Critical Gambling Studies (Journal)
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Gambling Advertising and Incidental Marketing Exposure in Soccer Matchday Programmes: A Longitudinal Study
Full text linkGambling is marketed in English soccer across various formats such as TV advertising, social media, pitch side hoardings, and shirt sponsorship. There have been recent reductions in TV advertising brought about by self-regulation, but gambling shirt sponsorship remains frequent, and can lead to a high frequency of incidental marketing exposure on TV. Knowledge is lacking on how gambling advertising frequency and marketing exposure have changed over time in other media, such as in matchday programmes. This study addressed this gap via a content analysis of programmes for 44 teams across 3 periods spanning 18 months (N=132). The number of gambling adverts decreased from 2.3 to 1.3 per-programme, while incidental exposure prevalence stayed constant, at a higher rate of 42.7 incidences per-programme. Teams sponsored by gambling companies had more adverts per-programme than those sponsored by other industries (2.3 versus 1.2), and also had more incidental exposure (58.8 versus 20.2). Incidental exposure to gambling marketing was consistently more prevalent (42.7) per-programme than alcohol (3.2) or safer gambling messages (3.1). Furthermore, across all timepoints, 56.8% of dedicated children’s sections contained incidences of gambling marketing. Researchers and policymakers should consider that sports fans can get exposed to gambling marketing through a number of channels outside of TV advertising. Indirect and incidental exposure to gambling marketing remains high, which can be particularly challenging for those experiencing gambling related harm. All forms of gambling marketing must be considered when making legislative changes
Mapping the Conceptualization of Gender in Gambling Literature: A Scoping Review
Full text linkThis scoping review aims to map the existing conceptualization of gender in peer-reviewed gambling scholarship to locate areas of future inquiry for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and gambling. It follows Arksey and O\u27Malley\u27s (2005) framework for scoping reviews, updated by Levac et al. (2010) and Daudt et al. (2013). We located the relevant literature published between 2000-2020 by searching through eight academic databases using Boolean operators and various key search terms, yielding 31,533 results. After a thorough screening based on inclusion/exclusion criteria and excluding duplicates, we located 2,532 journal publications that addressed gender and gambling. Among them, 53.4% used gender as a descriptive demographic variable, 44.3% explored the comparative analysis between men’s and women\u27s gambling behaviors, preferences, and risks, and only 2.3% focused on gender from a socio-cultural perspective. When articles mentioned gender, we found that it was primarily considered a descriptive demographic variable and an indicator of comparative analysis between men and women. Furthermore, the few articles that discussed the socio-cultural aspects of gender were mainly limited to a binary construction of gender. This scoping review concluded that there is a scarcity of socio-cultural studies of gender in gambling scholarship, indicating the need to expand socio-cultural analysis in research on gender and gambling
The Gamification of Responsible Gambling: A Critical Discussion of Emergent Techniques for Addressing Gambling-Related Harms
Full text linkLicense to Gamble: Discursive Perspectives on the 2019 Reregulation of the Swedish Gambling Market
Full text linkDuring the last decades, several European gambling markets have been reregulated. In 2019, it was Sweden’s turn; the former oligopoly was replaced by a licensing system. In this article, the governmental inquiry in which the new system was proposed, outlined, and justified is studied using discourse analysis. Medical, public health, and free market discourses have been shown to dominate articulations of gambling in several national contexts, but the ways in which these discourses interact, overlap, and differ are crucial to understand better in order to appreciate the production and legitimation of meanings around gambling. Moreover, the 2019 reregulation has not yet been studied from discursive perspectives; thus, the article makes both theoretical and empirical contributions. The article demonstrates that market and medical discourses structure the inquiry. While they sometimes overlap and merge, their co-existence also causes tensions, for instance regarding whether an increase in gambling is acceptable or not. The article points to a strengthening of market and medical discourses and a weakening of public health discussion within Swedish gambling debates
Shalene Wuttunee Jobin. Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships: nehiyawak narratives. UBC Press, 2023. 272 pp. ISBN:9780774865203.
