Casino games and traditional card games have rich and idiosyncratic histories, complex subcultures and player practices, and facilitate the flow of billions of dollars each year through casinos and card rooms, and between professional players and amateurs. They have nevertheless been overlooked by game scholars due to the negative ethical weight of “gambling” – with such games pathologized and labelled as deviance or mental illness, few look beyond to unpick the games, their players, and their communities.
The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader offers 25 chapters studying the communities playing these games, the distinctive cultures and practices that have emerged around them, their activities and beliefs and interpersonal relationships, and how these games influence – both positively and negatively – the lives and careers of millions of game players around the world. It is the first of a new series of edited collections, Play Beyond the Computer, dedicated to exploring the play of games beyond computers and games consoles.
Edited by:
Dr. Mark R. Johnson (University of Sydney Australia)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 853g
ISBN: 9781501347252
ISBN 10: 150134725X
Series: Play Beyond the Computer
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 30 December 2021
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations List of Contributors 1. Why Study Games and Money? (Mark R. Johnson, University of Sydney, Australia) Part I: Foundations 2. Gambling games, money and late capitalism James F. Cosgrave (Trent University, Canada) 3. To skill, perchance to win: How chance and skill have co-existed in gambling history David S. Schwartz (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA) Part II: Poker 4. ‘An hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe’: Popular memory, sports television and the World Series of Poker Alexander Kupfer (Vassar College, USA) 5. Be a Pal: Women’s intrusions into men’s poker play on TV sitcoms Danielle Seid (University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA) 6. Poker fiction: Romance, possible worlds and magic circles Paul Wake (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) Part III: Money and class 7. Cards, banking games and the normalization of finance Joyce Goggin (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) 8. ‘Pitch and toss’: Casinos of hope and despair in working-class Britain Graham Taylor (UWE, Bristol, UK) 9. Selves in play: Pop-up casinos and discontinuous persons in Greece Thomas Malaby (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA) 10. Honourable risks and dishonourable certainties: Naiveté and cynicism at play over the card table in Imperial Russia Ian Helfant (Colgate University, USA) Part IV : Casino cities 11. Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune: The social impact of risk, reward and roulette on visitors to Monaco’s legendary casino, 1863-1914 Robert W. Miller (University of Kansas, USA) 12. Gambling in the kitchen: Monte Carlo from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century Paul Franke (Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany) 13. What statistics don’t say: Game innovation in Macau’s casinos since 2002 Xavier Paulès (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France) 14. Playing with heritage : Gambling and Venice’s tradition Marta Soligo (University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA) 15. Locating Native American gambling traditions in contemporary Indian casino gaming Laurie Arnold (Gonzaga University, USA) 16. On the infrastructure of gaming: The case of pachinko Keiji Amano (Seijoh University, Japan) and Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta, Canada) 17. An enchanting witchcraft: Masculinity, melancholy and the pathology of gaming in early modern London Celeste Chamberland (Roosevelt University, USA) 18. Everyday casinos: The expanding gambling landscape in America’s neighbourhoods Rex J. Rowley (Illinois State University, USA) 19. The market in the conclave: Gambling on election outcomes in Renaissance Italy John M. Hunt (Utah Valley University, USA) 20. Eighteenth-century lotteries Mathias Fuchs (Leuphana UniversityLüneburg, Germany) Part VI: Cinema, art, literature and culture 21. ‘Whiskey, women, and loaded dice’: The images and places of gambling in popular music Matias Karekallas (University of Tampere, Finland) 22. From parasite to anti-hero: Shifting depictions of the card sharp James Banks (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) 23. Gambling ladies: The games that Barbara Stanwyck plays Catherine Russell (Concordia University, Canada) Part VII: Insiders 24. The poker economy: The skill gap problem and the lifecycle of PvP games Jeffrey Hwang (Independent Scholar, USA) Index
Mark R Johnson is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia. His work is focused on video game live streaming on Twitch.tv, as well as esports and competitive gaming, gamblification and digital gambling, procedural content generation, and game design. He is also an independent game developer noted for the game Ultima Ratio Regum, and a regular games writer, blogger, and podcaster.
Reviews for The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader: Communities, Cultures and Play
Mark Johnson has collected a valuable primer of identities, cultures, and interactions in game and gambling play in The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader. This collection is a must-read for anyone curious about the role of money in ludic activities across time and space. * Brett Abarbanel, Director of Research, International Gaming Institute, University of Nevada - Las Vegas, USA * At a moment when gamification has become a marketing buzzword, this volume of essays is as illuminating as it is essential. The rich historical, socio-cultural and subcultural knowledge in this edited collection provides a genuinely new lens through which to understand enduring and diverse connections between games and money in spaces of everyday life. * Fiona Nicoll, author of Gambling in Everyday Life (2019) *
