Embracing the experience
By conducting their study during the Casino’s Vegas Nights, the authors witnessed first-hand the supercharged kitsch and fun that comes when the ordinary casino experience meets drag queens, magicians, sugary Vegas-style cocktails, an abundance of deep-fried food and more. It was a “buffet of over-the-top spectacles and sensations,” they write.
“The Vegas Nights theme appeals to the bacchanalian, more-is-more aesthetic that comes from the actual Las Vegas, and it is also interesting as a theming exercise,” Lynch explains. “Vegas pretends to be somewhere else all the time — Paris, Venice, Egypt. So, when in Vegas you are being somewhere that’s pretending to be somewhere else. Vegas Nights at the Montreal Casino pushes this even further, being a copy of a copy.”
Hazard play
The researchers also passed time at the Casino’s Centre du hasard, its responsible gaming station. This government-mandated information kiosk is supposed to raise the curtains on certain aspects of gaming in order to demystify the experience and create awareness about the riskiness of gambling-related behaviour. While there are superficial similarities to the actual gaming areas, such as touchscreens and spinning wheels, the centre “feels clinical in nature,” they write.
“As a source of information competing for visitor attention in a sea of in-your-face entertainment, the sedate aesthetics of the Centre du hasard feel distinctly out of place.”
While their paper takes a critical look at some of gambling’s hazards, the researchers also argue that the fun side of the casino experience needs to be better understood.
Indeed while gambling studies have tended to focus on the pathologies of play, the “pleasurable experiences associated with gambling are under-studied,” according to French. “Industry has monopolized discourses of pleasure, and academics have abandoned this terrain. Our study, led by Erin, pulls us back into this terrain. It shows how social science can talk about pleasure in the context of gambling but also retain a critical edge.”
This study was made possible by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC).
Read the cited paper: “A touch of luck and a ‘real taste of Vegas’: a sensory ethnography of the Montreal Casino.” [free access until October 15, 2020 courtesy of the publisher]
Attend Erin Lynch’s (virtual) lecture on October 15, the fifth in the nine-part Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) Virtual Happenings Lecture Series on the theme of ATMOSPHERES.
Read about the work of the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies.