness in pokies has to be predictable in terms of revenue but inscrutable to the public. [Gaming machines] are a closed system with encrypted rules that you are prohibited from learning. Not as a regulator, not as a coder, not as a marketer. This lack of transparency makes me wonder how effectively they really can be regulated. (Interviewee E, 2015)

These pseudo-random sequences make it impossible for consumers to understand the games well enough to ever develop optimal strategies of play. Behavioural economics brings a useful theoretical framework to bear on the question of whether EGMs are gambling products. Over the past three decades, researchers in this field have drawn on psychology and neuroscience to challenge the figure of homo economicus as the individual subject of rational decisions designed to maximize utility. Instead, they investigate the irrational basis of many of our economic decisions and explore their basis in predictable errors and systemic biases (Thaler, 2015, pp. 23–24). Their insights have been influential across a wide range of organizational contexts, from large corporations to public service and not-for-profit agencies. One of the most important of these has been Richard Thaler’s theory of “nudging.” Describing it as a kind of “libertarian paternalism,” Thaler explains that the premise of nudging is that in our increasingly complicated world people cannot be expected to have the expertise to make anything close to optimal decisions in all the domains in which they are forced to choose. But we all enjoy having the right to choose for ourselves, even if we sometimes make mistakes. Are there ways to make it easier for people to make what they will deem to be good decisions, both before and after the fact, without explicitly forcing anyone to do anything? (2015, p. 324, emphasis added) While acknowledging that nudging can be used for positive or destructive purposes, its main attraction has been the alternative that it poses to mandates or bans. Nudging exemplifies the neoliberal value of frugal government and underpins policies of “responsible gambling,” which aim to cultivate healthy behaviours in individual gamblers—in the first instance—and, failing this, to empower them to “self-exclude” from gambling premises and websites. Responsible gambling apps and features within gambling platforms use nudging to help consumers make beneficial decisions without the need for external, coercive, interventions. Nudging, however, is a two-way street. Schull notes the emphasis that EGM designers place on creating a “smooth” ride for players (2012, p. 130).

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 201 The “dark patterns” engineered into EGMs (Harrigan, Collins, Dixon, & Fugelsang, 2010) could be described as the accumulation of innumerable and imperceptible nudges. In this sense, they simulate the “libertarian paternalism” Thaler ascribes to nudging; informed choices do exist for players but they are powerfully muted by the gaming environment and the presentation of the “game.” Obvious examples include visual and audio cues signalling “near misses” and “losses disguised as wins.” Less obvious examples include making large jackpots only to players who make maximum bets but providing this information in tiny font between the screen and flashing jackpot signs, which are designed to attract and sustain the gaze. This is an example of the “take it or leave it” logic that betrays dark pattern designing, but it is more insidious because the logic is virtually hidden. When EGMs are considered in relation to nudging, we can identify an obvious tension that structures the enjoyment they produce. On one hand, players are joined to machines to extract maximum value. On the other hand, they are enjoined to extract themselves from machines and to play responsibly. The design features that EMG producers have developed and refined over the past three decades have become ubiquitous in aspects of our everyday lives that are intermediated by platforms. And this limits the power of consumer education to promote responsible engagement with these products. Stanley found employment as a disability support worker after leaving his job as an EGM designer. This afforded an opportunity to witness the devastating efficiency of his creations at separating those with acquired brain injuries from their money. However, it was not only those with cognitive deficits he found difficult to dissuade from excessive expenditure: It’s striking how hard it is to convince people that pokies are not games of chance but are strictly formulaic. I always tried to reinforce that there is really no way to “win.” The machines aren’t there for entertainment, they are there for revenue collection . . . Even saying “I know this because I made them” doesn’t seem to convince people. They just sort of roll their eyes knowingly and keep on playing. It’s infuriating. (Interviewee E, 2015) Schull’s fieldwork with machine addicts, designers, and executives in Las Vegas further demonstrates the limits of education as a strategy for promoting responsible consumption. One of her participants even trained and found employment as a gambling machine mechanic in the hope that this would lessen her obsession; the plan did not succeed. She remained obsessed with the mysterious and invisible computer chip that would determine machines’ outcomes (Schull, 2012, pp. 76–77). Interestingly, Schull’s research also found that designers, themselves, were not immune to the pull of the “machine zone.” As one told her, “I designed the math on these things but it doesn’t matter; I do risky, irrational things when I play. Knowing the odds doesn’t interfere with my playing. Somehow the knowledge becomes irrelevant when I sit down at

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the machine” (Schull, 2012, p. 98). This resistance of consumers to adapt their behaviours after being exposed to information about EGMs’ risks supports their characterization by Australian gambling researchers Martin Young and Francis Markham as coercive commodities “recognized by consumers themselves to be contrary to their own best interests, all things considered” (Young & Markham, 2017, p. 2762, emphasis added). As prototypes for other addictive algorithmic media platforms around which parents, educators, and governments have mobilized in response to problems, including bullying and suicide, privacy violations, and election manipulation, EGMs exemplify the values of “sticky” design. Stanley described his infuriation at The way that the sort of behaviouralism used to hook people into pokies has almost become “best practice” in online design . . . I find it . . . disturbing that we’ve all just unquestioningly welcomed the sort of algorithmic emotional manipulation employed in gaming machines into so many of our personal interactions online. It’s not hard to imagine Facebook as machine where users put in a valuable token of personal data to spin a wheel, and if they hit the jackpot everyone likes them. It’s like we are all uncaringly, or worse—excitedly—complicit in a widespread culture of social engineering. 50 years ago, when Pavlov rang his bell his dog salivated. Now when [Mark] Zuckerberg rings a bell 100 million people salivate on cue. (Interviewee E, 2015) EGM design principles are thoroughly integrated in what Ted Striphas describes as “algorithmic culture” (Striphas, 2015). The pervasiveness of machine learning in everyday processes of consumption, communication, and commerce is raising important questions about what it means to be human. In particular, they prompt us to consider whether humans can or should adapt our behaviours to meet the requirements of systems fuelled by artificial intelligence. These questions are exercising those at the cutting-edge of innovation in computer science. Some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures are on the public record as banning or strictly curtailing their children’s use of mobile devices and educating them in tech-free environments and practices such as Buddhism. Former Facebook president Sean Parker refers to “the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and . . . It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other . . . It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways .  .  . God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains” (Garfield, 2017). Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly prohibits his nephew from using online social networks and conceded that his products are not meant for constant use (Weller, 2018). The circuit that links EGMs to social media platforms is evident in the development by Facebook and Instagram of new settings for users described by

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 203 the company as a “time management” feature developed in collaboration with “leading mental health experts and organizations.” Titled “your time,” the new setting provides users with information about their daily use and alerts to prevent unhealthy use and “better control their experience.” Its aim is to make peoples’ time on the platform “intentional, positive, and inspiring.” In a press release, Facebook linked the new controls to the company’s commitment to suicide prevention as part of a larger collaboration with concerned user groups and academic researchers (Ranadive & Ginsberg, 2018). The effects of algorithmically enhanced connectivity in the workplace are a focus of productivity concerns due to “technostress.” According to specialist IT magazine CIO, Over time, technostress is increasingly related to compulsion. People now feel powerful anxiety when they’re not looking at their phones, fearing unseen important emails and work messages and a general sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) with the social networks .  .  . While connected, people compulsively check all the incoming communications streams and feel compelled to respond. Time seems to stop, and the work hours spent on compulsive messaging and social media is usually considered to take far less time than it actually does. By the end of the workday, employees are exhausted, feeling that they worked hard all day. But much of that fatigue is caused by the constant mental shifting from one communications medium to the next, and the anxiety and stress are caused by nonstop communication. (Elgan, 2018) If this sounds familiar from earlier descriptions of the zone of EGM play, it is. The cultural shift recommended by the author includes a combination of self- and externally imposed regulations, from bans on hand-held devices in meetings and on emails after hours to a “focus on constructing the workday to enable flow, or concentrated deep work” (Elgan, 2018). The power of addictive algorithms to nudge individuals towards platforms where they become stuck and unable to exercise meaningful choices is difficult to reconcile with gambling as a cultural practice where “action” is sought and enjoyed as decisions are made based on luck or skill. It is one thing to bet with the knowledge that the house edge, which makes gambling organizations profitable, will extract money from you over time, and another to be attached to a machine designed to “override” your capacity for decision-making. To put it another way: the choice to gamble on a device designed with the primary purpose of circumventing your power to choose may be enjoyable, but it would be difficult to recognize it as a form of social action. Claims that EGMs, like tobacco, when used as intended, produce harm (Doughney, 2007, p. 315) find further support in an Australian study by Michael Walker and colleagues (2004). The study used self-reports from 120 participants and were corroborated by records from the machines provided by

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Aristocrat. Its aim was to determine whether the inclusion of a “stage 2” phase of betting on EGMs was related to problem gambling. Stage 2 betting refers to a game within a game where consumers can choose to wager any winnings generated by the Stage 1 game. This is the only even-chance bet offered by the game—players can choose between two colours for double their money or pick a suit of cards to quadruple it. The researchers hypothesized that stage 2 would be most popular among frequent consumers as well as players who played for higher stakes. The basis of this hypothesis was that profit seeking, risk taking, and sensation seeking were characteristics of problematic gamblers and that the gamble button afforded greater opportunities to satisfy these motivations. It seemed logical that the more familiar people became with the games and the role of this button, the more they would use it. After all, The 50:50 gamble occurs frequently in many forms of gambling: the coin toss in two-up, doubling down in blackjack, the even money favourite in horse racing, black or red in roulette and so on. A case can be made that this particular bet is central to all gambling. Thus the gamble option, although specific to poker machine gambling is an example of a very general betting phenomenon. It follows that the gamble button is not a minor bet independent of all other forms of gambling but an example of a core aspect of all forms of gambling. (Walker et al., 2004, pp. 10–11) The researchers did not categorize players on a spectrum of problem gambling; instead, they used length of sessions and frequency of play as a proxy for relatively “light” or “heavy” gambling. They also included variables of gender, age, and tobacco and alcohol use. After analyzing self-reports and industry data on the use of the gamble button, the researchers’ hypothesis was unconfirmed. Rather than intensification of play leading to greater use of the gambling button, the most important finding was that 71 percent of the entire sample never used the gambling button. This finding resonates with Schull’s discovery that many EGM consumers describe their motivation as not to win money but rather to play “to extinction.” It also recalls her conversation with a casino operator who described his venue as “like a huge washing machine—you swirl “’em around in there and take their budget from them.” This operator explained to Schull that he was working on an EGM patent that would “progressively lower [players’] odds as their jackpots progressively grow,” noting that “technology is catching up to the gambler’s paranoia” (Schull, 2012, p. 293). Further evidence to support the argument that EGM operators and designers are not motivated by producing and consuming a gambling experience but by the profits generated by inducing an immersive state that is highly addictive comes from Crown Casino. The establishment was fined after whistle-blowing employees exposed the practice of meddling with the machines (ABC, 2017).

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 205 Buttons that provide players a range of choices about how much to invest in each “spin” of the virtual reels were replaced with blanks to nudge them to choose between the absolute minimum or the absolute maximum bet. Staff also provided consumers with small plastic picks to jam the machine so it would keep investing their cash even when they walked away to take a washroom or smoking break. The case of the rarely used “gamble” button, together with these examples of passive gambling and manipulation of the machines, raises pointed questions about whether EGMs are products of gambling or parasites on gambling spaces and moments. Is it possible to gamble without being present to oversee the “gambling device”? Is it possible to gamble with a device that is designed to bypass my capacity to make informed decisions? What would motivate organizations and their staff to alter a gambling device in order to restrict my choices? It is difficult to see how EGMs facilitate the conscious act of placing a bet or a wager on an uncertain outcome of a game against a house that retains a part of the proceeds to provide individuals with the amenity of legal gambling. In this context, James Cosgrave makes an important distinction between the consumption of risk and risky consumption: The discursive construction of gambling activity as a form of entertainment, leisure, or excitement presents gambling as the consumption of “safe” risk . . . Risky consumption, by contrast, is consumption whereby risk may be entailed, but as an unwanted feature . . . The representation of gambling as consumption of risk is then a feature of the socially constructed symbolic representation of gambling by those “stakeholders” who have market (revenue) interests in the gambling field. (Cosgrave, 2009, pp. 46–47) The case of the virtually overlooked gamble button provides an example of the consumption of risk within a device that is otherwise designed to promote risky consumption. And it highlights the roles of EGMs in exacerbating confusion between the consumption of risk and risky consumption. The evidence above suggests that EGMs may have less to do with gambling than they do with reconfiguring, or “conditioning,” humans in ways that can be thoroughly quantified and understood in terms of pre-cognitive states such as “fight or flight,” “dopamine-seeking,” and—indeed—“extinction.” These concerns were raised by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in problem gambling, which questioned the ascription of responsibility to EGM consumers in a recent Lancet correspondence: We allege that EGMs are intentionally designed with carefully constructed design elements (structural characteristics) that modify fundamental aspects of human decision-making and behaviours, such as classical and operant conditioning, cognitive biases, and dopamine signals . . . These design features might explain why, relative to other forms of gambling,

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life EGM use is linked to an accelerated trajectory to harmful gambling, including disordered gambling, and more of those harms. (Yucel, Carter, Harrigan, van Holst, & Livingstone, 2018, p. 20)

The capacity of EGMs to alter fundamental aspects of “human decisionmaking and behaviours” is also registered in Schull’s discussion of how some EGM addicts understand themselves in terms of behavioural psychology as “rat people” (Schull, 2012, pp. 104–105). This is supported by some of her industry sources who describe their casinos as “laboratories” (p. 293) as well as players’ understanding of themselves as finite resources being programmed to play to “extinction” (pp. 210–233). While Schull uses Freud’s concept of the death drive to explain players’ complicity with the lack of control that EGMs are designed to produce, I am concerned with their capacity to condition suicidal behaviour. When played regularly, as intended, EGMs create a perfect double bind: the choice to play and the choice to stop become impossibly entangled. Rather than players making a choice to finish with EGMs, there is significant evidence that EGMs finish with players only after they are spent, physically, financially, and socially. Self-disposal is what happens when everyday lives are captured within algorithmic spaces and moments until their finopolitical capacities are exhausted. Suicide statistics related to gambling are difficult to obtain because they are often collapsed into a broader cause of “financial stress.” Nonetheless, it is significant that the coroners’ statistics for deaths in an Australian state where EGM revenue increased exponentially after deregulation linked 68 of the 70 recorded gambling-related suicides to EGM users or their partners (Doughney, 2007). This tragic inversion of consumer sovereignty recalls Bauman’s argument that “problems of (human) waste and (human) waste disposal . . . saturate all the most important sectors of social life, tending to dominate life strategies and to color the most important life activities” (2004, p. 7). Unable to exercise responsible gambling and unwilling to burden their families and friends, individuals are arguably programmed by EGMs to “self-dispose.” This provides a context for understanding apocryphal stories about “suicide traps” and “private morgues” within Crown Casino related by McGuire (2014) in chapter 2. Having considered the psychological and neuroscientific knowledge on which EGM developers rely, together with the ubiquity of their “sticky” design principles, there is a strong case against their classification as a gambling product. The exceptionally destructive impacts of EGMs are obscured by the development of “responsible gambling” initiatives in jurisdictions where they dominate the sector. The industry has proven reluctant to accept responsibility for harms related to consumption of their products. Len Ainsworth, founder of Aristocrat and Ainsworth Gaming Technology, crystallized this in his reflections about whether his industry might bear some responsibility for harms associated with EGMs: “I’ll feel responsible for what individuals do when General Motors feel responsible for the accidents that some nut at the

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 207 wheel might have” (Ainsworth cited in triple j, 2017). This attribution of responsibility to individual gamblers is produced and supported by therapeutic discourses. It aligns perfectly, for example, with the view articulated by an addiction therapist cited by Natasha Schull: “Addiction is a problem of you governing your own life—not the government” (2006, p. 230). We can see the

Figure 5.1 Sticker on the floor of Crown Casino, Melbourne, 2018 Source: Photograph by author.

