Poker avatars: affective investment and everyday gambling platforms

Abstract

This article examines the use of player-controlled avatars on digital gambling platforms and apps. Through a discussion of the influential, but now defunct, online gambling platform PKR ‘The Second Life of gambling’ the article illustrates how the avatar has a key role in the routinization of online gambling and cultivating affective investment from gamblers. The process of creating, maintaining and updating avatars promotes spending winnings in-house as the house now provides digital items that allow players to personalize their avatars. For gamblers, the affective investment in avatars adds a crucial qualitative and social dimension to what is otherwise a game of numbers and odds. The customizable avatar introduces a qualitative uncertainty by creating the possibility for indirect communication through avatar appearance, accessories and gestures, which reconnects online poker to face-to-face gambling through traditions such as bluffing. Affective investment in the avatar thus creates a feeling of co-presence between gamblers while gamblers and gambling platforms.