A study of adaptive gambling behaviors of visitors from Mainland China to Macau

PurposeThe adaptation hypothesis suggests that gambling participation would gradually decline after an initial exposure to this activity. While this hypothesis was tested in pathological gambling among residents in Western countries, the present inquiry explores the hypothesis in a tourism context.Design/methodology/approachThis research is focused on the Mainland Chinese gamblers. Convenience sampling was used. Data were collected outside participating casinos and at major attractions. A total of 498 valid responses were collected.FindingsBy assessing changes of the Mainland Chinese gambling perceptions (e.g. excitement and fallacy) and behaviors, results point to visitor gamblers' decrease in gambling excitement and fallacy as well as budget to income ratio.Originality/valueBy assessing changes of the Mainland Chinese gambling perceptions and behaviors, this research aims to contribute to the literature by demonstrating whether the Chinese gamblers have adapted and hence, are more rational about this recreational activity.

Game Over?

This chapter examines recent controversies over internet addiction and Chinese gold farmers, players of World of Warcraft who make a living acquiring in-game virtual currency and selling it for real money to (mostly Western) players looking to accelerate the tedious “grind” of the leveling-up process. The chapter shows how “cheap play” has been revived as a tool for condemning Chinese “cheap labor,” powerfully informing how internet game addiction is itself culturally and spatially represented in popular and psychiatric discourse. Using Cory Doctorow’s story “Anda’s Game” as a case study, it considers how twenty-first-century American anxieties about ludic immersion, compounded by the nation’s own destabilized position in the global economy, have led American game developers as well as medical professionals to pathologize gold farming as exclusionists had Chinese gambling: as symptomatic of an “Asian” psychosis that fails to respect normative boundaries between play and work, virtual and real world.

Japanese Immigrant Gambling in Early 20th-Century California

Gambling was a central facet of life for Japanese male laborers in early 20th-century California. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, labor contractors and Chinese gambling dens offered gambling to Japanese laborers to maintain a consistent cheap labor force and large consumer pool. Many laborers approached gambling as a form of leisure, an opportunity for getting rich quickly and building a sense of community. After the Gentlemen’s Agreement was passed in 1907–1908, Japanese elites led anti-gambling campaigns aimed at Chinese gambling dens in their larger project to build the empire abroad and acquire domestic civil rights. By the 1920s, Japanese-run gambling dens became more established, but the hardships of Japanese immigrant wives prompted collaboration with the Japanese Associations of America to address gambling among married men. The larger community memory around gambling is often told from the wife or children’s perspective, recounted with pain and suffering over how gambling tore families asunder.

GAMBLING IN CHINA RECONSIDERED: FANTAN IN SOUTH CHINA DURING THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Fantan 番攤 is a Chinese gambling game based on a draw from a random number of hidden coins or tokens, requiring the player to guess a number out of one, two, three or four. It currently survives only in Macao, but during the Late Qing and Republican periods, fantan was one of the most popular games in South China. Through the investigation of a wide range of sources, this article challenges the bias of standard accounts of gambling, which emphasize its corrupting influence and depict players as powerless victims cheated by the unscrupulous operators of gambling houses.The reality was less negative. Cheating by proprietors was by no means common and fantan was considered a socially acceptable leisure activity. For many people, it was part of daily life, and tanguan 攤館, the establishments where it was played, were popular venues both enjoyable and secure. They generated a specific kind of conviviality derived from complex interactions among participants. By underestimating the role of fantan (and gambling more generally), one risks overlooking a socially significant activity, something that influenced the way not only heavy gamblers but also ordinary people perceived their own lives and destinies.