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enjoinment to personal responsibility displayed quite literally on the ground of Melbourne’s Crown Casino. The carpet on the gaming floor features several signs displaying the L symbol used for drivers’ learning permits, suggesting that new gamblers should prepare themselves to avoid experiencing harms from their play (see also Redshaw & Nicoll, 2010). The next section explores how gamblers, and those close to them, have intervened within debates about responsible consumption of EGMs.

Consumer Advocacy: Reading Gamblers’ Stories as Testimony This section turns to the voices of problem gamblers as a form of testimony in everyday life to which a growing number of researchers feel compelled to witness. My discussion is informed by the account of testimony offered by literary theorist Gillian Whitlock (2015). Drawing on research from law, anthropology, and literature, Whitlock argues that testimony is communication that marks the discursive threshold between human, animal, and thing. This is evident in the rise of “reparative aesthetics” in photography where the depiction of victims of natural disasters, war, and poverty functions culturally as a form of witnessing, as well as the popularity of literature that aims to foster empathy with the suffering of those who are otherwise invisible, including asylum seekers, child-soldiers, trafficked women, and the homeless. One of the most powerful effects of testimony is its creation of the awareness of others looking at you while you read or look, compelling you to adopt the role of a witness. Art and cultural industries often provide spaces for testimony to be shaped in a compelling way so that audiences are empowered to witness abuses of power. And they have provided one way for individuals to intervene within systems and institutions of gambling that perpetrate social injustice. Several arts projects have been developed in Australia focusing on harms related to EGMs using theatre, creative writing, and non-fiction (see Nicoll, 2011). One example is a volume of edited stories by people affected by gambling published in 2013 titled From Ruin to Recovery: Gamblers Share Their Stories. The editor describes the process: The authors in this anthology . . . have had the courage to enter into the world of their addiction and to recreate it in writing. They have dared bear witness to their painful descents into obsession. . . . In writing about their experiences, the participants became adept at bearing witness to their own actions .  .  . Despite being victims of the gambling industry, most .  .  . display a high degree of political savvy. They have come to understand how the gaming industry creates and feeds their addiction. . . . They reveal, in their diverse passions, their interest, and in their professions, that we are all susceptible to addiction. They take us beyond the

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 209 stereotypes. [Authors] include a nurse, an academic, a former public servant, a businesswoman, a book editor, retirees and students. (Zable, 2013, p. viii) The sense that the book’s contributors are providing testimony and inviting public witness is reinforced by a foreword from one of Australia’s most vocal critics of EGMs, Baptist minister and social justice advocate Tim Costello. He writes, I once heard a spokesperson for one of Australia’s major gambling lobbies say that in years in the industry he had only ever met one problem gambler. An extreme case, perhaps, but reflective of the state of denial that clouds our public conversation about gambling addiction. (Costello, cited in Zable, 2013, p. iii) We will see that, in addition to autobiographical reflections from those harmed by gambling, friends and parents provide an important source of testimony. Before proceeding, it is important to recognize that, in some contexts, testimony can exacerbate dehumanizing affects, including compassion fatigue, looking away, shame, and guilt. In Australia, for example, the testimony of asylum seekers who arrive after dangerous sea journeys is often discounted by politicians seeking to secure national borders and who speak of them as though they are reckless gamblers, staking everything on the chance of the reward of life in an affluent country. Describing people as “illegals” or “economic refugees” is used to contrast them with asylum seekers waiting patiently in UN camps on one hand and individuals who bring skills and capital to Australia on the other. This distinction between worthy and unworthy arrivals is used to justify the offshore detention of people (including children) in unsafe and inhumane camps. Condemned for staking a claim to enjoyment which is not deemed legitimately theirs, they are prohibited from joining the nation and enjoined to return to their nations of origin. Similarly, the testimonies of people harmed by gambling can be dismissed as the self-indulgent complaints of individuals who refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their bad choices. For this reason, the testimonies I present will not be made to “speak for themselves”; instead, I will link them to the difficult, if not intractable, problems of governance with which this chapter is concerned. In 2004, Phyllis Vineberg, a professional woman and mother, spoke to an international gathering of gambling researchers in Nova Scotia covered by major news sources in Canada and the United States about the burden that suicide related to EGM gambling imposes on families. She described her frustration with gambling researchers and governments: I have been advocating for change to .  .  . gambling policies since our son died by suicide 9 years ago resulting from the senseless expansion

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life of legalized gambling into our communities . . . This is not a journey I would have chosen for myself, but I am compelled to speak out against the exploitation of an uninformed public. I am compelled to speak out because our son and family could be any child and family in North America, and many other countries in the world today . . . At first in my shock and grief, I wanted to protect our son’s reputation and the reputation of our family. I [later] realized that his reputation and our family’s reputation did not need protecting. We did nothing wrong . . . My struggle has led me to the unfathomable realization that it is our own governments who are preying on their citizens—the young, the old, the weak and the vulnerable. My struggles led me to the unimaginable realization that a gambling machine can cause such hardship, that for thousands, suicide seems like the only way out. (Vineberg, cited in Jubinville, n.d.)

In spite of a large audience on site and on air, Vineberg’s testimony seemed to lack witnesses. She describes a growing realization that industry, government, and universities are complicit in the damage caused by EGMs: Soon after our son died, I asked a leading youth gambling researcher for some of the youth-related gambling studies he had completed. He suggested that I wouldn’t understand them. If something is too complicated to explain, perhaps it is also too complicated to be safe . . . Many scientists are trading off their values to reach an acceptable compromise. (Vineberg, cited in Jubinville, n.d.) To support her claim about the need for more careful and effective regulation of EGMs, Vineberg seems aware that more than testimony of the suffering of their victims is required. She proceeds to detail the economic costs of suicides to Canadian provinces: It is critical that gambling-related suicides and suicide attempts are tracked in every province in Canada. Several Canadian and U.S. studies have estimated the cost of a suicide death to range from $433,000 to $4,131,000 per individual depending on potential years of life lost, income level and effects on survivors. One study completed in New Brunswick estimated the average direct and indirect cost per suicide at $850,000. The estimated cost of attempted suicide ranges from $33,000 to $308,000 per individual depending on the hospital services and rehabilitation required and the family disruption and support required following the attempt. . . . The cost to society of gambling-related suicides and suicide attempts is staggering. (Vineberg, cited in Jubinville, n.d.) This appeal to economic self-interest reminds us of Foucault’s argument that “a principle and a method of rationalizing the exercise of government [is] the

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 211 internal rule of maximum economy” (Foucault, 2004, pp. 73–74). Its failure to gain greater traction, however, suggests that suicide is accepted as collateral damage of the enjoyment that industry, states, and researchers derive from “business as usual.” Suicides are perhaps understood as comparable to deaths caused by car accidents that Ainsworth described earlier as being caused by “some nut at the wheel.” Testifying to harms associated with EGMs is also the focus of a 2012 memoir published by Gisele Jubinville. A successful inventor and businesswoman with advanced accounting skills, she spent over a decade trying to extract herself from the allure of EGMs. She ultimately succeeded in this challenge, but not before losing over 400,000 dollars, jeopardizing her marriage, and almost attempting suicide. The memoir is a fascinating account of the author’s transformation from successful mother, wife, and businesswoman to a hopeless addict, enlightened former addict, whistle-blower, and advocate for justice. The book begins with an aphorism from celebrity lawyer Erin Brockovich and is dedicated to “all victims of EGMs, to the players of these machine who did not survive their addiction, and to their loved ones for having to deal with such a tragic loss” (Jubinville, 2012). She describes her first contact with EGMs during a period of financial and personal stress. A keen poker player who had never experienced gambling problems, she began to visit the casino alone and discovered the slots while waiting for a table to become available. Within a short period, she was losing the money intended for the poker game and chasing her mounting losses on the machines: I found that the [EGMs] provided more action, thrills and excitement. Like a vampire seducing its prey, the [EGMs] were, at first blush, sexy and alluring . . . In the beginning, I stuck to a budget, just as I had for all the years I played poker . . . Breaking the budget was the first sign I was moving towards addiction . . . [Soon] I fell into a morbid routine of waking up, making sure my house was clean, tying up loose ends bright and early, and then driving to the casino by 10 am. (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 26–27) In desperation, she decided to join Gamblers’ Anonymous. However, I couldn’t find what I was looking for . . . At one particular meeting, I decided to address my concerns. I asked [the group leader] if it was important to find out the reason why we became addicted. He answered, “The cause of our addiction is not important. What is important is admitting we are sick and that we have a disease which cannot be cured” . . . [GA also] made it very clear that if you are addicted to one form of gambling, you need to stay away from all other forms of gambling . . . This approach didn’t make sense to me . . . No other form of gambling was comparable to my experience with [EGMs]. (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 47–48)

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She decided to make her own investigations, beginning with the figures provided by her provincial government about the total revenue generated by EGMs in their annual report. She was confused by the sums which suggested that Albertans spent seven billion dollars, “5 billion more on [EGMs] than they did on groceries and beverages” (Jubinville, 2012, p. 64). During the time she was addicted to EGMs, Jubinville spent much effort trying to reconcile this figure with the government’s claim that 98 percent of EGM revenue was returned to players. She asked the government body which regulates gambling to send her the figures to help her understand the relationship between expenditure and player return. Eventually she was sent the totals for one year but could still not fathom the discrepancy between the much lower figure provided (around two billion) and the reported revenue of eight billion; “it had taken over a year of my persistent effort to collect information that should have been readily accessible to the public. The experience left me feeling dismissed, mistreated, and frustrated” (Jubinville, 2012, p. 75). It was only after collecting discarded records from EGM venues while she was gambling that she discovered that a new formula was used by the government to report revenue after 1999; “in the [previous] reporting method, the government makes a whopping 31% profit on their [EGMs]; whereas the second method shows they are only making a profit of 8%” (Jubinville, 2012, p. 89). She speculates that this was achieved by programming the machines to generate 3.5 times more prizes than cash inserted into the machines. However, the vast majority of these prizes were considerably lower than the amount staked on each game (or spin), and 8 percent was being deducted from each prize. She wondered, Could it be that the government isn’t showing the real profit percentage made from their machines, which has always been around 30% because they are concerned that its citizens would no longer so readily accept these machines in their community? . . . [This accounting method] can have devastating consequences because it doesn’t force the government to be accountable to the people regarding the actual profit percentage they make. They can program the machine to generate as many prizes as are needed to obtain the exact profit percentage they desire . . . And if someone questioned why their profit percentage is so high, as I did, they can chalk it up to player behavior. (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 94–95) This discovery generated a series of disturbing questions: Who had decided to keep this information from the people? . . . Did other people think this was as misleading or deceptive as I did? Would I, as a concerned [citizen] be heard and respected? (Jubinville, 2012, p. 96)

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 213 With these questions, she organized a face-to-face meeting with senior public servants to share her discoveries. As she faced the head of finance, the manager of electronic gaming, and the communications manager, she felt a wave of self-doubt: The addict in me stepped in and I felt reluctant to speak up. I thought, Who are you to ask these important people for their time? How can you possibly demand answers from these experts? Who are you to question them? What if you’re wrong? . . . They say it is you who doesn’t understand. Maybe they are right. Do you even know what you are doing? (Jubinville, 2012, p. 99) Notwithstanding these doubts, she tried to ascertain, through a series of questions, whether the regulators knew what her investigations had revealed. At first, they claimed not to understand the questions and suggested that “player behavior” was the reason for the discrepancy in the figures. The meeting’s atmosphere became increasingly hostile. After being accused of “making an audit on government audited statements,” she thought to herself, “What happened? Why am I feeling so unsure? I don’t deserve to feel this way. Numbers don’t lie, so why am I allowing their comments to make me question what I know?” (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 103–104). She settled these doubts by asking the public servants at the table “do I, or do I not, have a right as [a citizen] to ask these questions?” Having established consent to her being there, she revealed the formula she had discovered and requested more information about the cash-in and cash-out totals for EGMs (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 106–107). It was then insinuated that her motive for sharing the information was an attempt to extort public authorities: Authentically, I had no ulterior motives so I answered from the heart. ‘What’s in it for me? The truth is that it’s way too late for me. I’ve been addicted to these machines for years and I’m still struggling with my addiction, but what about all the other players I see every day. I believe that we could prevent families and lives from being destroyed by gaming machines . . . I don’t agree with the answer you give me about player behaviour being the reason you make such a high profit percentage . . . Regardless of how Albertans did or did not play, the profit percentage has remained the same for 15 years. I think it has to do with machine programming .  .  . not player behavior. Using the formula I showed you, I now know it doesn’t matter how the players play, how many players play the machines, whether or not they cash out and come back to play, how addicted they are, or how often they play . . . The profit total may have something to do with player behaviour, but not the profit percentage. I believe Albertans have a right to know the truth about the profit percentage. It might prevent some people from becoming as addicted as I am or to stop them from ever choosing to play the machines to begin with.’ (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 107–108)

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After it became clear that the government was not going to alter its public communication about the ratio of EGM profits to player returns, Jubinville began approaching others to witness her testimony. An unsympathetic elected politician told her, with great confidence, “there’s only a small percentage of the population who gamble, and of those people, there’s only a tiny percentage who get addicted, and most of them become addicted because they have a problem with alcohol.” Even after Jubinville clarified that she had never had a problem with alcohol, the politician continued, I’m sorry to hear about your struggles, but unfortunately you happen to be one of the few people who do get addicted easily. [The machines] provide much needed funding for the citizens of this province. Without the huge revenue derived from these machines, the government would have to raise everyone’s taxes and I’m sure that wouldn’t go over very well. (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 114–115) She also reached out to a former addict employed by the government to educate people about problem gambling. Unsatisfied with his response, she spoke to his employer and was warned against sharing the information she had discovered about misleading reporting: I never told him about my ongoing addiction . . . I had learned quickly that people made assumptions about gaming-machine addicts and I was worried that they would assume I was an idiot for still playing these machines . . . In my mind, I was reduced to a pathetic addict, someone who used to be fairly smart, but was now no better than crumpled garbage. (Jubinville, 2012, p. 121) After dealing with the near breakdown of her marriage and her ongoing struggle to detach herself from EGMs, Jubinville had an opportunity to move to Texas, where there were no EGMs. She found “my moods were lifting and I was returning to my old self . . . the guilt, anxiety and depression that had become my unwanted guests back home seemed to have finally packed their bags and moved on” (Jubinville, 2012, p. 160). It was a conversation with a gambling researcher that clarified her understanding of this experience of liberation. His response to her question about why she could not give up playing in Canada was, “it is not you who is sick but rather the machines that are making you sick . . . each time you play, the machines mess with your head without you knowing it . . . stop calling yourself an addict. You are not an addict, you are a victim” (Jubinville, 2012, p. 167). Her further research uncovered studies suggesting an addiction rate to EMGs closer to 60 percent than to the 5.2 percent her government cited. She also consulted the literature on the impact of EGMs on the brain, recalling the adverse effects of playing for hours on her driving skills. After discovering a video of B. F. Skinner describing the

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 215 psychological effects of variable reinforcement schedules, Jubinville, like the machine gamblers Schull encountered in Las Vegas, felt she had been treated like the subject of an animal experiment. In the video, Skinner is unequivocal in describing the variable ratio schedule as the heart of all gambling devices [with] the same effect. Pigeons can become a pathological gambler just as a person can. We don’t say the gambler gambles to punish himself as the Freudians might say or gambles because he feels excited when he does. Nothing of the sort. People gamble because of the schedule of the reinforcement that follows. And this is true of all gambling systems [that] all have variable ratios built into them . . . [This] leaves free will in the position of a fiction. (Skinner in jenningh, 2007) Jubinville realized that, rather than being an abnormal person with a behavioural problem, I had behaved exactly how the designers of the machines had intended me to . . . I didn’t have a disease before I began to play the machines and I didn’t have one now. Losing control of time and money simply meant I was playing the machines exactly how they were intended to be played . . . I was indeed a victim. Yes, it was my choice to start playing these machines but no-one warned me about the hell I was getting myself into. Why did the counsellors at my government’s treatment program not tell us that the gambling machines are known throughout the world as “the crack cocaine of gambling” and tell us why? .  .  . Whenever I thought about all the years I spent severely berating myself for not playing the machines responsibly and that someone could have told me the machines were programmed to entice me to lose control, I felt used . . . victimized. (Jubinville, 2012, p. 190) She reflected on the responsible gambling messages that shadowed her gambling consumption: The government posters that hung on the wall where I played said “Play smart. Gamble responsibly,” or “Set a limit and stay within it. Always!” or “Think about how you spend your time and money.” Yet the machines acted like a drug and enticed me to do the opposite. [Those] posters were a constant reminder of how weak and stupid I was. I tried so hard to play smart and set a limit but I could never do [it] . . . Why had [the government] spent all that money developing and implementing a program to help players control the time and money they spend when their machines are intentionally programmed to support the opposite behaviour? . . . Why

