The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

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.

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