My doctoral dissertation, “The Gambling Mystique: Mythologies and Typologies”, is the first major study of the positive effects of gambling for the nonproblem gambler. Until 1973, the literature dealing with gambling behavior had been overwhelmingly negative and focused almost entirely on compulsive gamblers. Wire service coverage and an article, “The Future of Gambling” in the Futurist magazine (Campbell 1976), gave me more than my fifteen minutes of fame, and I must admit that it was rewarding to pick up the newspaper and find Dr. Joyce Brothers citing my saying that “casinos don’t cause compulsive gambling any more than soap causes compulsive hand-washing”. It was even rather entertaining to walk into a session at a gaming conference in Montreal and hear my words in slightly altered form supposedly coming from the mouths of other gamblers.
It is my view that gambling represents a preservative rather than a destructive impulse. When I began writing about gambling, a prevailing view was that all gamblers were masochistic and had a profound desire to lose. Leading the attack was Edmund Bergler, who saw gambling as an attack on bourgeois values, reducing them to absurdity, and the gambler as a “private rebel” who attacks societal norms with dice, stocks, and chips rather than guns or ballots. One wonders what he would think of today’s trading revolution (Bergler 1957).
Although I have continued to take an essentially phenomenological approach to gambling, viewing the gambler as part of the entire context in which he or she exists, today’s context is wildly different from that of twenty-five years ago. The twenty-first century has arrived with a vengeance in all of its cyber and virtual glory. In a world of cybersex, daytrading, extreme sports, and robot technology rivaling anything in science fiction, the casino gambler no longer stands out as one of Bergler’s social rebels, although I believe the rebel still gambles for the same reasons – an altered state of consciousness that offers hope, opportunities for decision making, possible peak experience, and a respite from the day’s cares, a minivacation, if you will. Note that I am speaking here of normal gamblers, not desperation gamblers.
For its adherents, gambling is a form of adventure and sometimes of therapy. As far back as the sixteenth century, universal genius and gambler Girolamo Cardano prescribed gambling to alleviate melancholy, noting that “play may be beneficial in times of grief and the law permits it to the sick and those in prison and those condemned to death”. Although the altered state of gambling provides part of the therapy in the action, it is the wins, few as they may be, that count. As a young friend of mine who prefers casinos to tranquilizers after a hard day teaching high school says, “It’s ecstasy, it’s Paris, France that is. I’ve been to Paris on a handful of quarters. On my income by the time I saved enough I would be too old to go. Oh, the casino is a wonderful place”.
Today’s adventurer gamblers can enhance their experience by prowling the alternate reality of their choice, the Las Vegas Strip obligingly having turned into a form of virtual reality. Almost as quickly as you can change channels on your television set, you can move from Mandalay Bay to Egypt or Rome or a horde of other destinations. You pay your money and walk into the fantasy of your choice, which may be one of the reasons that the Wizard of Oz theme failed at the MGM. Although the casino is definitely not Kansas, it seems to me unlikely that many people revving up for an evening at the tables or machines want to identify with Dorothy or the Tin Woodman. The casino gambler may have isolated himself or herself from nature, but not from a need for sensate experience, an experience that for good or ill moves ever closer to virtual reality, a concrete fantasy that provides escape from the mundane.
Casinos even present a kind of in-house camaraderie. A fellow feeling exists among card players that may not always be present in the real world. At the blackjack table, players all face the same odds whether they are betting five or 500 dollars and have a common adversary in the dealer. Here cultural and racial differences and biases disappear during the action, often, sadly, to be replaced after the players leave the tables and reality returns.
Even machines take on personalities in these palaces of escape. I have always been fascinated by relationship between machine gamblers and their adversaries. In my early research I cited an elderly woman who said that she played because she was lonely, and the machines seemed friendly and acknowledged her existence. To her the ringing bells and flashing lights of even a small payoff said, “I like you”.
To see that this feeling is not isolated, one need only observe the give-and-take that goes on between player and machine. I have created a brief typology that illustrates some of the major behaviors. Except where noted, these behaviors are common to both genders. There is the Lover, whose hands move softly over the machine or gently slide up and down the handle, when such exists, as though it were a beloved other, caressing it, trying to lure it into spewing its riches into his hands. Not for nothing is gambling parlance studded with sexual terms such as betting “the come” or the “don’t come”. The Patter, a variation on the Lover, softly pats the sides of the machine, all the while talking to it. More violent, Thumpers beat a rhythmic tattoo on the side of the machine, while Ragers, almost always male, literally pound the machines with their fists and both cajole and threaten them in language fine for television but probably not appropriate for this entry, seeming to believe that they can bully the machines into submission. In contrast, the Pleader maintains a constant dialogue with the machine, usually referring to it as “baby” as he begs for its favors. Players sit silently in front of their idols, lips constantly moving.
Perhaps the most annoying to other players are Singers, usually out of tune, and Whistlers, totally oblivious to those around them (at least I hope they are) and seemingly less in communication with the machine than the others I have mentioned. All, however, regardless of their annoyance factor, are totally absorbed in “the action” within the world of the machine, largely unaware of anything going on around them and often of their own behaviors. They have for the moment escaped. You have probably noticed as have I an uncanny resemblance to the relationships between hackers and their machines, which also carry their users to alternate realities.
Clearly everything about casinos is designed to assist gamblers in slipping the perceptual boundaries of their worlds. Linear time and space are smashed. Themed casinos representing diverse historical eras and geographical settings help to destroy the concept of an orderly, linear time line and traditional geography. I think we need note that theming is not confined to businesses but has become a part of home decor and planned communities everywhere.
In the twenty-first century, we no longer collectively believe in a linear universe of simple cause and effect. We now know that we dance on a web of intersecting realities, where the effect of the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Hong Kong can escalate to create a dust storm in Las Vegas. In essence, as chaos theory explains, everything influences everything else.
Greed is not the primary motive for these new beliefs. The motive is the slipping of ordinary perceptual bounds and moving into the intensity of another reality.
|
|