Encoding chance: a technocultural analysis of digital gambling

This thesis explores how gambling and gambling-like practices are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. Digital gambling brings gambling closer to the practices and features of videogames, as audiovisual simulations structure users’ experiences. New forms of digital gambling have clear political implications and institute new economic dynamics, as operators increasingly rely on the exploitation of constant interaction, as well as fostering compulsive play. By studying digital gambling from media studies, videogame and cultural studies approaches, this thesis offers a new critical perspective on the issues raised by computer-mediated gambling, while expanding our perspective on what media and gambling are. Current research on gambling practices and markets in disciplines such as psychology, sociology and law has positioned wagering as an exceptional activity because of its association with problem gambling, taxation and financial loss. The increasingly malleable nature of digital gambling media complicates these understandings. Digital gambling and play take a number of shapes: state-of-the-art slot machines, desktop platforms and mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. These cultural forms involve both gambling companies such as Aristocrat and IGT, and videogame companies such as Atari and Zynga. Digital gambling products are consumed by millions of users, primarily in Australia, Europe and North America. In contemporary forms of digital gambling, many users have a gambling or gambling-like experience with or without real money involved. Consumers pay with money and/or labour and/or time and/or access to their digital social networks and contacts. These dynamics represent a significant departure from previous gambling studies, which only consider gambling as those games that involve real money and are demarcated from everyday life. The development of digital gambling sees new cultural forms, including gamble-play media (gambling and gambling-like platforms constructed as videogames), the procedure-image (images that articulate interactive rhetoric), mobile social gambling (the practice carried out through social casino apps) and gambling-machines (an iteration of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines). Digital gambling operates through assemblages that are materially heterogeneous and increasingly deterritorialised. Through a selection of case studies – including the 3D online casino PKR, the mobile apps Slotomania and Slots Journey, the Electronic Gaming Machine market in New South Wales, Australia, and the online casinos PokerStars and 888 – this thesis analyses the interplay between various digital gambling assemblages and their relations to other media such as videogames and social networking sites

Using Misconceptions to Improve Engagement and Preventative Effects Within Gambling Education.

Gambling education programs typically focus on promoting gambling as a risky behaviour with harmful consequences. However, young people may not engage with this messaging as they cannot personally relate to the individuals described. Gambling-related misconceptions facilitate development and maintenance of problems and learning gambling mathematics concepts may reduce the likelihood of misconception development. Including gambling misconceptions in education may improve youth engagement by providing a developmental account of gambling problems which is more relevant. Pedagogical literature suggests misconceptions are important in learning complex new material like probabilities and statistics. This research aimed to test if educating young people about gaming machine misconceptions improved their engagement with educational content and understanding of gambling mathematics; and if it reduced existing misconceptions in adult gaming machine players. Three educational videos were developed: risk awareness, information only, and cognitive misconceptions. Results suggest the Misconceptions video was not more engaging than the other videos amongst young audiences, but resulted in significant improvements in misconceptions and understanding of gambling mathematics amongst adult gamblers. Young people who are not heavily involved in gambling may prefer reductive information about gaming machines, however, this type of information is the least likely to produce preventive effects. Gambling education is best delivered by stratifying complex information over time in line with people’s development and gambling experiences. Incorporating gambling education into the mathematics curriculum may ensure crucial information about game design is conveyed but may require a blended approach with multi-media and trained facilitators. Most adolescents in this research did not gamble and future studies should aim to develop a foundational understanding of gambling harm in this population

Simple gambling or sophisticated gaming? : applying game analysis methods to modern video slot machine games

Slot machine games have become the most popular form of gambling worldwide. In Finland, their pervasiveness in public spaces and popularity makes them one of the most common form of gaming. However, in game studies, gambling games are often regarded as borderline games due to the player’s lack of control. In this thesis I ask whether modern video slot machine games can be considered as games and if so, what similarities there are between them and contemporary video games. To find out if modern video slot machine games are in fact games, I compare their features with influential definitions of game and play. After this, I utilize an analysis framework derived from the method of close reading to analyze a popular Finnish video slot machine game Emma. The comparison between modern video slot machine games and the various definitions of game and play reveals that modern video slot machine games fit very well into these definitions, and thus they can be considered as games. This notion enables them to be analyzed with game analysis methods. The analysis showed that modern video slot machine games feature many elements that are commonly found in traditional video games, such as contextual aesthetics, narratives, interaction, as well as some form of player control via choices. Research regarding slot machine games as games is scarce despite their many intriguing elements that cross disciplinary borders. Modern video slot machine games have evolved into a form of complex digital entertainment, which calls for open-minded collaboration of game studies and gambling studies in particular, but many other disciplines as well

Very Important Game People in the History of Computer and Video Games

This thesis covers the history of 30 very important game people (in alphabetical order): David Arneson, Ralph Baer, Daniel Bunten, Nolan Bushnell, John Carmack, Chris Crawford, Richard Garriott, Gary Gygax, Trip Hawkins, Rob Hubbard, Toru Iwatani, Eugene Jarvis, Ken Kutaragi, Ed Logg, Sid Meier, Jeff Minter, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, Yuji Naka, Alexey Pajitnov, John Romero, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Chris Stamper, Tim Stamper, Yu Suzuki, Satoshi Tajiri, Ken Williams, Roberta Williams, Will Wright and Gunpei Yokoi. It includes their background, their most important games and game-related work. It also provides information about the companies they worked for and the people they worked with. The thesis was created by gathering information from large number of sources, including books, internet, magazines, games and contacting some of the actual people. The thesis also contains a timeline of the most important events in the history of computer and video games and a chapter on the precursors of videogames, namely money game machines and pinball. The thesis is illustrated with several hundred pictures