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life had no one ever told us that our addiction to VLT and slot machines was not a disease or a weakness but rather a programmed behaviour? (Jubinville, 2012, pp. 198–199)

There are several points to take from this memoir. Firstly, it underscores the radical difference of EGMs from other forms of gambling; secondly, it highlights how the provision of responsible gambling communication produces self-blaming individuals; thirdly, it shows how players’ experiential knowledge of EGMs can be discounted and rendered insignificant to regulators; and, finally, it points to the absence of a responsible addressee in government for the author’s testimony. A strong theme in Jubinville’s memoir is the relationship with God that she develops and strengthens in the course of her addiction. If God becomes the ultimate witness to her testimony, it is not simply because the author has a Christian faith, it is also because her communication about the deceptive representations of EGM harm never reach the ears of a human witness who can defend her rights as a citizen and consumer. It is God who tells her not to blame herself for lacking strength, intelligence, and willpower; it is God who encourages her to trust her experience and intuition through her addiction; and it is God who hears her calls for help and responds by guiding her to attend to her intimate relationships and to her creativity as a writer and painter. This spiritual presence is used throughout the narrative to mark the absence of ethical and spiritual values in the author’s jurisdiction where the government is also the provider of gambling. The memoir also underlines the importance of language in the way that gambling policies are formed and implemented. Jubinville describes how the explanation of “player behavior” was repeatedly used by regulators, treatment providers, and researchers to dismiss her concerns. She explains her difficulty accepting Gamblers Anonymous’s characterization of gambling addiction as an incurable disease which distinguishes members from the majority of the population who they believe to be “normal” gamblers. This clarifies the sense of liberation she experienced when the label of “pathological gambler” was exchanged for that of “victim.” It is not just that she understood the power of this terminology to shift the way that she was perceived by others. Perhaps even more important was its power to change the way she saw herself and evaluated her worth as a human being. The importance of terminology is underlined by Phyllis Vineberg, the grieving mother and activist cited earlier: Our son Trevor was not dysfunctional or sick before his introduction to electronic gambling machines . . . In my early communication with the media . . . I represented my son as a pathological gambler. The sickness did not lie within him however. The truth is he was just an uninformed consumer exposed to the lethal effects of a dangerous and addictive product . . . The stigma associated with gambling addictions and suicide and the lack of public awareness about gambling issues, prohibits open discussion,

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 217 a coordinated approach to finding solutions, and help for people who need it the most . . . We must move away from the personal responsibility, blame the victim approach. We must all challenge the legitimacy and credibility of the industry marketing the product. The debate must be reframed to expose the gambling industry’s role in the misery and devastation that our families are suffering. (Vineberg, cited in Jubinville, n.d.) A similar refusal to rationalize EGM addiction as an individual pathology appears in a song by The Whitlams, an Australian band which lost a member to suicide through EGMs. The emotive title of the song “Blow Up the Pokies” refers to the transformation of the deceased band member after he began playing EGMs and calls on the government to listen and respond with the decisive action of “blow[ing] up the pokies and drag[ging] them away” (Nicoll, 2011). The testimonies I have examined raise important questions about the subjective and intersubjective effects of the language of research and policy related to problem gambling.

Sacrifice and Scapegoating: the Finopolitics of Problem Gambling Political philosopher Wendy Brown suggests that the threat of a pure market state to the “bare democracy” on which political life depends requires sacrifice as a supplement, something outside of its terms, yet essential to its operation . . . active citizenship is slimmed to tending oneself as responsibilized human capital [and] sacrificial citizenship expands to include anything related to the requirements and imperatives of the economy . . . As we are enjoined to sacrifice to the economy as the supreme power and to sacrifice for “recovery” or balanced budgets, neoliberal austerity politics draws on both the religious and secular, political meanings of the term . . . Yet the devastation of human well-being entailed in slashed jobs, pay, benefits, and services brings no immediate returns to those who sacrifice or are sacrificed. Rather, the putative aim is restoration of economic and state fiscal “health,” a return from the brink of bankruptcy, currency collapse, debt default, or credit downgrade. (2015, pp. 210–211) After examining anthropological literature on human sacrifice and scapegoating, she notes, “Religious sacrifice often aims not only to nourish or propitiate the gods, but to rebalance the forces of life and common existence.” She then poses the question, “What is the disharmony or torn social fabric at stake in the call to sacrifice in contemporary neoliberal regimes? Is it only fiscal and economic? Does it concern only debt, spending, or even improperly regulated financial institutions?” (Brown, 2015, p. 218). The answers to these questions become clearer once we understand gambling as an integral rather than a

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contingent aspect of liberal governmentality. As Brown and numerous other authors note, in the wake of the GFC, the addressee of appeals to austerity is by no means a universal one; individuals and corporations embodying values of free enterprise are almost universally exempted. The freedom of gambling enterprises to grow unconstrained by “red tape” has been an important part of states’ response to neoliberal austerity. Using a small part of their profits to support functions and services formerly delivered by states and charities has plugged some gaps in public goods, from medicine and education, to arts and sporting clubs. In this way, citizens are asked to sacrifice our ethical principles for the return of shared goods that would otherwise be unaffordable. It is also in the sphere of gambling that the relationship between sacrificing subjects and scapegoated subjects comes into relief. If, following Brown, we take sacrifice to be the supplement of the neoliberal market state, scapegoating appears, in turn, as the supplement of the sacrificial subject. The scapegoat is a figure with biblical origins. The Old Testament refers to a goat being laden by a priest with the sins of the people and then sent out into the wilderness. A recorded Tibetan custom involves a person who loses a competition with the king in a contest using loaded dice, “kept in a chamber of horrors for a week, after which he had to remain secluded for a period in a mountain den. If he died, this was a good omen. Otherwise he returned only to repeat his role the following year” (Cohen, 1960, p. 128). In contrast to the final fate of an animal or human whose death becomes a sacrifice, a scapegoat may or may not be allowed to return to the community. The problem of scapegoating highlights issues that arise when the term “vulnerability” is applied to individuals or populations in problem gambling research and policy debates. For this reason, I suggest the terminology needs to be changed and “vulnerability” replaced by the term “targetability,” to register the reality that scapegoats are not born; they are chosen. A brilliant and prescient literary meditation on gambling, human sacrifice, and scapegoating is a short story by Shirley Jackson titled “The Lottery” (1948). In it she describes a beautiful summer’s day on which all of the members of a village community gather for a lottery draw. The ordinariness of the scene is emphasized as well as its connection with other moments of everyday life organized by a leading member of the community, including the square dance and Halloween programme. The lottery is described as tradition whose origins are ancient and which requires “a good deal of fussing” before it is declared open. We learn that the draw always begins at 10 and is completed in time for people to get home for their dinner at noon. The story builds through descriptions of apparently innocuous details like groups of small boys piling up stones and the aging black box from which numbers are drawn. As the growing crowd waits for everyone to be present, casual discussions are held about the value of this tradition: “They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him “that over in north village they’re talking of giving up the lottery.”

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 219 Old Man Warner shorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know they’ll be wanting to live in caves .  .  . There’s always been a lottery.” “Some places have already quit lotteries,” Mrs. Adams said. “Nothing but trouble in that,’” Old Man Warner said stoutly. “Pack of young fools.” (1948, n.p.) A woman who pulls the marked ticket from the chest is reluctant to reveal it; her husband takes it from her, holding the result up for the organizer to see. It is only in the final paragraphs that we learn what her fate is: Tessa Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers with Mrs. Graves beside him. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her. (1948, n.p.) The cry for justice that concludes this bleak tale resonates with the testimonies of problem gamblers and their advocates we have read earlier. The profits and social benefits that governments and businesses enjoy would not be possible without their sacrifice. Because this sacrifice is unspeakable, the problem gambler becomes a scapegoat upon whom more ubiquitous failures of willpower and responsibility are placed. As a subject whose addiction is seen to threaten the enjoyment of recreational gamblers, the problem gambler not only presents a social waste disposal problem, s/he becomes the foil against which commercial gambling is celebrated as a means of supporting free enterprise and charitable causes. The discussion of Dismissed and the testimonies of other problem gamblers and family members highlighted problems with individual self-regulation as a means by which to govern gambling. I presented processes of sacrifice and scapegoating as a way to understand the apparent disposability of EGM gamblers. In the next section, I show how citizen-activists have reframed the provision and consumption of EGM gambling from an individual to a community responsibility.

Problem Gambling Beyond the Individual: Defending Communities From EGMs In November 2018, a group of concerned citizens in Brisbane, Australia, converged on a hotel in their local shopping mall where a license had been approved to install 45

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EGMs and extend trading hours to 4 am. Having exhausted avenues of legal appeal, they called for customers to boycott the venue, holding up signs reading, “Stop the Pokies at Pig & Whistle.” Whether they will be successful in disrupting the flow of trade to the venue remains an open question. But their protest is one of the latest examples of local communities taking matters into their own hands in the face of government inaction to curb harms related to EGM consumption (Lynch, 2018). With at least two members of Australia’s federal parliament elected on a platform of “no pokies” over the past decade, political opposition to EGMs has been steadily gathering momentum. This has been supported by effective media communication by gambling scholars, together with quality investigative journalism. The Alliance for Gambling Reform provides a non-partisan platform to disseminate information and promote advocacy, under the rubric of “The Pokies Play You.” And a documentary film containing interviews with industry players, politicians, and academics titled Ka-Ching: Pokie Nation was released in 2015. This was promoted together with a package instructing citizens about how to host a screening and discussion group in their local community. These resources have provided ammunition for ordinary people to act in the face of industry power and government indifference. The following case study explores how resistance immanent to relations of domination (Foucault, 1976, pp. 95–96) are manifested in struggles over gambling. A small group of participants in my research were involved in a campaign to prevent an EGM license for 30 machines being granted to a hotel in a small town that I will call Separationville. Five hours’ drive away from a major city, the town’s most well-known cultural heritage consists of scattered sites celebrating a gang of criminals from colonial times. Separationville is also a town with low socio-economic indicators, with average weekly individual incomes considerably lower than the national average of $662 in 2016. I asked three members of the campaign to tell me about their motivations for lodging a protest against the grant of the EGM license, the resources required, the allies they found, as well as the biggest challenges they encountered. Garry, a local business owner, has resided in the town for over four decades and has been involved in several sporting clubs, serving on school committees as well as being a member of an environmental group. While he strongly disliked EGMs, he did not have personal experience with playing them; his reference point was the experience of a close family member with “the trifecta of addiction; cigarettes, alcohol, and pokies. The dollar value lost, as told to me by the spouse, was in the hundreds of thousands.” He was also motivated by concern for his community which he described as “a good one although disadvantaged. I could not sit back and allow it to become a sad, embattled one. People helping one another is the fabric of a community, EGMs would tear at that fabric” (Interviewee P, 2016). Kevin is a farmer with connections to sporting and other community groups and was encouraged to join the campaign by the local doctor, who led the appeal. He was initially unfamiliar with EGMs but, after reading some published studies, became convinced that the detriment caused to the small town by their introduction outweighed

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 221 the refurbishment of the hotel’s facilities (Interviewee Q, 2016). Sarah is a local businesswoman who supports “a range of civic endeavours” and became involved after reading some of the research on EGMs and realizing that “this was going to be a tough fight and we ALL needed to get involved” (Interviewee O, 2016). All three participants were additionally motivated by what they saw as the bad character of the hotel owner who applied for the license. They referred to his misrepresentation of the benefits of EGMs to community sporting clubs, his references to customers as “dickheads,” and his propensity for physical intimidation. To attract support and publicity, a “no pokies” group was formed and a protest march was held in the main street which ended outside the shire council office. A considerable “war-chest” of over $25,000 had to be amassed to support an appeal to the state planning tribunal. In addition to this money, Kevin said, Activists on the campaign would have spent hundreds of hours researching the case [for the state planning tribunal], trying to convince the local council to change the approval they had given the application, organising public meetings/demonstrations and generally ‘working’ the population to explain the pitfalls of pokies. (Interviewee Q, 2016) This became a running joke, as Sarah recalled, “A handful of people dedicated huge amounts of time to the campaign—to the point where it was remarked that ‘Pokies are addictive on so many fronts—to those that play them and to those fighting them!!!’” (Interviewee O, 2016). Sarah, Kevin, and Garry found several strong allies in their campaign, from health professionals, researchers, and former gamblers, to the local media who covered the campaign, as well as farmers, lawyers, retired nuns, mechanics, and teachers. However, there was considerable resistance, and this often took challenging forms. Sarah believed that opinion in the town’s population was divided down the middle: many [people] we spoke to were ambivalent (as I was initially) about the social impacts of the [EGMs] and .  .  . others who were against the introduction of pokies to town were too frightened to make public their opposition. From the outset, the applicant was aggressive towards those opposing the application, and many of his followers were vocal and angry towards our group who they saw as “wowsers” against development. (Interviewee O, 2016) Garry described an encounter between a town councillor and a member of the “no pokies” group: He walked up to a member of the [no pokies] steering committee and asked, “how long have you lived here?” and made an attempt to head-butt

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life that person .  .  . [on another occasion] the applicant “shouldered” me as I walked past. [During the march and protests] many people hurled abuse . . . it was embarrassing what was said to [an elderly male] by members of the community, some of whom he went to school with and had worked with . . . The use of Facebook by young patrons of the hotel was often rude, crude and hurtful in a way that people could say what they thought with scant regard for ethics and facts. (Interviewee P, 2016)

Local sporting clubs which had been sponsored by the applicant were placed in a position Peter Adams (2016) describes as “moral jeopardy.” While their purpose is to enhance the health of individuals and the community as a whole, their need for funds makes the steady revenue stream that EGMs promise a gift that is often difficult to refuse. For clubs this poses both “reputational risks of being linked to an unethical source and risks to governance posed by dependence on the funding” (Adams, 2016, p. 160). While the campaign was successful in its appeal to the state planning commission, the applicant rejected the decision and was seeking an exception via a ministerial decision at the time of publication. Reflecting on the campaign to date, all of the participants described their frustration with governments at local and state levels. Garry described his feelings: Anger .  .  . as it has been demonstrated that the body responsible for gambling in [my state] have not discharged their duties in a responsible manner. So, it would appear that the [state] government is a serious benefactor of EGMs at the expense of those who can least afford it . . . Disappointment . . . as the real and negative costs (economic and social) to the government and the citizens far outweighs the “Cash Cow” [EGMs present] to the treasury coffers. Sad, as I do not believe my government is going to be prepared to make the tough decision to change legislation and make it much more difficult to obtain a gaming licence for EGMs. There are very few outlets in the [wealthy] suburbs of any state in this country. (Interviewee P, 2016) Kevin’s feeling was that “Governments . . . [are] complicit in the problems created by problem gambling. Their dependence on income from pokies . . . is a deterrent to any meaningful regulation” (Interviewee Q, 2016). Sarah was left feeling disgusted and frustrated that communities continue to deal with the devastating effects of problem gambling because the government is the biggest . . . ‘addict’ . . . Although the government, it seems, is more like a drug baron—getting rich whilst exploiting the vulnerable. (Interviewee O, 2016)

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 223 She also expressed concerns about government misrepresentation that are familiar from Jubinville’s memoir discussed earlier: I think the EGM expenditure figures . . . showing money leaving communities via poker machines, should be regularly publicized. Most people, when hearing these figures were totally disbelieving. Many in our community said that gambling was a “choice” and others did not differentiate between different forms of gambling . . . so broader awareness is definitely required. (Interviewee O, 2016) A strong theme in these interviews was the value these community activists attributed to research, information, and education. This was expressed in different ways, including references to the group having done their “homework” on the issues prior to standing up and fighting against the license (Interviewee O, 2016) as well as valuing members who had “training, qualifications and contacts . . . [and] the ability to digest detailed information” to brief others (Interviewee P, 2016). Yet this value was, in certain ways, a liability. As relatively older and well-educated residents, they were perceived as imposing middle-class values on younger customers of the hotel who had been mobilized by the owner. While the campaigners used strategies of legal actions, public education, and peaceful protest, the applicant used physical bullying, abuse, and social media trolling to gather support for the EGMs as symbols of urban development, political freedom, and consumer choice. What was joined and enjoined in this debate? Campaigners—in spite of being residents of many decades in the town—were framed by the owner and his supporters as not belonging to a community whose amenities would be improved by EGMs. The owner and the government, in turn, were framed as being reckless spoilers of the fragile social cohesion that currently exists in the community. This case highlights some fundamental tensions related to gambling and government. While governments are enjoined to protect citizens from harm, they are also enjoined to protect the interest of business and dependent on EGM revenue to fund various public services.

