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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Learning From Las Vegas: Gambling, Technology, Capitalism, And Addiction, David T. Courtwright
Learning From Las Vegas: Gambling, Technology, Capitalism, And Addiction, David T. Courtwright
Occasional Papers
Gambling has always led to addictive behavior in some individuals. However, the number and types of addicted gamblers have changed over time and in response to specific gambling environments. Recent work by historians, journalists, and anthropologists, reviewed in this paper, suggests that the situation worsened during the modern era, and that it has become worse still during the last half century. Technological, organizational, and marketing innovations have “weaponized” gambling, increasing both the likelihood that people will gamble and that they will gamble compulsively—a phenomenon with parallels to several other consumer products, including processed food, digitized games, and psychoactive drugs.
Halos, Alibis And Community Development: A Cross National Comparison Of How Governments Spend Revenue From Gambling, Lynn Gidluck
Halos, Alibis And Community Development: A Cross National Comparison Of How Governments Spend Revenue From Gambling, Lynn Gidluck
Occasional Papers
This paper provides a cross-national comparison of how governments around the world distribute revenues from state-directed gambling and how these choices have been justified by proponents and vilified by critics. Case studies where governments have popularized gambling expansion by “earmarking” revenues for particular good causes and where the state has collaborated with the voluntary sector to deliver programs from this revenue stream are examined. Lessons learned from challenges of various approaches are considered.
Containment And Virtualization Slot Technology And The Remaking Of The Casino Industry, Kah-Wee Lee
Containment And Virtualization Slot Technology And The Remaking Of The Casino Industry, Kah-Wee Lee
Occasional Papers
This paper examines how the casino industry was transformed by slot technology between 1950 and 1990. The criminalization of slot machines in the 1950s led to their massive evacuation into Las Vegas casinos. In this concentrated environment, slot machines revealed to casino operators an automated surveillance technology that could disassemble the player into streams of virtual data, not through any overt means, but through the very activity of play itself. Slot managers and gaming technologists found themselves empowered professionally as they experimented with ways to transform data into profits. From the 1970s to the 90s, this technological development effectively linked …
Souls/Soles Of Signs Tell Totems And The Sphinx Wager, Darryl A. Smith M.Div., Ph.D.
Souls/Soles Of Signs Tell Totems And The Sphinx Wager, Darryl A. Smith M.Div., Ph.D.
Occasional Papers
This paper develops a philosophy of play through an analysis of the foot wager of the Sphinx. Applying a construction of the cosmology of Plato along with a Socratic etymology of her riddle’s answer, it provides a reading of Sphingian contestation consistent with contemporary practices of deception found in modern games like poker. I argue that such deception is constitutive of the excessive illumination of signaling tells in games and that such excess, in turn, is indicative in allied political contexts of a covetous and acquisitive obsession with light. This theory makes use also of Ralph Ellison’s refiguring of Oedipal …
Taking The Points: The Socialization Process Of A Sports Book “Regular”, Frederick W. Krauss Ph.D.
Taking The Points: The Socialization Process Of A Sports Book “Regular”, Frederick W. Krauss Ph.D.
Occasional Papers
Patrons of a casino sports book use the environment for much more than the instrumental task of sports betting. It is also a place to congregate with other like-minded patrons and through this process complex interactional dynamics develop over time. The social world of the sports book emerges in a designated space for the betting act where patrons meet, interact, and establish a culture to which they adhere.