future, speculating that the rest of the nation would follow its model.[^30]
Seven years later, by which point the Station Casinos franchise had blossomed into thirteen properties and was capturing nearly 90 percent of its gambling revenue …This tension is at the heart of the cultural diagnosis made by the American sociologist Erving Goffman in 1967 based on his ethnographic study of gambling in Las Vegas, where he worked as a blackjack dealer and was eventually promoted to pi…Caillois, Goffman, and Geertz each referred to coin-operated machine gambling in the course of their analyses, and each of them dismissed it as a degraded, asocial form of play not worthy of cultural analysis. For Caillois, it was pure alea…
Roger Caillois
philosopher · 4 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Roger Caillois was a French theorist of play who developed an influential taxonomy distinguishing types of games—notably separating alea (games of chance) from other play categories—though the course readings invoke him primarily to critique his dismissal of machine gambling as culturally insignificant. His framework for understanding play is being used here to historicize how mid-twentieth-century theorists like Goffman and Caillois failed to recognize the social and economic complexity of automated gambling, setting up a contrast with contemporary analysis that takes such systems seriously. The readings position Caillois's categorical thinking as an example of how older theoretical vocabularies obscured rather than illuminated the cultural work of emerging technologies.
Mentioned in 2 readings
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