Eyes Down

Using legislation, case law, and official records (including Hansard), Chapter 2 outlines the early history of state intervention into bingo in England and Wales. The chapter traces the gradual liberalization of restrictions on small-scale gambling, and the subsequent backlash against bingo in the 1960s. It also tells a new story about gambling regulation and political economy. In particular, it excavates the key role of mutual aid to elite debates about the proper place of gambling in national life. Although many authors have argued that disavowal of gambling helped legitimize the forms of collective insurance developed by early friendly societies and similar associations, the chapter shows that gambling played a key role—as entertainment and mutual aid—within working men’s clubs, and that it was promoted by the state. This mutual aid dimension of gambling was heavily conflicted in gendered terms. Lawmakers were lobbied by bingo-organizing men, with women’s interests at least one step removed from Hansard. Unequal gender roles were hereby woven into dominant understandings of small-scale gambling.

Introduction to Part III

In Part II of the book I turned to the Hansard archive on bingo—a regrettably untapped scholarly source—to understand how lawmakers saw gambling within national visions of welfare, risk, and insurance. In the remainder of the book (Parts III and IV), I move on to explore how gambling regulation actually works—or fails to work—in practice. I am interested in how regulation feels; how it distributes benefits across gambling sectors; how it both shapes and reflects social relations (including class and gender relations); and how it has sometimes unintended material consequences....

Social Responsibility, New Technologies, and Problem Gambling in Bingo

Chapter 9 traces the impact, on bingo, of recent laws, policies, and procedures related to problematic gambling, by exploring the risks associated with the game and the perceived vulnerability of its distinctive players. By linking problem gambling studies to critical regulation scholarship, it seeks a deeper understanding of the limits, and risks, of algorithmic approaches to consumer protection. The chapter outlines a novel analytic approach to responsible gambling debates, one that pays attention to workers as well as players, and that centres the nexus between profit-making and risk-monitoring. The chapter then charts the emergence of social responsibility as a regulatory priority within UK gambling in general, and bingo in particular. Companies now use a standardized responsible gambling approach, involving increasingly formalized interactions between staff and players. This standardized approach has intensified reliance on technologies borrowed from electronic gambling machines and online gambling formats to identify, and manage, risky play. These technologies are, in turn, reliant on moving customers to cashless play in order that they can be tracked. The chapter focuses on two key consequences of these changes: their impact on workers, and their impact on cash players. Specifically, it shows that standardized responsible gambling measures have resulted in the responsibilization of staff, and have reshaped the relationship between workers and players. Because cash use helps players to limit spending, account-based play is likely to be of dubious effectiveness as a harm reduction measure, and may even be counterproductive.

Innovation Framing, Regulation, and User Adaptation Online

Chapter 8 explores the role of regulation in shaping the interface between online and land-based bingo. It locates discussion of online bingo within debates about whether regulation by code is replacing the rule of law, and whether virtual life undermines sociality and community, including through its role in monetizing social networks and exploiting users’ participation. The chapter also seeks to add an online component to existing accounts of place competition and gambling—focused mostly on casino resorts—by showing that the where of play remained a crucial element of the UK debate about online gambling. The remainder of the chapter narrows the focus to online bingo regulation, to better flesh out the distinctive lessons it holds for a study of rule-making, game standardization, and technology. It outlines the current regulatory system for online bingo, before turning to the role of users (workers, players, and land-based bingo operators seeking an online presence) in game adaptation. The chapter shows that the agency of workers and players to adapt products and practices varies significantly between online and offline forms of bingo. Because workers have limited connection to players in online bingo games, and the infrastructures upon which the bingo relies allow for so little user adaptation, the capacity to ‘re-playify’ the game is far more restricted, and the designers of the technology have significantly more power. Moreover, software providers are able to capture far more profit from instrumentalizing players’ social ties than is possible for land-based operators. The chapter concludes with a call to revisit the enthusiasm for straightforwardly pluralistic approaches to categorization and definition.

State Optics and Bingo Definitions

Chapter 7 focuses on the new types of bingo authorized by regulators since the 2005 Gambling Act came into effect, in 2007. To better understand the official and unofficial definitions of the game, the chapter centres the dynamic interactions between newly permitted technologies and artefacts, and users (both workers and players). The broader stakes of the seemingly narrow interest in bingo definitions relate to two key debates, about: (1) the centrality of premises concerns to the regulation of gambling technologies; and (2) the key role of user adaptation (including by workers) in reanimating bingo vernaculars. The chapter asks some deceptively simple questions: what makes a bingo premises a bingo premises, or a bingo operator a bingo operator? What is bingo, and how much of it needs to be played in order that a bingo premises can be differentiated from one licensed for other types of gaming? The answers are extremely contested, including by the people who work and play in the shadow of newly created official definitions. In particular, through analysis of a successful regulatory effort to prevent licensed bingo from being allowed in pubs, the chapter shows that employees’ work to re-enable social gambling practices is being overlooked by the state.