Full text linkThe GameBling Game Jam: Game Jams as a Method for Studying Gambling Games
Full text linkGambling scholars may be unfamiliar with the research methods used by their colleagues in game studies. Yet, as gambling becomes gamified, and gaming becomes gamblified, the intersection between our two fields continues to grow. The GameBling game jam, which took place in 2022 at Concordia University, proposed to explore this growing intersection by applying a game making and game studies method—the game jam (see, for instance, Kultima 2015; Meriläinen et al., 2020; Ruberg & Shaw, 2017)—to a gambling object—the slot machine. This post argues that game jams can be used in gambling studies to learn more about public perceptions of slot machines, to reverse-engineer black-boxed gambling algorithms, or even to help new research interests emerge through the process of game creation. We ultimately propose that the practice of creating games from scratch in a limited time frame, or "game jamming," is an innovative research method that can help uncover new ways to think about and question social science concepts
Welcome Inside The Casino Cottage: Challenging the Notions of “Risk” in Online Casino Advertising through a Context-Attentive Discourse Analysis of a Swedish Brand’s Ad Videos from 2014-2022
Full text linkGambling advertising’s use of celebrities, humor, and representations of happy people who Win Big, in narratives told in brash colored, high-pitched ads, are argued to increase the risk for gambling problems, or worse, addiction. Online casino ads have been subject to particular legislative attention partly for these reasons, as well as for being increasingly targeted to women who, by some, are judged to be especially vulnerable to such marketing. This paper presents a context-attentive, multimodal discourse analysis of a Swedish online casino brand’s advertising videos from 2014-2022. The study illustrates how general statements regarding risk in relation to (online casino) gambling ads’ content dramatically reduces their potential cultural significance to audiences. It is argued that one should, to a greater extent, treat these adverts as complex and socio-culturally rooted texts whose content may not so easily be written off as simply “risky,” to women or otherwise
Pocket Queens: Women, Poker, Memoir and Perifeminist Strategies
Full text linkApproaches from the humanities that understand poker as a culture (rather than as a gambling pathology or an isolated gaming activity) can help to highlight the voices and stories of women and connect them to feminist and gender research. Stories by individual women who may or may not be feminists can be most usefully described as “perifeminist,” a description of the strategies to cope with sexism that do not necessarily involve either confrontation or negation. Understanding women’s poker stories within this framework can bring depth and breadth to the representation of female poker players in popular journalism, which generally characterizes female players as objects or accessories for male players. In this article, I analyze the gender politics of memoirs by Annie Duke and Victoria Coren, prominent female players whose texts are widely read, because these memoirs are a good place to look for perifeminist strategies and a sense of what being part of poker culture involves for women. Looking for and noticing the stories of female players and contextualizing them as part of the everyday experiences of gender politics can do much to make the lives of poker playing women more visible, and worthy of critical attention
Book Review: Kasey Henricks and David G Embrick. (2020). State Looteries: Historical Continuity, Rearticulations of Racism and American Taxation. Routledge. 220 pp. ISBN 9780367596170
Full text linkBook review of Kasey Henricks and David G Embrick. (2020). State Looteries: Historical Continuity, Rearticulations of Racism and American Taxation. Routledge. 220 pp. ISBN 978036759617
Parliamentary Debates on Gambling Policies as Political Action: An Interpretive Political Analysis
Full text linkThe aims of this paper are twofold: first, to demonstrate the importance and relevance of interpretive political analysis to gambling research and second, to analyze from the aforementioned perspective why politicians in Finland talk about gambling harm and gambling revenue the way they do. The speeches of the representatives in the Parliament of Finland during debates on gambling policy are analysed as political action. The analysis has three levels. The first focuses on the themes of the speeches. The results show that there are four distinct thematic dimensions in the speeches: gambling harm, revenue, regulatory system, and regulation. The second level of analysis establishes the contexts where certain themes typically occur. Typically, revenue is discussed in the context of the economic aspect of gambling while gambling harm is discussed in the context of the justification of the regulatory system. The third level of analysis explains why the themes occur in the contexts they do. The representatives´ acceptance of the self-evidence of the regulatory system forecloses any possibility of getting support for major changes to the system. This explains why the official policy aims of reducing and preventing gambling harm have not been realized. It is concluded that the approach introduced can help to understand the political aspects of gambling