Gambling and Cultural Game Studies

Chapter 17 by Jani Kinnunen looks at gambling from the cultural game studies perspective. The majority of gambling studies have focused on problems – which are usually studied by approaches derived from psychology or medical sciences – with quantitative methods dominating in this kind of research. There is, however, also an interpretivist strand in gambling studies. These kinds of studies are more concerned with meanings, cultures, and contexts of gambling, the goal being to understand individual gambling activities in their socio-cultural surroundings, which evolve and change in time and space. Here, qualitative methods, such as participant observation, interviews, or case studies, are applicable also to gambling studies. Cultural game studies and interpretivist gambling studies seem to have shared goals and methods to the extent that it can be questioned whether there should be separate game and gambling studies at all, especially when the line between gambling and other types of gaming is constantly blurring.