Roll 'em!

The UK government is in unexpected hot water over their gambling bill, which will legislate for a real expansion of betting and money-gaming - a 'casino in every town'. The Guardian has a running news and feature archive on it, and there's a new poll which shows the majority of the British public against it.

Gambling fascinates me as an example of pure play that challenges our current norms of the ethical or valuable - yet has existed since the beginning of human civilisation. (The gods in the Mahabarata threw dice to birth the universe). Sutton-Smith, my major inspiration in the Play Ethic book, devotes one of his 'rhetorics of play' to chance, fate and chaos - we gamble because we are willing to throw ourselves on the play of possibilities in the universe.

So my take on the gambling controversy has to be nuanced. Is gambling addictive as a leisure activity? Sure - and it fits foully into that work-leisure divide which over-rationalises our productive time, and over-hedonizes our reproductive time. Yet can I oppose the profounder implications of gambling, and particularly the National Lottery, as an sign of genuine playfulness? Is it part of a general willingness to open up to surprise, possibility, sudden change in our lives?

Gerda Smith, the Glasgow sociologist of betting, describes well the primordial place of gambling in our lives:

Behind the glamour of wealth and the tension of winning and losing, gambling encapsulates a more fundamental human instinct: the drama of our relation to chance.

The concept of chance -- and the way it is played out in gambling games -- has fascinated mankind for millennia. The idea that things happen for no reason is a deeply unsettling one, and for thousands of years human thought has tried to get round it by working out causes, looking for reasons, finding explanations. Gambling, it turns out, is the perfect medium through which we can experience chaos and uncertainty. Games can be seen as miniature worlds where chance can be brought temporarily under human control, struggled with in the briefest of encounters and forced to give up its secrets over the turn of a card, the spin of a roulette ball, the fall of a die.

Gambling is a kind of theatre where the major features of the human condition -- power, money, greed, our relation to chance and luck -- are played out. The drama unfolds through the cabalistic inscriptions on cards, dice and roulette wheels: stark patterns in red and black that symbolize man's struggle with Fate. Games of chance encapsulate the basic human urge to take risks, and they also tap into our desire for transformation: to be in charge of our destiny and to be, for a moment, whoever we want to be.

Chance is crucial here, because it possesses a kind of transformative power in itself. The existence of chance allows us to dream of the Big Win; the life changing event, and to imagine a situation where the future is wide open and the possibilities are endless. And in this world, everyone gets an equal share of the dream because, unlike the inequities of everyday life, chance is absolutely democratic. It is no respecter of title, wealth or merit: as Gogol put it, all men are equal at cards.

I'd be keen to hear what she thinks of the current bill. Myself, I think it may be too much - rather than extending this form of play, government might be better extending others (what would 'creative support'/citizens income do for play-as-imagination and play-as-sociability, for example). As this Observer piece shows, the National Lottery has turned out to be a ludic enrichment of common life in Britain. Wise legislators should probably leave it there. This is me being unctiously "play-ethical", for once...