Introduction

This Introduction identifies why bingo—a self-effacing game that is rarely taken seriously by academics—provides a vital new lens on debates about political economy and regulation. Within gambling studies, bingo practices can be used to further our understanding of mutual aid, of gambling law and policy, and of gendered gambling cultures. More broadly, bingo offers a lens through which we can see political economy and regulation differently. The Introduction summarizes this argument and provides an account of the three academic literatures—on diverse economies, regulation, and gender—to which the book seeks to contribute. It closes with a chapter-by-chapter overview. Finally, using two bingo prizes that reside in a domestic kitchen (a knife set, and a pair of mugs featuring Carry On characters that speak smutty catch phrases when lifted off a surface), the author also explains her personal investments in having the game—in all its ordinariness—taken more seriously in debates about the political economy of gambling regulation.

Introduction to Part II

In this part of the book, I add to existing debates about the law, politics, and political economy of gambling by offering a new account of gambling liberalization. I do so by analysing references to bingo in Hansard, the official records of the Westminster Parliament. As Lord McNally suggests, it may seem something of a downer to start out by giving boring politicians centre stage in this way. Hansard tells us almost nothing about the everyday experiences of those who encounter bingo regulation ‘on the ground’. That is a task for subsequent chapters, using different methods. I begin with Hansard because it tells us something else. It helps reveal how elites have understood the game over time, in its own terms and as relating to the broader governance and regulation of risk and welfare....

The Sociolegal Significance of Membership

Chapter 6 revisits debates about the role of membership in building alternative, non-capitalist forms of collective being. Rather than assuming that the committed member is distinct from the passive, usually feminized consumer, the chapter seeks instead to explore the ways that membership is, or is not, activated in non-commercial and commercial gambling. Using bingo practices as evidence, the chapter probes the blurred boundaries between membership and consumption, exploring how the two are co-constituted. After charting the gendered and racialized membership exclusions in working men’s clubs, the chapter traces how women’s bingo organising labour involves resistance to state membership rules. Mutual aid practices are sustained by this resistance. Finally, the chapter identifies a distinctive sense of membership within commercial bingo, wherein halls become the realm of occupying players—usually older women—who act like they own the place. The chapter thereby seeks to trouble the dichotomy between membership and consumption.

‘Something Rather Perverse’

Focused on debates preceding the passing of the Gambling Act 2005, Chapter 4 traces a final set of changes in how gambling was understood to relate to national visions of risk, profit-making, insurance, and welfare in the UK. Under New Labour, commercial gambling was repositioned as a potential regeneration tool, with the state’s role in part to ensure its success in the domestic and global marketplace. This led to a further narrowing of lawmakers’ visions about gambling. The chapter focuses specifically on New Labour’s casino expansion and online gambling liberalization plans, identifying a reorientation of elite gambling debates to focus on globally salient, technologically cutting-edge spectacles, designed to draw outsiders. Everyday forms of play—especially in multi-use environments—became newly problematic for the state, and in some cases they were to be subjected to increased surveillance. The chapter hereby challenges claims that the 2005 Act represented a neo-liberal effort to encourage risk-taking.

Maggie’s Den

Chapter 3 shows the transformation that occurred, between 1968 and 1997, in lawmakers’ approaches to bingo and what it represented about the nation. Focusing especially on Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (1979–90), it identifies three key changes. First, commercial bingo was significantly deregulated, and political debates were refocused on the need to bolster the industry, including by taxing non-commercial operators that were its alleged competitors. Second, political debates about gambling moved away from self-organized mutual aid towards charity. Third, there were increased references to commercial bingo within discussions of welfare and consumer responsibility, and as a result gambling became proof of individual fecklessness rather than national cultural and economic decline. In charting these changes, the chapter makes bingo reforms central to the state’s broader project of welfare state restructuring and better regulation in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it emphasizes the state’s alliance with charitable actors to privilege non-participatory forms of gambling (especially lotteries) over gambling run by non-commercial members’ clubs. The chapter also identifies the key role of gender in gambling debates, showing that deregulation rested in significant part on claims that commercial bingo halls provided lonely old women with their only source of company.