Extractive Industries and the Constitutional Grounds of Democracy I am browsing the Queensland Government website when I encounter a page informing operators about the importance of saving electricity consumed by EGMs. This is an issue for pubs and clubs because the machines consume almost as much electricity when they are idle as when they are in play. The page explains, Typically, Queensland electronic gaming machines have an average power consumption of 100–250 Watts. This figure varies depending on the type of machine, size, usage and the quality and number of monitors and other

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life peripherals, including note and coin acceptors and hoppers. Generally, electronic gaming machines using larger monitors tend to have higher power consumption.

I read further to discover that all EGMs are required to be fitted with a “power save” mode to be used when trading has finished for the day. This will save between 30 and 60 percent of ordinary power consumption (Queensland Government, 2016). I visit an Indigenous Cultural Exhibition in a large Canadian city and experience several traditional dancing competitions in a large auditorium. Each category has a competition for different age groups for which a group of drummers and singers perform a specific song. The regalia is spectacular and the drumming and singing both thunderous and soaring as the dancers spin and move to the rhythms. The communication of enjoyment seems impossible to separate from the intergenerational production and circulation of energy sources to which the terms “spirituality” and “culture” do not do justice. I’ve argued throughout this book that the spheres of play, finance, gambling, and work have become increasingly permeable. With the search for ways to govern ever more frugally, the culture that EGMs both embody and perpetuate is pushing the limits of what it means to be human. While algorithmic technologies has opened up new territories of enjoyment from which profits can be made, gambling remains grounded in longer historical processes that link liberal government to extractive industries. Australian researchers Martin Young and Francis Markham argued, “Big Gambling”, the industry-state gambling complex, is both exemplary and symptomatic of the concentration of capital and political power among an economic elite in the Western World since the 1980s. Rather than reflecting changing patterns in consumer demand, Big Gambling is driven by political processes and economic imperatives. It has inserted dangerous commodities en masse into vulnerable communities in ways that parallel the actions of both Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco, with similarly damaging consequences. (Young & Markham, 2015, p. 1) In spite of the documented role of gambling in exacerbating social inequalities through the calculated and exploitative placement of dangerous gambling products in low-income areas, they note, A prodigious, international research effort has been directed towards the measurement of pathological gambling prevalence and its social correlates . . . This research has focused heavily on identifying, enumerating and profiling pathological gamblers. Indeed, in all these countries, problem gambling has emerged as the primary issue raised by gambling liberalisation. In this way, the pathological gambler, rather than the process of

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 225 gambling liberalisation, has been constructed and mobilised as the object of policy and intervention. (Young & Markham, 2015, p. 3) Some of the clearest arguments for reorienting gambling policy to address the problems created by “big gambling” can be found in two books by public health researcher Peter Adams: Gambling, Freedom and Democracy (2007) and Moral Jeopardy (2016). For the purpose of this discussion, I will focus on two of his most important claims. The first is that inherent conflicts of interest between institutions and agents involved with gambling provision, regulation, and research are corrosive of individual and institutional integrity. The second is that commercial gambling industries—as currently organized—are extractive and unsustainable from the perspective of both individual citizens and the communities of which they form part. Adams equates the damage caused by environmental resource extraction such as logging and mining and the extraction of energy and attention from communities inundated by EGMs: The current international proliferation of gambling can be productively compared to the expansion of other commercial operations that involve the large-scale exploitation of primary resources. The first feature relates to the commercial nature of extractive industries in their early phases of development; the second feature focuses on the development of new methods and technologies for extraction; the third feature focuses on the creation of a frontier society that services the expanding industry activity; the fourth feature focuses on the importance of the relative size and scale of commercial activity; and the final feature describes how resistance to the initial expansion is compromised by the naivete of resident populations. (Adams, 2007, pp. 3–5) This description captures the capacity of commercial gambling industries to lay waste to the resources that sustain life, at both an individual and a community level. After identifying the subtle coercion which organizes commercial gambling and the agents and institutions most closely involved with it, he wonders how the liberalization of commercial gambling “will impact the social and economic systems of those who get involved, and what will the longterm effects be on political systems and the foundations of democracy itself?” (Adams, 2007, p. 3). Adams sees the participation of community organizations in democratic structures and processes as evidence of political health, arguing that “A nation that values its democracy and the part community organizations play within it will appreciate the link between moral jeopardy and participation in democratic processes” (Adams, 2007, pp. 61–62). I think this is a somewhat optimistic assumption made possible because Adams

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doesn’t link the parallels he draws between logging and commercial gambling to broader challenges posed by Indigenous sovereignty in four of the nations where gambling has been most extractive: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Republican and monarchical forms of sovereignty that founded these settler-occupying states all implemented processes of human and non-human dispossession and resource extraction on an enormous scale. The nations whose territories were appropriated for European settlement were, and continue to be, recognized as subjects of constitutional exception. This ambiguous status of Indigenous citizenship is important if we are to understand gambling’s role in the development and implementation of liberal democratic projects from the eighteenth century to the present. Unfortunately, it is often overlooked in arguments about the crisis of democracy attending the rise of neoliberalism and its celebration of homo economicus (Brown, 2015). In her powerful critique of neoliberal governmentality, Wendy Brown defines “bare democracy” as the only political form permitting us all to share in the powers by which we are governed, it affords without guaranteeing the possibility that power will be wielded on behalf of the many, rather than the few, that all might be regarded as ends, rather than means, and that all may have a political voice. (2015, p. 203) However, a subject of political representation encompassed here by the word “all” has never existed within America or other democratic states that occupy Indigenous territories. From the outset of Europe’s colonial projects, through to the rise of constitutional states, to the current entanglement of nations in global marketplaces, homo economicus has extracted prosperity from Indigenous lands and slave labour, while homo politicus has sought to authorize and legitimate this extraction. This has implications for the conclusions Brown draws about the future of political democracy. She writes, [Neoliberalism’s] figuration of the human, its reality principle, and its worldview—“there is no alternative”—consecrates, deepens, and naturalizes without acknowledging this despair. In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence. The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies, new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning for the future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic discussion, law,

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 227 policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus. (Brown, 2015, p. 221) At this historical moment, Brown argues, The Left alone persists in a belief (or in a polemic, absent a belief) that all could live well, live free, and live together . . . The perpetual treadmill of a capitalist economy that cannot cease without collapsing is now the treadmill on which every being and activity is placed, and the horizons of all other meanings and purposes shrink accordingly. This is the civilizational turning point that neoliberal rationality marks, its postpostmodernism and deep antihumanism, its surrender to a felt and lived condition of human impotence, unknowingness, failure, and irresponsibility. Tasked with the already difficult project of puncturing common neoliberal sense and with developing a viable and compelling alternative to capitalist globalization, the Left must also counter this civilizational despair. (Brown, 2015, pp. 221–222) But who is included in the Left’s struggle against civilizational despair? While Indigenous activists and authors have been active in anti-capitalist struggles for generations, their unique orientation in respect of both homo economicus and homo politicus is not addressed in Brown’s argument about the undoing of democracy. This is not unusual. Debates about Indigenous politics and sovereignty are rarely indexed in mainstream or feminist political theory, except to point to Indigenous peoples’ historical exclusion from and more recent inclusion within the body politic of existing nations. This occurs notwithstanding that the epistemological and ontological status of the “nation” itself is the focus of a large and rigorous body of critical Indigenous scholarship (see Simpson, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Coulthard, 2014). I would argue that the constitutive (and, in some cases, constitutional) exclusion of Indigenous people from the “human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus” is inextricable from the problem that opponents of neoliberalism’s homo economicus seek to address. To explain how Indigenous sovereignty struggles are related to gambling regulation, I want to touch briefly on Loretta Napoleoni’s (2008) concept of “rogue economics.” She uses this term to capture an inherent tension between the “civil” societies valued by democratic nation states and the absence of civility associated with the rise of global market states—including underground networks of weapons, drug, and sex trafficking and counterfeiting. After linking the rise of democracy to markets for all kinds of slavery, from ancient Greece onwards, to the open traffic in prostitution “liberated” with the collapse of communist states in the 1990s, she argues that “rogue economics is not exceptional but endemic, a dark force encrypted into our social

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DNA, constantly lurking in the background of the societies in which we live” (Napoleoni, p. 5). As she points out, rogue economics were inextricable from the emergence of modern states: “While the discovery of America enriched Europe beyond imagination, the spoils came at the hands of ruthless conquistadores. Today rogue economics has resurfaced because the world is experiencing an equally profound transformation, perhaps the biggest in history” (Napoleoni, 2008, p. 3). Napoleoni’s arguments provide little comfort to proponents on either the left or the right side of political arguments about gambling. They not only underline the inherently extractive character of economic relationships against idealized versions of the market capitalism evoked by ubiquitous references to Adam Smith’s invisible hand in neoliberal theory; they also hint at the dehumanization of peoples who pre-occupied and pre-possessed territories on which liberal theory and political economy depended. Transformed into objects of governmental control and administration, their humanity was subsumed into racial categories such as “Aboriginal,” or Indian “Indigenous.” The racial biopolitical foundations of liberal democracies not only become clearer when viewed through the lens of gambling; we can also begin to see how they inflect the arguments of formative theorists of neoliberal economics and positive psychology. The influence of Karl Popper’s concept of “the open society” on Hayek’s thought is important in this context. The philosopher of science who made falsification the centre of epistemological validity was vigorous in his criticism of political projects aiming at social improvement. In his 1950 foreword to The Open Society, he defined modern liberal democracy as the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority of the merely established and the merely traditional while trying to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. (Popper, 1966, xxxvi) Here the revolutionary impetus of liberal democracy is not only opposed to the “closed societies” epitomized by communist states after WWII; it is also opposed to tradition and faith in human or superhuman authorities. An enemy of “historicist” philosophical work, from Plato through to Hegel and Marx, Popper imagined a human future guided by science rather than grand political schemes. Underpinning this view and Hayek’s appropriation of it to affirm the sovereignty of markets is a conception of the modern individual and Western

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 229 civilization as the sole bearers of social evolution. Indigenous peoples, contained first by the occupation of colonial and, subsequently, nation states, are homogenized in this imagination of liberal democracy as “tribal,” and their scientific knowledge is dismissed as not worth knowing. At stake is a profound and genocidal mis-recognition of the ontological ground of liberal democracy in the dispossessed ground of Indigenous sovereign being (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). This history matters if the extractive relationships that govern human and non-human beings which normalize rogue economics are to cease. Marxist and critical Indigenous scholars continue to highlight the importance of the lands on which the subsequent development of modern liberal democratic states depended. Patrick Woolf explains that, with the “primitive accumulation” of “pre-accumulated” capital from Indigenous territories, terra nullius and market economics fuse inseparably, connecting settler capital directly to a landscape miraculously emptied of the accumulated human labour, male and female, that has made it what it is. In the outcome, all the ostensibly self-sustaining actors in liberalism’s individualist drama—the entrepreneur, the labourer, the investor, the citizen—turn out to be collectively reliant on the continuing violence of colonial expansion .  .  . As Max Weber seemed to recognise in setting so much of his analysis of the emergence of the capitalist ethos in the US . . . the unmarked, means-end optimism of the capitalist market place was simultaneously the ideal settler-coloniser, homo assimilans. (Woolf, 2016, pp. 24–25) At the very moment that societies were made “open for business” by frontier colonialism, they were closed to nations that previously dwelt throughout the territories of North America, New Zealand, and Australia. The racial governance that resulted from this bloody and genocidal process persists in constitutional exclusions and inclusions in each nation. From the lotteries held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that helped to finance frontier expansions in America through to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (United States, 1988) and targeted welfare policies in Australia, gambling has always formed part of racial governance in liberal states (Nicoll, 2018). Bruno Latour’s (1993) anthropological study of the laboratory cultures, from which scientific knowledge is produced, challenged claims to objective truth with the memorable claim: “we have never been modern.” When we turn our attention to the experience of Indigenous people, it is equally clear that “governing has never been frugal.” As freedoms expanded for white immigrant populations, they contracted for Indigenous people with the loss of their territories; survivors of frontier warfare and new diseases were contained on reserves and, with policies of assimilation, states passed laws to authorize the removal of children to residential schools and other non-Indigenous institutions. The failure of nation states to deliver justice for Indigenous people,

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from their constitutional formations through to the present, is an important part of the finopolitical story that connects gambling to liberal modernity’s spheres of work, finance, and play. When theories of markets that refer to the historical evolution of our species are recognized as grounded in a racially constructed framework of classifying entire societies as more or less open or closed, as more or less primitive or civilized, as more or less retarded or evolved, as more or less conventional or creative, commercial gambling’s production of humans as waste seems less like a problem to be solved than an inevitable consequence of a specific way of seeing and making the world. We have seen this worldview and ensemble of political practices crystallized in gambling’s promise to deliver a type of grace that Lears (2003) describes as “mana,” or “something for nothing.” And we can see it encapsulated in the nineteenth-century doctrine of “manifest destiny” which saw America as a promised land that would be guided by liberal democratic values extracted from bloody revolutions in Europe and the United States. Rather than dwell in the “civilizational despair” generated by the incapacity of homo politicus to address the problems created by homo economicus, we might recall that wampum was the first currency used in the colonial settlement of Manhattan, where Wall Street, named after an abandoned fort, would become the hub of financial capital. As John Steele Gordon relates, the members of Indigenous nations who provided the furs on which the colony’s economy depended did not want to be paid for them in gold or silver . . . instead, they demanded payment in what they regarded as “real money”: wampum. Wampum were tubular beads, usually strung together in intricate patterns, that were made from the shells of the freshwater clams that abounded in the rivers and lakes of eastern North America. [Wampum] continued to be used in New York as a currency until shortly after the American Revolution. Then a machine was invented that cheaply manufactured counterfeit wampum, destroying the value of the real article. (Gordon, 1999, pp. 26–27) But if counterfeit wampum destroyed the value of the currency for the European occupiers, it has retained political, legal, and cultural force for Indigenous traders and their communities. Anishinaabe/Ojibwe legal scholar John Borrows explains that the 1764 Treaty of Niagara, one of the founding documents of Canada’s constitution, was created through the exchange of two wampum belts, the Gus Wen Tah, or “two-row wampum,” and the “belt of peace.” [The] Gus Wen Tah was one of two belts exchanged at Niagara in 1764; the other belt emphasized the interdependence of the Indians of the Great Lakes and the nascent settler population. A ship was woven into one end

