Covering the entire United States gaming market, Legalized Casino Gaming in the United States provides gaming researchers, policymakers, and hospitality students comprehensive overview of the history, development, legislation, and economic and social impacts of riverboat, land-based, and Native American casino gaming. Containing national and regional research about the industry, this book will provide students with a historical view on gaming and the hospitality industry, offer researchers data and current market status of the industry; and will give policymakers information about the advantages and disadvantages of a gaming industry in their community. Comprehensive and thorough, Legalized Casino Gaming in the United States is full of case studies, data, and surveys that provide you with credible information on community incomes, residents’attitudes about gaming, and gaming taxes in certain states. This fact-filled book will help you evaluate and learn about the pros and cons of the industry, including: reviewing changes in the gaming laws and regulations in particular regions and segments of the industry explaining laws and regulations by state for riverboat and other Native American land-based gaming examining negative and positive social impacts of gaming, including crime; quality of life; community services; availability of entertainment, recreation, and cultural activities; community attractiveness, such as reputation, appearance, cleanliness, and traffic; local resident attitudes; and pathological gaming explaining Nevada’s gaming regulatory system, including the roles of the Nevada Gaming Commission and Gaming Control Board, and discussing issues related to currency transactions, exclusion lists, work permits, customer disputes, and underage gambling discussing positive economic aspects of Native American gaming, such as tax benefits, in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota, and how the industry impacts surrounding communities Examining the industry from ethical, economic, and social standpoints, the contributors offer you several perspectives of a situation, not just one side of an issue, to help you make educated decisions or opinions about gaming. Bolstered with charts, graphs, tables, and future research recommendations, Legalized Casino Gaming in the United States offers you an in-depth and comprehensive look at the gaming industry, helping you weigh the positive and negative effects of one of the most popular areas of hospitality.

An anthropologist looks at the new "crack cocaine" of high-tech gambling Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.

A history and analysis of gambling in the United States from bingo to state lotteries to Indian gaming and the rise of Las Vegas, this book reveals how we have become a nation of gamblers and what the future holds for the gambling industry. From the colonial era to the present, Americans have enjoyed a love-hate relationship with gambling. It is a pastime that has gone from sin to recreational activity, and an industry that has moved from control by organized crime to management by executives with MBAs. While gaming is one of the nation's fastest-growing industries, Barker and Britz predict that this process will slow or stop in the next century as the result of market saturation and unknown social and economic effects which loom over the glitz, glamour, and action. Providing the latest information on the nature and extent of legalized gambling in the United States, this study examines why we gamble and how the relative impact of the activity differs in certain segments of the population. Legalized gambling is, at best, problematic behavior with both good and bad consequences. State-sponsored gambling, both in the form of monopolistic lotteries and in tribal casinos, does to some extent call into question the proper role of the state or tribal nation in promoting a potentially harmful activity among its citizens. States that have looked to legalized gambling as a source of economic salvation may soon experience difficulties as gambling venues multiply and unregulated Internet gambling becomes more widespread.