Abstract
Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and reconfigured by digital mediation. The case study of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) illustrates a contemporary challenge to rigid dichotomies between game/not game, skilled/unskilled play, and game/gambling game, demonstrating how regulation becomes deterritorialized as gambling moves out of state-regulated physical casinos and takes the form of networked, digital games. Our second case study of Pokémon Go approaches regulation from a different direction, complicating the rigid dichotomy between production/consumption in online networked play. We show how play is increasingly realized as productive in economic, social, physical, subjective and analytic registers, while at the same time, it is driven by gambling design imperatives, such as extending time-on-device. Pokémon Go exemplifies analytic productivity, a term we use to refer to the production of data flows that can be leveraged for a wide variety of purposes, including to predict, shape, and channel the behaviour of player populations, thereby generating multiple streams of revenue. Ultimately, both cases illustrate how digital games and gambling increasingly blur into each other, complicating the regulatory landscape.
Highlights
This article examines the blurred boundaries between games and gambling, theorizing the implications of their interconnection for how both are regulated
We move to a digital register, using case studies of daily fantasy sports (DFS) betting and Pokemon Go to illustrate what Albarran-Torres (2018) defines as “gamble-play,” wherein gambling situations are staged through digital means, and chance events are produced through algorithms
The first case study, DFS, demonstrates how gambling practices are increasingly staged as digital games, while the second shows how digital games incorporate digital dynamics of seduction and control developed from gambling media
Summary
This article examines the blurred boundaries between games and gambling, theorizing the implications of their interconnection for how both are regulated. While economic productivity in the form of tax US dollars impacts how DFS in New York State is regulated, the case of Pokemon Go exemplifies how digital play is framed as productive, not just on an economic register but in terms of producing data/knowledge, spaces of socialization, and healthy bodies The valorization of these intersecting forms of what we call “productive play” often elides discussions of how digital games incorporate gambling design imperatives and mechanics. Returning to Juul’s (2005) definitions of digital games, above, Pokemon Go and other social mobile games break with classical game theories in terms of how they generate and leverage player data, and how mobile networks encourage players to carry the gamespace in their pockets (Albarran-Torres and Goggin, 2014; Nicoll, 2019) They further blur the magic circle and enable operations that are opaque to players and regulators. Because the lines of economic exchange are blurred and much less visible, so too are clear lines of accountability
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