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 231 of the belt, with its bow facing towards Quebec; at the other end of the belt is an image of Michilimackinac, a place in the centre of the Great Lakes regarded as the heart of the Chippewa/Anishinabek homelands. Between these two images were woven twenty-four Indians holding one another’s hands, with the person furthest to the right holding the cable of the ship, while the one on the extreme left has his foot resting on the land at Quebec. Representatives of the twenty-two First Nations assembled at Niagara in 1764 touched this “Belt of Peace” as a symbol of friendship and as a pledge to become “united.” (Borrows, 2002, p. 150) Borrows makes an argument for the currency of this belt in reconstituting the laws that govern Canada in the twenty-first century: This belt portrays the connection between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples and the lands they occupied. In fact, in this belt the Indians are holding on to the ship, pulling it towards them so that they can receive and participate in the benefits from the non-Indigenous population. Aboriginal tradition can thus support a notion of citizenship that encourages autonomy and at same time unifies and connects us to one another, and to the lands we rely on. (Borrows, 2002, p. 150) Building on this work, Jean Leclair argues that legal acknowledgement of “moral interdependency” flowing from these agreements would replace essentialist conceptions of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identities with federal constitutionalism which relocates the political autonomy of Indigenous communities from captivity in a pre-colonial past into the dynamic present of Canadian legal and political life (Leclair, 2006, p. 529). Wampum embodies an agreement for two legal, economic, and political orders to peacefully coexist in territories where Europeans sought to build new lives and societies and that the force of this agreement holds into the present. The wampum belt stands as an explicit refutation of what I have designated loosely as “Chicago School theory.” It reminds us that the notion of a historical passage from a closed to an open society, from a tribal to a civilized world, from a world of tradition to a world of innovation is a fiction needed to support liberal political economy rather than a historical or scientific fact. I’ve used the concept of finopower to explain how gambling accommodates tensions between state, corporate, and individual actors in the name of national, regional or local jurisdictions that require government to be as frugal as possible. In different ways, gambling has become part of political processes aimed to accommodate tensions and contain enduring frictions related to unresolved sovereignty issues in settler-occupying nations (see Bruyneel, 2007). For over a generation, Indigenous people in Canada and the United States have mobilized as nations, using treaties as legal

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instruments to defend their rights to establish and benefit from gambling. The worldwide gambling boom has been harnessed to adjust the terms on which their property and persons are available for extraction established over centuries of occupation (Belanger, 2006, 2011; Belanger, Williams, & Arthur, 2012; Cattelino, 2008; Miller, 2012; Manitowabi, 2011, 2017). Gambling revenues have been used to fund various social goods including education, healthcare, infrastructure, and cultural benefits including language revival and cultural centres or museums. The degree of benefit for those who have pursued gambling varies significantly, according to the laws of the states or provinces which encompass their territories and the proximity of reservations to cities or popular tourist destinations. It should also be noted that some Indigenous nations have refused to use gambling as a route to economic development. What new ways of thinking open up when we focus on the kinds of “enjoyment” entailed in contexts of disputed sovereignty? In chapter 2, I noted that, while it is often invoked, “enjoyment” is a topic that is barely addressed in the gambling studies literature, the majority of which is focused on the prevalence and treatment of “problem gambling.” I developed a detailed account of the “enjoyment” that gambling delivers to governments, operators, and consumers. The following definition is especially pertinent as we consider the constitutional grounds of gambling in settler-occupying states: Enjoyment (noun): 1. The possession, use or occupancy of anything with satisfaction or pleasure. 2. A particular form or source of pleasure. 3. Law the exercise of a right: the enjoyment of an estate. (Macquarie Dictionary, 1997) When we consider legal meanings related to possession, it is clear that “enjoyment” is a concept that is simultaneously juridical and subjective. Legal tests of Aboriginal title often rely on anthropological accounts of the “enjoyment” of the land in question by Aboriginal claimants’ ancestors. Contemporary claimants may be expected to perform versions of this enjoyment to satisfy anthropological witnesses through practices including hunting, fishing, camping, and ceremony. In 1992, the Australian High Court in Mabo v. Queensland (No2) found that Meriam people are entitled “as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use, and enjoyment of the lands of the Murray Islands” (1992, emphasis added). More recently, Canada’s Supreme Court found in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014, emphasis added) that Aboriginal title post-sovereignty reflects the fact of Aboriginal occupancy pre-sovereignty, with all the pre-sovereignty incidents of use and enjoyment that were part of the collective title enjoyed by the ancestors of the claimant group—most notably the right to control how the land is used.

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 233 While gambling in North America is one component of how culture was traditionally enjoyed by Indigenous people (Belanger, 2011), it is important to note that its contemporary manifestations are indelibly marked by racializing discourses that seek to define and circumscribe the politics of Indigenous sovereignty. Two developments can be observed. The first is the weaponizing of “authenticity” as a value against which Indigenous gambling enterprises are judged. The second is the frequent conflation of the cultural figure of the problem gambler with the figure of the “vulnerable” Indigenous citizen whose proclivity for dangerous consumptions is used to authorize intrusive research projects and governmental interventions (Moreton-Robinson, 2009; Nicoll, 2018). Both of these developments raise important questions about research ethics, which are the focus of the following section.

Regulating Gambling Research I am attending a gambling research conference and experience four presentations that leave me deeply disturbed. The first is a presentation by an expert on surveys that are used to identify problem gamblers. The speaker confides that her favorite part of designing these surveys is creating questions to demonstrate cognitive errors held by gamblers. These range from superstitious beliefs, to misunderstanding probabilities, to “chasing losses” and discounting the house edge. The second is a presentation by a researcher with a history of paid consultations for government and industry. He argues that attributions of harm to EGM consumption are misplaced due to a logical error on the part of researchers’ interpretation of statistics. The third is a presentation by an eminent gambling researcher who has served on independent bodies reviewing social impacts of gambling. He describes his surprise on being told that the government’s view in his country was that “all gambling forms are equivalent” in their capacity to cause harms. The fourth presentation claimed that recent population-level research on EGMs indicated declining individual harms over time and that researchers should shift our focus from harms related to this product. In the days following the conference, I attempt to distill what I found so disturbing about these presentations. I was unsettled by their underestimation of gamblers’ intelligence, their dismissal of a large body of research establishing EGM harms, and their misleading representation of the relationship between population and personal harms. But there was something more . . . As I sought to understand my unease in the days following the event, I recalled a statement by a participant in the study of gambling researchers conducted by Rebecca Cassidy and colleagues: “Gambling policy is not based on evidence but on the politics of what counts as evidence. It is whoever decides this question who holds the cards” (Cassidy, Loussouarn, & Pisac, 2013p. 38). To understand this problem, I invited a veteran gambling researcher to participate in an interview as part of my social research. How are gambling researchers joined and enjoined by the organization, conduct, and design of gambling in everyday life? Livingstone and Adams (2016)

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defend their commitment to a critical orientation towards gambling provision and regulation. After acknowledging that “specific technical and systematic arrangements will reflexively configure social space and subjectivity,” they argue, proliferation of gambling opportunities, particularly with highly tuned EGMs deployed in substantial chunks of social space, creates a situation where multiple partners have an interest in maintaining extractive rights for as long as possible. These partners are many and varied but their power and financial resources far exceed those of public health researchers and advocates . . . Indeed, as researchers, we are particularly alarmed by the extent to which it is now commonplace for gambling researchers to accept funding directly from industry sources. This speaks not only to the financial power of gambling industries and the tacit approval of governments but also to the widespread challenges those involved have in recognizing and responding appropriately to deep-set conflicts of interest. (Livingstone & Adams, 2011, p. 13) This problem is taken up in debates among researchers about the value and politics of the “Reno model” of responsible gambling, developed in the early 2000s as a settlement between industry, governments, and researchers. With reference to indicative research articles and case studies of regulation in Australia and Canada, Linda Hancock and Garry Smith (2017) argue that the focus on individual pathology, in conjunction with libertarian dogma among many researchers, has led to failure of corporate responsibility and a lack of government oversight. They argue that while responsible gambling measures aimed at individuals such as public awareness campaigns and resources for problem gamblers appear to promote consumer safety, responsible gambling provision is rarely implemented by advocates of the Reno model, several of whom have consulted directly for governments and industry stakeholders. A growing body of literature points to issues of research integrity raised by the preponderance of research on problem and pathological gambling. Questions are being posed about the role of industry and state parties in funding of gambling research events and outcomes; the dependence of problem gambling service providers on gambling revenue for funding; editorial independence of key journals; disincentives to research on the impact of “opportunity and availability” of gambling products on social harms (Livingstone and Adams, 2016; Orford, 2011, pp. 106–107); and a lack of access to meaningful data from industry. A related issue is that, because university researchers are often expected to conduct commissioned research, it is difficult to produce rigorous, independent research on gambling. This poses a major obstacle to academic researchers seeking to provide testimony in the face of the human suffering to which our work exposes us. Sanjay is a researcher who has worked for over a decade to make the suffering of EGM addicts more visible to governments and fellow researchers. His expertise was originally in alcohol and other substance addictions, but he shifted

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 235 his focus to EGMs when he noticed similarities between many of the problems experienced by players, alcoholics, and injecting drug users. His work began with documenting where machines were located in a large Australian city: It was pretty obvious that most of them were in areas . . . where people were doing it tough . . . this was about introducing a toxic product into areas, which could little absorb them, in order to make a bunch of people rich . . . including the state government. (Interviewee R, 2016) He shared his understanding of EGMs in the context of the broader political and research environment which keeps them in place. He described them as “steal[ing] money from people under false pretenses”: [EGMs] are not a legitimate form of entertainment in my opinion. They’re a way of relieving people of their money. They’re a way of getting people addicted and they’re essentially . . . the most avaricious devices . . . in the sense that they are entirely designed for making as much money as they can . . . to my mind, they’re misleading and deceptive and unconscionable products. . . . [To] extend the comparison with heroin, it’s like the state deciding that . . . we can’t balance the books so let’s give a license to people to stand on street corners legitimately with a government approved outlet and sell heroin. [Imagine] you can only buy 10-dollar bags at a time, but you can buy 20 hours a day if you wish . . . I mean there’d be an outcry if something like that occurred. (Interviewee R, 2016) Sanjay reflects on the process of raising public awareness about EGMs, in particular: I think people are starting to understand, more and more, about what EGMs do . . . the neuroscience which emerged in the last few years around the relationships between dopamine receptors and gambling addiction in someone . . . has been useful. But it’s very hard when, you know a lot of academics are very poor at communication. They don’t know how to tell their tale to anyone other than another academic. I think it’s really important to know how to do that. Particularly if you want to engage in what is essentially a political activity. (Interviewee R, 2016) The importance of academic testimony is explained with reference to the representations of gambling industries and their impact on public understanding. He speaks of the need to highlight specific examples where industry makes claims, which are clearly wrong. [They] get out there and they make claims and the papers report it and

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Governing Gambling in Everyday Life it has some sort of “truthiness” to it, to use a contemporary term . . . For example, one of the favorite pastimes of industry is to say there’s only one percent of the people who use EGMs and have a problem. I mean, that’s clearly not true because only 20% of the population use [them] . . . so that means that 5 percent of the people who use EGMs have problems with them . . . just trying to point that out is a full-time job, almost. (Interviewee R, 2016)

Sanjay identifies the broader ideological context within which debates about regulation occur as a significant challenge to public awareness: the doctrine of liberalism . . . argues that individuals are sovereign consumers who can decide for themselves what it is that pleases them and what gives them the most satisfaction. This belief is a sort of affirmation  .  .  . of the right to exploit people. It’s been used by the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry, the gambling industry .  .  . for a long time to justify their appalling practices. [The idea is] people should be free to buy whatever they’d like to spend their money on . . . Up to a point that sounds great doesn’t it? I mean who’s going to argue with freedom? But what it really boils down to . . . is the freedom of gigantic corporations to plunder people’s finances and health and well-being for their profits. (Interviewee R, 2016) The scale of capital and state investments in gambling, combined with the investment of the majority of gambling researchers in the perpetuation of “business as usual,” created a difficult situation for Sanjay. As he put it, “I’m almost ashamed to call myself a gambling researcher because so many are on the take” (Interviewee R, 2016). The debates and interview material above support a case that researchers on gambling who are critical of industry and government investments in gambling and who bring intellectual frameworks and methods from outside the psy-sciences are marginalized within the broader field of gambling research. One way that researchers have organized to address this marginalization is by developing a code of ethics to explicitly communicate the values that should guide gambling research in the public interest. This initiative, led by scholars in several countries around the world, comes from a recognition that, while universities are nominally state institutions charged with producing knowledge for the benefit of all citizens, they are increasingly beholden to powerful private stakeholders. A common thread that links together the values stated within the code of ethics is the problem of deceptive and extractive relationships between governments and citizens, industry and consumers, and researchers and researched. The authors of the

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 237 code argue that such relationships are irreconcilable with research that seeks to promote the public good.

Conclusion I have presented gambling as a litmus test against which to evaluate claims about neoliberal capitalist societies and strategies proposed to ameliorate the devastation they inflict on environments, populations, and the possibilities for human knowledge itself. I have considered some of the most intractable questions posed by commercial gambling industries and the states which depend on them and investigated some of the grounds on which they are opposed by critics and activists. After a close investigation of debates about EGMs’ status as gambling products, I explored how gamblers’ testimonies challenge a psy-scientific focus on the individual subject of responsible gambling. After analyzing a campaign against EGMs in a local community, I linked critical arguments about neoliberalism to deeper constitutional issues in settler-occupying nations. The final part of the chapter considered the role of researchers and public intellectuals in sustaining and challenging current configurations of legal gambling. My postscript includes reflections on gambling’s joys as well as suggestions to make gambling spaces, moments, and products less extractive and more enhancing of well-being.

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Nicoll, F. (2014). Indian dreaming: Iconography of the zone/zones of iconography. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 28, 835–849. doi:10.1080/103043 12.2014.941336. Nicoll, F. (2018). Beyond the figure of the problem gambler: Locating race and sovereignty struggles in everyday spaces of gambling. Law and Social Policy, 30, 127–149. Orford, J. (2011). Does the fault lie in the person or in the product? In An unsafe bet? The dangerous rise of gambling and the debate we should be having (pp. 96–120). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Popper, K. R. (1966). The open society and its enemies (5th ed., Vols. 1–2). New York: Routledge. Queensland Government. (2016). Electronic gaming machine power consumption. Business Queensland. Retrieved from www.business.qld.gov.au/industries/ hospitality-tourism-sport/liquor-gaming/gaming/electronic-gaming-machines/ power-consumption Ramp, W., & Badgley, K. (2009). Blood money: Gambling and the formation of civic morality. In J. F. Cosgrave & T. R. Kassen (Eds.), Casino state: Legalised gambling in Canada (pp. 42–43). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Ranadive, A., & Ginsberg, D. (2018, August 1). New tools to manage your time on Instagram and Facebook [Press release]. Instagram Info Centre. Retrieved from https://instagram-press.com Redshaw, S., & Nicoll, F. (2010). Gambling drivers: Regulating cultural technologies, subjects, spaces and practices of mobility. Mobilities, 5(3), 409–430. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rosengren, J. (2016, December). How casinos enable gambling addicts. The Atlantic. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/losing-itall/505814/ Schull, N. D. (2006). Machines, medications, modulation: Circuits of dependency and self-care in Las Vegas. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 30, 223–247. Schull, N. D. (2012). Addiction by design: Machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. Middlesex: Pelican. Striphas, T. (2015). Algorithmic culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18, 395–412. Thaler, R. H. (2015). Misbehaving: The making of behavioural economics. New York, NY: Penguin Books. triple j. (2017, September 18). HACK: Meet Australia’s billionaire Pokie King [Video file]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW5ICe9lgmY Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia. (2014). Retrieved from https://scc-csc.lexum. com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14246/index.do United States. (1988) Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Public Law 100-497–Oct. 17, 1988 100th Congress Sec. 2701. Walker, M., Matarese, K., Blaszczynski, A., & Sharpe, L. (2004). Explaining the attraction of poker machines: Cognition or conditioning? [Report to the casino community benefit fund trustees]. Sydney, NSW: Gambling Research Unit, University of Sydney.

Governing Gambling in Everyday Life 241 Weller, C. (2018, February 18). Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free: And it should be a red flag. Business Insider. Retrieved from www.businessinsider. com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2 Whitlock, G. (2015). Postcolonial life narratives: Testimonial transactions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Woolf, P. (2016). Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. London, UK: Verso. Young, M., & Markham, F. (2017). Coercive commodities and the political economy of involuntary consumption: The case of the gambling industries. Environment and Planning A, 49, 2762–2779. Young, M., & Markham, F. (2015). “Big gambling”: The rise of the global industry-state gambling complex. Addition Research and Theory, 23, 1–4. doi:10.3109/16066359.2 014.929118 Yucel, M., Carter, A., Harrigan, K., van Holst, R., & Livingstone, C. (2018). Hooked on gambling: A problem of human or machine design? The Lancet Psychiatry, 5(1), 20–21. doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(17)30467-4 Zable, A. (Ed.). (2013). From ruin to recovery: Gamblers share their stories. Melbourne: MonashLink.

Postscript

Between 2015 and 2017, I had two consultations with my retirement fund. Having recently moved overseas to pursue a new employment opportunity, I would no longer be making regular deposits into my Australian fund. I wanted to understand the financial consequences of my changed circumstances. The downtown office where I met my adviser was very similar to the refurbished offices of my bank, described in chapter 2. There was a spacious lobby area offering free snacks, espresso coffee, and quality teas, a fridge with quality fruit juices, as well as several small tables on which glossy brochures were placed, together with copies of daily financial newspapers. My adviser came out to greet me, checking that I was comfortable and had a drink in hand before escorting me to his office, engaging me, en route, with chat about forthcoming Christmas holidays and other pleasant topics. He then proceeded to administer a survey to gauge my risk tolerance profile. My profile was medium, meaning that I could tolerate some volatility with investments but was concerned to protect my accumulated capital. I silently wondered how many clients in my industry of academic professionals revealed high or no risk tolerance after taking this survey. My adviser began to launch his explanation for advocating a portfolio matched to my moderate risk tolerance when I interrupted him to explain that I would be temporarily exiting the fund. His confidence seemed to dissipate. My position was complicated, he explained, due to the limited products available for people exiting the system before retirement. I would need to make some challenging decisions to avoid “going backwards” financially while I was working overseas. He explained that the organization provided customized advice but that this would cost several thousand dollars. The alternative was a telephone consultation with an expert adviser who would tell me how to self-manage my retirement funds. Weeks later, I called the telephone adviser who gave me the same advice as the adviser in the downtown office. For over a year I did nothing with my funds. It seemed too complicated. The following year when I returned to Australia, I organized another consultation with a different adviser from the fund. I was determined to act one way or another. I underwent another risk tolerance assessment and came out with the same “moderate” risk profile. I said that I was now ready to invest my remaining funds. This adviser said he could not conduct transactions on my behalf but that he would advise me on a five-year investment strategy based on the current situation of global

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markets. There followed about five minutes of written and verbal disclaimers. After examining my existing portfolio, we were both surprised to discover that I had been allocated an aggressive investment strategy over a decade previously and that I had experienced considerable growth over the past twelve months. I had been gambling without knowing it. On closer investigation, I discovered that much of this growth was from booming stocks in military, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, and fossil fuels during the period surrounding the US elections which saw Donald Trump campaigning for the presidency. We examined investment products that would allow me to withdraw funds from these sectors to support renewable energy projects. Making the move to investments that aligned with my values felt good. I was wagering on a future I wanted to see rather than on the way things had always been. Now I was consciously wagering on a sustainable economy. And I had to get ready for a rough ride . . . As I reflected on my choice to divest from extractive industries, I thought about my interview with Graeme for this book. In particular, I remembered the moment when he told me that he would have preferred not to have won the lottery if this would have prevented his colleague from spiralling further into a gambling and drug addiction. I wondered if my decision to manage my retirement funds in ways that avoided investment in extractive industries was, in part, influenced by our conversation. With this book in progress, it seemed timely to make clear decisions about where I stand at the intersections of gambling, work, finance, and play in everyday life. I have shown that, in the psy-scientific literature, “problematic” and “recreational” gambling stand as opposite poles on a continuum that individuals must negotiate as they try to engage in gambling practices that are conducive to financial and social health. While it brings many positive connotations, including leisure, relaxation, and fun, the figure of the recreational gambler is an abstraction required for gambling’s governance rather than a description of how individuals experience gambling in everyday life. Once we move beyond the cultural figures of the problem and recreational gambler, and the value of individual responsibility that they sustain, it is clear that gambling harms depend on many variables, including income, financial commitments, and opportunity. Most people who gamble regularly do so more or less intensively at different stages of their lives (Reith & Dobbie, 2013). Part of what will determine this intensity is the extent to which gambling is embedded in ordinary and extraordinary aspects of our everyday lives. We have seen that commercial products and practices of gambling and play are often promoted as improving for individuals who consume or participate. The genealogies of transforming spaces, moments, and products that I have presented link ubiquitous invitations to play to broader social relations of domination, including gender and colonialism. Taking these into account explains why dismantling gambling industries or refusing to participate in the enjoinments and enjoyment they offer is not a simple matter. Gambling has become part of the tapestry of everyday lives in which we make more or less empowering and more or less ethical choices about consumption, investment,

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and recreation. The arguments I have mounted in this book are bound by a common thread: the conviction that we need to stop using gambling as neoliberal “policy by other means.” It is time to engage in informed political conversations about commercial gambling’s benefits and costs for states and to imagine paths to economic prosperity that sustain individuals and the communities to which they belong. Jackson Lears’ representation of gambling in American culture as being suspended between “cultures of luck” and “cultures of control” continues to resonate in nations built on settler-colonial occupation. Such nations generate powerful myths about the qualities that individuals need to cultivate to seize, secure, and maintain various kinds of property. Through racial fictions of civilization and the inevitable march of modernity, Indigenous territories were transformed from living bodies of law and culture into mana, or “something for nothing.” On one hand, commercial gambling, like mining to which it is often historically linked, perpetuates and legitimates the appropriation of Indigenous bodies and land as resources. On the other hand, in some cases, it has been successfully used to assert and sustain Indigenous sovereignty, building the economic and cultural capacity of First Nations and Tribes in North America. Training to become finopolitical subjects begins early in life. And it is often through the lens of play that structural injustices are recast as collective destinies or individual fates. Abt and Smith capture this well: Perhaps children and adolescents still have faith in the democratic ideal of equality of opportunity, since their competitive play mirrors the spirit of competition so ingrained in American civilization. They hope for a future reward brought about, at least in part, through their own effort . . . In this connection it is interesting to note how many popular adult games fall into the category of pure chance . . . the most often played games—especially casino slot machines and lotteries—fall completely in the realm of Caillois’s alea. Any attempt to control these games without cheating falls into the realm of superstition. Perhaps adults have less confidence in their ability to control their destinies and are therefore more willing to accept the unearned prizes bestowed by chance. (Smith & Abt, 1984, p. 133) The drift they describe, from skill-based to aleatory games, might be compared to a fall from grace, as individuals mature and gradually recognize that the rules and design of games make success more likely for some than for others. A notable exception is professional investors who accumulate wealth in share markets but mistakenly attribute their success to rational decisions, underestimating the role of randomness in trading and everyday life. Ironically, the very strength of the conviction that they are not gamblers reinforces their gambling behaviours as investors (see Taleb, 2004, 2007).

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My wager in this book was that if we can think and write about gambling differently, new knowledge will emerge from the shadows of problem gambling literature and new ways of governing gambling can be imagined and trialed. It might then be possible to shift frameworks of cultural and political intervention from the individual subject of responsible gambling to those which better enable corporate responsibility and social sustainability. Accordingly, the first cultural study of gambling in everyday life ought to provide some guidelines for governments, researchers, industry, and consumers. These will not consist of authoritative truth claims about gamblers or government policies, and they are sufficiently broad as to apply to most national and sub-national jurisdictions within liberal democratic societies. They also tend towards damage control and harm minimization rather than abolition or revolution. This is not because I lack hope in revolutionary projects but, rather, because commercial gambling is an important thread that holds liberal political economy together; eliminating gambling would likely contribute to unravelling the racial and patriarchal forms of capitalism which have produced the author of this book and many of its readers. While I contribute to political, economic, and cultural movements to make an inhabitable world for the next seven generations (Borrows, 2008), my experiential and academic knowledge cannot and should not prescribe what this world will look like. I am nevertheless confident that the unique joys belonging to gambling can be part of it. As citizens in liberal democratic societies, we should be empowered to ask and formulate answers to the following questions: What kind of gambling spaces do we want? What kind of gambling moments do we want? What kind of gambling products do we want? In the next three sections, I present some provisional answers to these questions.

Transforming Gambling Spaces Gambling spaces can be reconfigured so they do not continue to broker “statey” compromises between government and industry, which encourage individuals to self-dispose when their finances are exhausted. These spaces can become more open to the sense of belonging that supports a humane unfolding of everyday life for individuals and populations. To achieve this, gambling spaces should conform to the rules governing other kinds of small and large business which service the public, rather than persisting as exceptional spaces that are empowered to self-regulate. Citizens should be invited to actively contribute to drafting enforceable codes of conduct which mandate screening and training of security personnel to prevent the application of undue or lethal force on gamblers. We should also demand protection for industry whistle-blowers and meaningful penalties for violating rules created to protect gamblers’ rights as citizens and consumers. Other measures to address problems associated with gambling spaces include removing special tax concessions and banning donations to political parties,

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as well as preventing former politicians from taking consultancy and other advisory roles for gambling industries. Staff working in gambling spaces should be given training and authority to intervene where individuals are obviously experiencing financial problems in venues, and access to addiction and debt counselling services should be made available within 24 hours without charge. Surveillance technologies used in gambling spaces should be applied to make self-exclusion orders more effective for individuals who register for them. Singapore provides a model worth consideration here, empowering family members and spouses to request exclusion of individuals whose expenditure on gambling is causing them hardship. Gambling venues should also provide quiet and comfortable spaces without tobacco smoke where individuals can take “time out” to recalibrate their priorities. Alcohol should be acknowledged as a potent agent within the extractive processes of commercial gambling. Staff working in gaming spaces should be trained to understand how alcohol increases the likelihood of people spending more than they intend and to adjust their provision accordingly.

Transforming Gambling Moments Gambling moments could be better aligned with existing regulations designed to protect social order and peace. Casinos could be made to close at the same time as other entertainment venues. Opportunities for non-extractive gambling moments should be cultivated in everyday life. Informal poker games, tipping competitions, lottery syndicates, and other betting competitions should be supported but not promoted by businesses and other organizations. The potential of non-traditional and informal gambling moments to enhance a sense of belonging and well-being could also be recognized in workplaces to build resilience among employees faced with arbitrary and unjust outcomes. For example, keeping a “book” on grant and promotion decisions can shift the focus from individual “merits” and “deficits” to the ground of everyday experience where we will encounter failure as often as success, and where unpredictable and unknown factors beyond our control can be as decisive as our talent or agency. The ritual component of gambling competitions, including fashion parades, special lunches, or wearing the colours of our favourite sporting teams, can be encouraged as ways of bringing people together at work. A certain proportion of money spent on these games can be put aside for donation to causes that members of these everyday gambling competitions value.

Transforming Gambling Products and Services The limitations of policy based on abstract theories of consumer sovereignty should be clear after close investigation of EGMs and other algorithmic gambling products and social media platforms. The proposition that individuals can make beneficial decisions while under the influence of substances or

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devices to which they have become addicted does not make rational or ethical sense. We need to make clearer calls about what constitutes “gambling” within markets for entertainment, investment, and play. In this context, we will recall my revision of Reith’s historically grounded definition of gambling in chapter 4. Gambling is a product or service which is partially integrated within the everyday world around it and within which chance is deliberately courted as a mechanism which governs a redistribution of wealth among players as well as a commercial interest or “house.” We need to ask what relationships obtain among the following terms “commercial interest,” “deliberate courting of chance,” and “redistribution of wealth among players.” For chance to be deliberately courted and for wealth to be redistributed among players, the commercial interest or “house edge” must be transparent to all players. The legitimacy of gambling products requires a clear distinction to be made by providers between “the consumption of risk” and “risky consumption” (Cosgrave, 2009). This is currently not the case with EGMs and other products that distribute prizes according to commercially protected algorithms. Rather than being marketed as gambling products, EGMs could be reclassified as addictive games that deliver rewards according to a schedule that is impossible for players to calculate and which reliably deliver a specified percentage of profit to owners and venues. At a moment of unprecedented evolution in gaming design and delivery, it is also important to clarify the difference between the monetization of play in video games and the purchase of gambling products and services. Clearer lines should be drawn about exactly where financial products and services end and where gambling begins. Adapting my revised definition of gambling would also serve this purpose by redefining finance as “a product or service which is partially integrated within the everyday world around it and within which chance is deliberately minimized as a mechanism to govern a redistribution of wealth among investors as well as a commercial interest in their transactions.” Self-help seminars like the one discussed in chapter 4, as well as projects of financial literacy using “gamification,” should be closely scrutinized. Their designers and promotors should be required to provide empirical evidence of success to support their claims, and participants should be allowed to record and criticize materials presented in “free” educational workshops.

Transforming Gambling Research Ethics To redress the imbalance between qualitative and quantitative research, we need more embodied and critically engaged knowledge of gambling spaces, moments, and products. Researchers need to expand their methods beyond the survey and the laboratory to spend more time playing and talking with gamblers. Information about gambling products displayed to the public must be supported by independent research, not research directly supported by industry and government stakeholders. Potential conflicts of interest should be addressed transparently on all academic and non-academic publications.

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The language of gambling research addressing individual and social harms needs to be changed. Instead of referring to vulnerable individuals and populations, we should refer to individuals and populations that are targeted or endangered by commercial gambling industries. And instead of referring to clusters of illness as “co-morbidities,” we should acknowledge the toxicity of many products and substances provided by gambling, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries. Academic researchers should also define clearly what is meant when we use terms including “gambling,” “gaming,” “entertainment,” and “responsibility” and justify our arguments about policy accordingly. Researchers addressing Indigenous gambling should consider how these terms are framed by racial governance in settler-occupying nations, with particular attention to intensive and targeted marketing and predatory extraction of profits from those already harmed by gambling.

Amplifying the Joys of Gambling in Everyday Life Gambling in everyday life is not restricted to exchanges involving a business interest; some of our most important and valued gambling experiences may occur outside the sphere of regulated, commercial gambling. To close this study, I build on my participant-observation and social research to describe what joyful gambling in everyday life might look like. It is a freezing Friday night in early spring. The temperature is 18 below zero when I leave my home to drive cautiously on slippery roads to the home of a colleague in my university who is hosting a poker game. I arrive early and am greeted by the host and one of her long-term poker buddies. As other players arrive, snacks and drinks are provided and pizza orders taken down for later. Accompanying me is a young colleague who has recently joined the university and is a keen online poker player. He is introduced to others amidst small talk about our workplace. Once we are settled around the lounge room table, the host reveals a new purchase: a felt poker mat which is sensuous to the touch. We are already laughing. The host then brings out a selection of card decks to choose from, all purchased from different holiday destinations, some of which are delightfully kitsch. Alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks lubricate the social gathering as we begin to play. Each player is given the right to choose the game when the dealer button arrives in their place. This makes the game an opportunity to learn about old and obscure forms of the game, as well as a way for individuals to play to our strengths. I am still learning the basics. We play Omaha, Chicago High and Chicago Low, and Five Card Draw and a game where everyone puts a card on their forehead and tries to guess its value. Dealers also select and describe the rules for games that no one has heard of and that we suspect have been invented on the night. That keeps things interesting. At first I stick to Texas hold ’em (no limit). But then I learn about “Crazy 3s” where the 3, 6, and 9 are wild cards. For the moment, Crazy 3s has become “my game.” The poker night is a flexible and open gathering with few rules. People are free to bring their partners, and no previous experience is required. The host is responsible

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for food on the night and people bring their own drinks, along with snacks to share. The levels of skill vary enormously, from players who win at land-based and online casinos to those who are playing for the first time. Men and women are equally welcome to participate, and teenagers can join in with their parents’ consent. The amount of money required to generate enjoyment has had to be negotiated over time. In earlier games, with 50 dollar buy-ins, several people were wiped out after the first hour, while others spent more than they wanted to for a fun night out. We halved the buy-in and everyone was able to happily continue. Poker night is a loose event in our work and social calendars and there is no pressure to participate. Sometimes family commitments or other social events compete or players are out of town. The autonomy of poker night from the organizational roles that often mandate socializing, such as work lunches and office parties, makes it even more enjoyable. This is not to say that poker night lacks governance and discipline. Uncodified rules could be expressed as a list of dos and don’ts. These include: do trust that the banker and the dealer are not going to cheat; don’t make beginners feel stupid for forgetting the rules, but you can laugh at their expense when they make poor decisions; do supply quality food and beverages when you are hosting, whether you are cooking or ordering take outs. Don’t get serious about winning or losing and do celebrate surprising turns of the cards, like when the novice beats the professional player at the table with an outrageous bluff. After the game begins, don’t discuss work or personal life for the remainder of the evening. Together these rules reliably produce a gambling moment that is joyful, bringing people together in a place and time which is non-extractive and energizing. I’m sure that many readers could provide accounts of similar experiences of joyful gambling in everyday life, whether these are within or outside legal commercial contexts. It is my hope that such experiences will guide the ways we proceed to do research and contribute to policy conversations about gambling in future.

References Borrows, J. (2008). Seven generations, seven teachings: Ending the Indian Act. Research paper for the National Centre for First Nations Governance. Retrieved from http:// fngovernance.org/resources_docs/7_Generations_7_Teachings.pdf Cosgrave, J. (2009). Governing the gambling citizen: The state, consumption and risk. In J. F. Cosgrave & T. R. Klassen (Eds.), Casino state: Legalised gambling in Canada (pp. 46–47). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Reith, G., & Dobbie, F. (2013). Gambling careers: A longitudinal, qualitative study of gambling behavior. Addiction Research & Theory, 21(5), 376–390. doi:10.3109/160 66359.2012.731116 Smith, J., & Abt, V. (1984). Gambling as Play. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 474, 122–132. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1044369 Taleb, N. (2004). Fooled by randomness: The hidden role of chance in life and in the markets. London, UK: Penguin. Taleb, N. (2007). The black swan. London, UK: Penguin.

Appendix

Altogether 118 people participated in this research, which was conducted over a period of eight years. Ethics permission was obtained by the University of Queensland for the life of the project, and interview and focus group data from all participants was anonymized for the purpose of all publications (including this book). Social research included three surveys and two focus groups, with a total of 103 participants. Participants in two of the surveys and both of the focus groups were all employees of a large public sector organization. Their average age was 50 years old, with the oldest being 74 years old and the youngest being 24 years old. The gender ratio was almost equal for male and female, with one participant identifying as transgender. Throughout the manuscript, material from the focus groups is cited as Focus Group A (FGA, 2014) and Focus Group B (FGB, 2014). In addition to these surveys and focus groups, I conducted a survey of 44 students about their experience of Melbourne Cup Day celebrations at school and in everyday life in an advanced level undergraduate class in cultural studies class for which I was not the instructor. The oldest member of this group was 31 and the youngest was 19 years old. Qualitative research included 18 interviews with gamblers, non-gamblers, former gambling and finance industry employees, gambling scholars, and community activists. These questions were open-ended to allow participants to discuss gambling in the terms they encountered it in their everyday lives. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of participants in these interviews. In the manuscript, references to each individual interview are made in alphabetical order from A through to R (e.g. Interviewee A). My research assistant also conducted qualitative research on Melbourne Cup Day celebrations in the workplace in 2015. Material from her notes is cited as research assistant fieldnotes (RAFN, 2015).

Statement of originality and acknowledgement of previously published research The research published in this book is based on primary and secondary sources generated and analyzed between 2006 and 2019. Short extracts of

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examples and interpretations used in this book also appear in the following three articles: Nicoll, F. (2008). The problematic joys of gambling: Subjects in a state, New Formations no. 63, 101–118. Nicoll, F. (2011). The Pokie lounge as a cultural site of neoliberal governmentality in Australia, Cultural Studies Review, 17(2), 219–256. Nicoll, F. (2018). Beyond the figure of the problem Gambler: Locating race and sovereignty struggles in everyday life, Journal of Law and Social Policy. http://digitalcom mons.osgoode.yorku.ca/jlsp/

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure on the respective page. Aboriginality 63; see also Indigenous peoples Abt, Vicki 46 accommodation 76, 77, 78, 100, 111; see also statey actants 5, 26, 54 Adams, Peter 222, 225–226 addiction 195, 208–209; consequences of 105; to EGMs 211–216; encouragement of 198–199; to gambling 41, 42, 52–53, 54, 216; and liberal government 42; machine 201; psycho-biological 67; to smart phones 56–57; and social despair 68; study of 44; see also problem gambling advertisements: for lottery 127, 128, 142; for Melbourne Cup Day race 146; online 126–127; for sports betting 162–163; for Storm Financial investment 180; on televised football games 173–174; totalizer agency boards 162–163 affect 26; and moral disapproval 48; shame, disgust, distaste 49–50; machine gambling 59; specific to gambling 58; affective turn 57; enjoyment 63; joys 67–71, 207 African Americans 80, 134 Ainsworth, Len 171–172, 206 Ainsworth Game Technology 172, 206 Albarrán-Torres, Cesar 163, 169, 178 algorithmic culture 202 algorithmic games 164, 168 algorithmic identities 4–5 algorithmic technology 183 Alliance for Gambling Reform 220 Allon, Fiona 183, 187

America, gambling in 148; see also Atlantic City; Las Vegas American National Council on Problem Gambling 46 American Psychiatric Association 46 Angry Birds 181 anthropology 3–4, 27–28, 48, 68, 197, 229; cultural 4 anti-capitalism 227; see also capitalism Anzac Day 150 The Apprentice (television show) 91 arcade games, video 177–178 architecture: and gambling spaces 87–89; regulation of 196 Aristocrat 172, 178, 204, 206 artificial intelligence 31, 160 assemblages 26 asylum seekers 209 Atlantic City 90, 91, 95, 188; working conditions in 133 austerity, neoliberal 218 Australia: Anzac Day 150; asylum seekers in 209; Australia Day 151; casino resorts in 90–99, 150; Electronic Gaming Machines in 101–108; gambling on sporting events 135; gambling spaces in 84, 171–172; history of gambling in 171–172; Indigenous peoples in 232; Melbourne Cup Day race 149–157; Queensland 153; see also Barangaroo casino (Sydney); Crown Casino (Melbourne) Australia Day 151 authenticity 233 auto-ethnography 30; see also ethnography autotelic personality 58–59

Index Barangaroo casino (Sydney) 92–95, 171 bare democracy 217, 226; see also democracy Bateson, Gregory 13 Bauman, Zymunt 24, 61, 206 behavioural economics 195, 200; see also economics behavioural psychology 195, 206 behaviouralism 202 Benjamin, Walter 9, 121–122, 129–130 Benter, Bill 168 Bentham, Jeremy 20, 58 Bet365 173 Betfair 173 Big Fish 172 Big Gambling 224–225 bingo venue 76–77 biopolitics 14, 16, 20, 25, 63, 96, 228 biopower 15–16, 25 black box 168 Blackwell, Glenda 143 “Blow Up the Pokies” (pop song) 40–41, 217 Borgata casino (Atlantic City) 90, 133 Borrows, John 230–231, 245 “bots” 164 Bourdieu, Pierre 11, 26, 50, 56, 68, 123 Brockovich, Erin 211 Brown, Aaron 123, 131 Brown, Wendy 217–218, 226–227 Caillois, Roger 124 Campbell, Marie 29 Canada: gambling on sporting events 134–135; Indigenous peoples in 230–232; legal history of 230–231; video lottery in 199 Canto Bight 178–179 capital: human 21, 217; pre-accumulated 228–229; symbolic 12; transnational flows of 18 capitalism 5, 17, 68, 129; anti- 227; casino 4, 6; global 123, 142; liberal 21; neoliberal 237; North American 18; platform 169, 178 Carse, James P. 68–69 Casey, Emma 131 casino capitalism 4, 6; see also capitalism casino resorts 77, 90–95, 109, 132; advertising for 120; in Australia 90–99, 150; gendered dimensions of 91; surveillance of 95–97; see also Atlantic City; casinos; gambling spaces; Las Vegas

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casinos: Barangaroo casino (Sydney) 92–95, 171; Borgata casino (Atlantic City) 90, 133; Crown casino (Melbourne) 82, 82, 92, 94–98, 120, 204–205, 207, 208; gendered dimensions of 91; Holland casino 84; Marina Bay Sands casino (Singapore) 90; in Monte Carlo 80; Native American 80; security staff training in 49–50; Studio City casino (Macau) 81, 84–87; surveillance of 95–97; Treasury Casino 65; Venetian Casino (Macau) 90; see also Atlantic City; casino resorts; gambling spaces; Las Vegas Cassidy, Rebecca 27, 43–45, 178, 233 Certeau, Michel 9, 12, 108 chance 3, 17, 40, 64, 67, 70, 80, 119, 127, 143, 161, 166, 169, 181, 183, 198–199, 201, 204, 209, 247; see also commodified chance 187 Chandler, Susan 132 Charger, Charlie 143 Chicago School 23, 79, 195–196, 231; second generation 196 children, use of mobile devices by 202 civilization 60, 227, 229–230, 244 civilized 230 civilizational 227, 230 civil society 227 code of ethics 236 coercive commodities 162, 202 collaboration 178 colonialism 4, 17, 229 commodity activism 54, 161 compulsion 67, 203 Concordet, Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat (marquis de) 21 conditioning 205 consumers 12, 14, 18–19, 27, 42, 44, 47, 50, 52, 53–54, 65, 67–68, 71, 77, 80, 81, 104, 108–110, 160–162, 164, 167, 169–170, 172–176, 178–179, 183, 187, 194, 198–199, 200–202, 204–206, 208, 216, 223–224, 243, 236, 245–246 consumer advocacy 208–217 consumerism 4, 12 consumer rights 32, 194 consumer sovereignty 206 control societies 17 Coren, Victoria 131 corporate responsibility 33, 245 Cosgrave, James 205, 247 Costello, Tim 209

254

Index

creativity, and culture 48 Credit Karma 183 credit lines 174 credit rating apps 183 credit scores 183 critical cultural studies 2, 7–8 critical Indigenous scholarship 227, 229 Crown Casino (Melbourne) 82, 82, 92, 94–98, 120, 204–205, 207, 208 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 cultural anthropology 4; see also anthropology cultural economy research 5 cultural research 9, 32, 44 cultural studies: affective turn 57; everyday life in 10 culture(s): celebrity 170; of chance 17; consumer 4; of control 17; convergence 178; and creativity 48; digital forms of 160; and hierarchies of taste and value 48–49; Indigenous 224; laboratory 229; ordinary nature of 7–8; and social worlds 48; as specific structure of feeling 57; value of 11; see also popular culture Cvetkovich, Ann 57–58 cybernetics 168 dark flow 55, 59 Davies, Dan 184 Dean, Mitchell 15 death drive 206 DeGeneres, Ellen 160, 171 De Goede, Marieke 17, 68 Deleuze, Gilles 17 democracy 18–25; bare 217, 226; constitutional grounds of 223–233; future of 226–227; liberal 197, 228–229, 230; and neoliberalism 193 depression 57–58 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) 46 digital games, hybrid 177 digital media infrastructure 5 Doughney, James 198 Drawing Dead (documentary) 52 economic inequality 25 economic irrationalities 5 economic refugees 209 economics 5; behavioural 200; global 171; neoliberal 228; rogue 227–228; see also global financial crisis economic theory, liberal 162

EGMs. See Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs) Electronic Arts 179 Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs) 41, 42–43, 48–49, 50, 101, 143, 162, 170–172, 177–178; addictive qualities of 54, 110; in Australia 101–108; based on television shows 170; campaigns against 193, 237; critics of 209; dark patterns in 201; design of 118; design principles 202; difference from other forms of gambling 216; disposability of 219; distinctive potency of 56; featuring Ellen DeGeneres 160; harms caused by 109, 193, 203–206, 209–211, 235; legal challenges to 199–200; legal status of 193, 197–208; locations of 111–112; masochistic use of 64; new ergonomic features 170; Playboythemed 115–116, 116; programming of machines 212–214; raising public awareness about 235–236; regulation of 236; social stigma associated with 51; “sticky” design of 202; use of electricity by 223–224; using celebrities for marketing 170–171; and the zone 126, 203; see also gaming machines; pokie lounges emotion, sociality of 50 enjoinments 65, 67, 70, 195, 197, 208, 243 enjoyment 1, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 44, 57–67, 193, 232 entertainment: gambling as 40, 164; monetization of 178 environmental extraction 224–233 epistemological 6, 26, 40, 43, 52, 56, 62, 71, 227, 228 equality 18–25 eSports 77, 177 ethnography 3–4, 78, 96, 131; auto- 30; institutional 29 everyday life: gambling in 7, 9, 14–18, 31, 32, 117; gamification of 13; governmentality and gambling in 14–18; and the problem gambler 40; psychologization of 46; role of repetition in 10 extractive industries, and the constitutional grounds of democracy 223–233 Facebook 202–203; see also social media fantasy sports betting 177

Index Farrelly, Elizabeth 93 Felski, Rita 10, 12, 128 feminism 4, 18, 26, 91 Fife, Wayne 68 Figart, Ellen 133 finance 5; cultural theory of 187; as gambling 164–165; and gambling 182–184; gendered contexts of 134; intersections with gambling, work, and play 15, 18–25, 77; and the lottery 142; performativity of 5; rational sphere of 17; regulation of 217; wagering on 162 Financial Counselling Australia 174 financial fraud cases 184 financialization 4, 5 financial literacy 166 financial products, gambling on 181–188 financial stress 206 financial trading software 165 finopolitics 109, 143, 206 finopower 1, 7, 15, 18–25, 29, 77, 79, 231; neoliberal 59; and problem gambling 217–219; and suicide 25 Fiske, John 8 flow 55, 59, 60–62; see also dark flow Fong, Wai Mun 182 Fortuna (goddess) 68, 127 Foucault, Michel 7, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 41, 96, 210 Franklin, Benjamin 18 freedom 16, 18–25, 60; of gambling enterprises 218; individual 67; and liberalism/neoliberalism 21; powers of 197; for white immigrants 229 free enterprise 218, 219 Freud, Sigmund 3, 206 Frye, Marilyn 89 fundamentalism, religious 18 gamble-play media 162, 163, 169, 178 The Gambler (Dostoevsky) 3, 125–126, 166 The Gambler (song) 53 Gambler’s Anonymous 211, 216 gambler’s paranoia 204 gambling 1, 24, 28, 31; 50/50 draw 134–135; activities divided by age group 153; aesthetic approach to 9; agonistic 173; aleatory games 80, 166; algorithmic games 117; in Australia 135; on Balinese cockfights 197; benefits of 23; in Canada 134–135; for charitable purposes 31; commercial 2, 119; communication materials

255

generated by 26; as consumer product 161; deregulation of 160; effect on relationships 13; enjoyment of 1, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 44, 57–67, 193, 232; as entertainment 40, 164; on eSports 77; in everyday life 7, 9, 14–18, 31, 32, 117; experience of 124–125; and finance 182–184; on financial products 181–188; gendered dimensions of 126–127, 130–131, 134, 157; Goffman’s theory of 129; governance of 46; and governmentality 2–3, 13, 14–18, 21–22, 31, 44; and habitus 11–12, 13, 48; harms caused by 3, 32; and individual rights 3; intersections with finance, work, and play 15, 18–25, 77; legal 193; legitimization of 2; as leisure practice 40, 164; liberalization of 225; linked to good works 1; literary and scholarly attention to 3–7; in Macau 162; machine 59; marketing of 163; and media interactivity 173; on the Melbourne Cup 10, 32, 117, 146, 149–157; as model for social action 122; normalization of 41; in North America 232; ordinary nature of 7–14; pathological 32, 44, 47, 48; as pervasive social activity 3–4; political approach to 9; and the political process 231–232; popular representations of 26–27; punter’s clubs 135, 136–138; recreational 40, 44, 51, 62; regulation of 18–25, 193–197; and religion 68, 216; Reno model 234; representations of 64–66; responsible 43, 44, 51, 54, 84, 177, 194, 195, 197, 200, 201, 206, 214–215, 234, 237; as ritual 161; and sexual perversion 65–66; skillbased games 80; as social action 197; social aspects of 136–138; on sporting events 134–140, 162; statey qualities of 196–197; theoretical approach to 9; tipping competitions 135, 137, 139, 157; vernacular knowledge about 41; by women 130–132, 134; at work 134–140; see also Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs); gambling industries; gambling research; gambling spaces; gambling systems; online gambling; problem gambling gambling addiction see addiction gambling advertisement see advertisements

256

Index

gambling industries 14, 237; communication materials generated by 26; damaging effects of 193; as extractive and unsustainable 224–233; and governance 2; growth of 2–3; and regional and urban development 2–3 gambling machines see Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs) gambling mechanics 161 gambling research 15, 41–42; and addiction research 44; auto-ethnography 30; and the configurations of legal gambling 193; criticism of 209–210; ethics in 194; focus groups 29, 30, 51, 110, 136, 144, 151; funded by the gambling industry 234; interviews 29, 30, 51, 106–107, 119, 136–138, 144–147, 154–156, 175–176, 199–200; methodologies 25–30; obstacles to 234; participantobservation 27–29, 104–108, 115–117, 140–141, 152, 167; and problem gambling 43–49; problems created by 48; qualitative 27, 32, 44; regulation of 233–237; and research integrity 234; research topics 44–45; sites of 28–30; surveys 29, 30; and “the zone” 58–59 gambling spaces 31, 32, 47, 77–78, 84; in Atlantic City 90, 91, 95, 133; in Australia 84, 171–172; Barangaroo casino (Sydney) 92–95, 171; Borgata casino (Atlantic City) 90, 133; compared to spaces of finance 111; Crown Casino (Melbourne) 82, 82, 92, 94–98, 94, 120, 204–205, 207, 208; Holland Casino 84; laser light show sponsored by lottery (Brisbane) 83; in Macau 84–87, 90, 171; Marina Bay Sands casino (Singapore) 90; Monte Carlo casinos 80; Native American casinos 80; New Lisboa casino (Macau) 88; in North America 80; Parisian arcades 121; regulation of 84; “sensible” 117; in Singapore 84, 90; as sites of hyper-productivity 111; statey 89–90, 101, 111; Studio City casino (Macau) 81, 84–87, 85; Taj Mahal casino (Atlantic City) 91, 188; transformation of 79–84; Venetian casino (Macau) 90; Wynn casino (Macau) 86; see also casino resorts; Las Vegas; pokie lounges Gambling Studies 26, 43, 44, 47, 232 gambling systems 166–170; algorithmic 164, 168; casino table games 167;

systems for prediction, calculation, and analysis 166–167 games and gaming: and game design 177; mobile 4; online platforms 153; roleplaying 19–20; social 2–3, 162, 172, 178; typology of 124; see also video games; videogaming game theory 5 gamification 5, 13, 62, 183, 247 gaming, and game design 177 gaming apps 4, 62 gaming machines see Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs) gaming platforms, online 153 gaming systems, algorithmic 168 Gardiner, Michael 11 Geertz, Clifford 197 Gender 10–12, 17, 30, 32, 63, 89, 91, 105, 117, 126–127, 129–134, 137–139, 157, 162, 173–174, 184, 197, 204, 243, 250; and class 138; and politics 134; and roles 133, 136; global financial crisis 5, 6, 181, 183, 218 global financial markets 184 globalization 12, 227 GoalProfit 168 God 68, 70; relationship with 216 Goffman, Erving 122, 129, 130, 197 Goggin, Joyce 19 Gordon, John Steele 230 governance 7, 15, 29, 32, 42, 46, 52, 80, 89, 95, 183, 188, 194, 195, 209, 222, 243; and the gambling industries 2–3, 249; liberal 68; over- 89; racial 229, 248; self- 46 governmentality: and gambling 3, 13, 14–18, 21, 31, 44, 87; laissez-faire 16; liberal 20, 79, 218; neoliberal 16, 23, 226; and social science 6, 7; social welfare mode of 16 governmentality scholarship 15 Gregor, Frances 29 habitus 11–12, 13, 48, 123 Hackley, Chris, 30 Hall, Stuart 9, 24 Hancock, Linda 234 Harvey, David 6 Hayano, David M. 27–28 Hayek, Friedrich 21, 60, 61, 228 Hidalgo, Pablo 179 Holland Casino 84 horse racing 121, 150–153, 164, 167 human capital 21, 217

Index iconography 172 identity: Aboriginal 231; algorithmic 4–5; feminine 132; gendered dimensions of 157; hyper-masculine 130; individual 2; local 157; national 128, 150, 157; non-Aboriginal 231; social 2, 17, 18, 124–125, 157; working-class 132 illusio 12, 68, 123 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act 229 Indigenous activism 227 Indigenous culture 224 Indigenous peoples 17–18, 60, 63, 80, 84, 134, 141, 194, 226–231; in Australia 63, 143, 232; in Canada 63, 94–95, 224, 230–232; gambling enterprises 4, 63, 232–233, 248; in North America 134, 194, 233; see also sovereignty, Indigenous industrialization 121 infrastructure 5, 111, 141, 163, 169, 232 Instagram 202–203; see also social media insurance 5, 16, 25, 70–71, 122, 142, 176 intellectual property (IP) 172 investment 2, 12, 16, 19–20, 78, 89–90, 105, 107, 162, 165, 170, 172, 176, 180, 182–183, 194, 199, 242–243, 247; and real estate 185–187; and simulator 183 Jameson, Frederick 67 Jenkins, Henry 178 Johnson, Rian 179 Jones, Jill 132 Jubinville, Gisele 211–216 Ka-Ching: Pokie Nation (documentary) 50, 102, 118, 220 Keane, Helen 42 Keynes, John Maynard 23, 182, 194 Kholer, Alan 164 Kingma, Sytze 47, 54, 78, 125 Kiyosaki, Robert 184–188 Last Bets (McGuire) 97–98 Las Vegas 68, 78, 79, 132, 162, 214; entertainers in 170 Latour, Bruno 229 law, regulation of 196–197 Lears, Jackson 17 Leclair, Jean 231 Lefebvre, Henri 78, 87 leisure 10, 16, 40, 60, 77, 78, 82, 101, 102, 112, 121, 131, 132, 161, 162, 164, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 205, 243; global 164; passive 58, 60, 62

257

Lessig, Lawrence 196 liberalism 236; and democracy 197; freedom and 21; laissez-faire 16; through the lens of gambling 18; as a ‘way of doing things’ 20; welfare 16; see also neoliberalism liberal societies 3, 63 libertarianism 234 libertarian paternalism 200 lifestyle betting 174 literary theory 208 Livingstone, Charles 54 loot boxes 161, 164, 177, 179–180 lottery 124, 131–132, 194; advertisement tied to Mother’s Day 127, 128; changing schedules of 143; for charitable purposes 142; display of products 139; government-run 195; history of 141; Keno 143; mindset 182; scratch tickets 143; systems of 167; ticket checking device 140; video 199; winning 140–147 The Lottery (Edgeworth) 3 “The Lottery” (Jackson) 218–219 Louisiana Lottery 141–142 Lucasfilm Story Group 179 Mabo v. Queensland 232 Macau 84–87, 90, 171; New Lisboa casino 88; Studio City casino 81, 84–87, 85; Venetian casino 90; Wynn casino 86 March Madness 148 Margin Call (film) 183 Marina Bay Sands casino (Singapore) 90 marketing: using celebrities 170–171; of gambling 163; gendered 126–127, 173; lottery-related 117–118; for online sports gambling 173; social 142 markets, regulation of 196 Markham, Francis 202, 224 martingale 167; see also reverse martingale Marx, Karl 58 Marxism 61, 162 masculinism 129 massively multiplayer online role-playing games 19–20 Mbembme, Achille 25 McGuire, Michaela 97–98 McGurrin, Martin C. 46 media and communication studies 9 media interactivity 173 media platforms 4, 169; algorithmic games 173

258

Index

mega-urbanization 12 Melbourne Cup Day race 10, 32, 117, 146, 149–157 Mill, Harriet Taylor 22–23, 194 Mill, John Stuart 22–23, 58, 194 mobile devices: addiction to 56–57; use by children 202 modernism 7, 10, 61, 129 modernity 7, 61–62 monetization 5, 181, 247 Money Monster (film) 183–184 Monte Carlo casinos 80 Murnane, Gerald 167 Mutari, Ellen 133 Nadesan, Majia 15 Naltrexrone 47 Napoleoni, Loretta 227–228 nationalism: Australian 150; and gambling 149 Native American casinos 80 Nazism 21 necropower 25 neoliberalism 7, 15, 16, 20, 23, 60, 88–89, 217, 226–227, 237; and austerity 218; and democracy 193; freedom and 21 neoliberal society 123, 161 neoliberal theory 79, 228 neo-Marxism 4, 68; see also Marxism neuroscience 47, 51, 206 New Deal 21 Nilbert, David 142 nudging 200–201, 205 Obama, Barack 148 Odell, Jamie 172 off-shore competitions 194 online gambling 133–134, 153, 173–177; casinos 194; as financial product 176; micropayments in 160–161; poker 52, 164, 174; prize scams 117; on sports 162–163, 174 organizational studies 4 Pachinko 178 Packer, James 91–94, 98, 171, 195 panopticism 17 Parisian arcades 121 Parker, Sean 202 passive leisure 58, 60, 62; see also leisure paternalism, libertarian 200 pathological gambling 32, 44, 47, 48; see also problem gambling planet Hollywood 172

play: in everyday life 13; intersections with finance, gambling, and work 15, 18–25, 77; as meta-communication 13; see also leisure Poker Face of Wall Street, The (Brown) 123, 131 poker games 130–131, 148 poker machines 41; see also pokie lounges; pokies Poker Star, The (television show) 131 pokie lounges 99, 100, 174; community protests 219–223; descriptions of patrons and employees 105–106; differing perceptions of 102–104; etiquette in 106–107; as everyday cultural space of gambling 100–108; strategies and tactics in 108–111; see also Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs) pokies, non-random nature of 199–200, 201 political demonstrations 153–154 political economy 4; liberal 20, 231 political philosophy, liberal 195 political representation 226 political science 5 political theory, liberal 21 Popper, Karl 228 popular culture 4, 8, 9, 32, 40, 172 positive psychology 58, 60–62, 63, 228 postcolonialism 18, 52 post-feminist discourse 127, 131, 134; see also feminism post-industrialism 142 postmodernism 7, 61, 67, 194; in architecture 87; see also modernism power: bio- 15; corporate 132; of freedom 197; post-disciplinary 17; productive character of 14; and resistance 14–15; social 78 probability science 142 problem gambling 24–25, 32, 33, 41, 62, 104, 174, 204, 214, 232; affective character of 50; co-morbidities 54; debates about 67; in EGM venues 48–49, 153, 219–223; and finopower 217–219; individual subjects of 193; knowledge of 42; and the “presubjective” state 50; prevention of 44; psy-scientific discourses of 8–9; research on 43–49; vernacular knowledge of 48; and the “zone” 54–55; see also pathological gambling Product Madness 172

Index prostitution 22, 95, 97, 121, 127, 129–130, 194, 227 Protestant ethic 18, 80 psychoanalysis 3 psychology 43, 206; behavioural 206; individual 60; positive 58, 60–62, 63, 228 psy-sciences 42, 44, 45, 48, 54, 193, 195 punters’ clubs 135, 136–138 qualitative research 27, 32, 44 Queensland 153 randomness 3, 5, 199–200, 244 Ranogajec, Zeljko 168 RatPac Entertainment 170 rat people 206 real estate investment 186–187 Reed, Jennifer 171 regulation: architecture of 196; of EGMs 236; of financial institutions 217; of gambling 18–25, 193–197; of gambling research 233–237; indirect 196–197 Reith, Gerda 4, 17, 47, 121, 124–126, 161, 247, 243 religion 68, 216 Reno model 234 reparative aesthetics 208 repression hypothesis 14 research see gambling research; social research resource extraction 224–233 reverse martingale 167; see also martingale Rich Dad/Poor Dad system 185–187 risk 205; absence of 6–7; in gambling 1–2, 5–6; scholarship of 5–6 risk society 4, 5, 54 Roland, Marie-Jeanne 21–22 Rosecrance, John 28 Roulette xv, 3, 40, 122, 125, 166 sacrifice 217–219 scapegoating 217–219 Schlitz, Don 53 Schull, Natasha 49, 59, 96, 207, 214 science and technology studies (STS) 5, 168 security staff training 49–50 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 89 self-development 178 self-exclusion 42, 43, 174–175, 200, 246 self-help movements 46 self-regulation 219

259

settler-occupying nations 12, 32, 63, 226, 229, 231, 232, 237, 244, 248 Simpson, Tim 87 simulation 4, 66, 69 Singapore 84, 90 Skinner, B.F. 195, 214 slave labour 134 slot machines see Electronic Gaming Machines (EGMs); pokie lounges smart-phone addiction 56–57 Smith, Adam 20, 58, 228 Smith, Garry 234 social contract 194–195 social control 22 social engineering 202 social exclusion 123–124 social games and gaming 2–3, 162, 172, 178 social harms 26, 234 social imaginary 54 social inequalities 5, 18, 48, 224 social injustice 208 social justice 161, 194 social media 153, 169, 202–203; gaming apps for 4 social norms 196 social power 78 social research 26, 30, 42, 50; see also gambling research social sustainability 33 social theory 3 sociology 3–4, 48, 197 sovereignty 15–16, 95–99; disputed 232; Indigenous 188, 226, 227–229, 233, 244; Republican 226; state 25 spaces: cultural 78; of finance 111; monumental 88–89; see also gambling spaces sporting-media events 117, 119 Sportsbet 173 sports gambling, online 173 spread betting 2–3 State Communism 21 state phobia 21 stateyness 89–90 Stevens lawsuit 199 Storm Financial investment 180, 181–182 stranger fetishism 52 Striphas, Ted 202 Studio City casino (Macau) 81, 84–87 sub-proletariat class 123 suffering 234 suicide 25, 41, 206, 209–211, 216–217

260

Index

surveillance 95–97, 99 surveillance technology 164 Sweeney, Matthew 142 Sztompka, Piotr 12

video lottery 199 Vineberg, Phyllis 209, 216–217 virtual reality 177 Vrecko, Scott 47

table games 167 Taj Mahal casino (Atlantic City) 91, 188 Taleb 244 Taylor, Mark C. 68–69 technology: algorithmic 183; cultural 5; surveillance 164 technostress 203 television 9, 19, 40, 41, 64, 90–91, 102, 104, 106, 112, 126, 131, 135, 143, 153–154, 161, 163, 170–171. Thaler, Richard 200–201 Thompson, John 142 time management 203 tipping competitions 135, 137, 139, 157 totalizer agency boards 162–163 Trademate 168 transformations 15, 16 Treasury Casino 65 Treaty of Niagara (1764) 230–231 Trump, Donald 91, 187–188 Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia 232 Twain, Mark 149

Walker, Michael 43, 203 Walsh, David 168 Weber, Max 18, 229 The Wedge (television comedy) 40 Weeks, Mike 52 Welfare 12, 16–17, 26, 32, 108, 229 welfare state 15, 20, 21 The Whitlams (band) 217 whiteness, as symbolic capital 12 Whitlock, Gillian 208 William Hill 173 Williams, Raymond 7–8, 48, 57 women: gambling by 130–132, 134; Indigenous 94; lower-status 157; working-class 132 Woolf, Patrick 228–229 Woolley, Richard 54 work: algorithmically enhanced connectivity to 203; casualization of 153; gambling at 152–153; intersections with gambling, work, finance, and play 15, 18–25, 77; social experience of 156–157 World Poker Tour 131 Wynn, Steve 91

urban geography 4 variable ratio schedule 214 Venetian casino (Macau) 90 video games 4, 161, 162; arcade 177–178; based on Star Wars 178–179; based on television shows 163; beta-testing 178; in-game purchases 178; production of 164 videogaming 4, 32; eSports 177; monetization of 181

Young, Martin 101, 202, 224 Zizek, Slavoj 67 zone: and EGMs 126, 203; and gambling addiction 42, 54–55; in gambling research 58–59; literature on 54–55, 69, 71, 126, 201 Zurcher, Louis 13, 130