 Why say gaming instead of gambling?
In today's dispatch, we learn how gambling's foes seek to demonize wagering as a pernicious tobaccolike vice. She begins referring to the "gaming industry." It may finally settle this question: Is gambling Hollywood or tobacco? This effort has largely succeeded, because Vegas is still the dominant image of American gambling, if not the dominant reality. The antis, meanwhile, cry that gambling is like cigarettes: unsafe for kids, viciously addictive, deceptively marketed, unhealthy, expensive, and unacceptable unless mightily regulated. Instead it will opt for small, targeted policies, concentrating on compulsive gambling. It will probably propose that casinos and state lotteries fund gambling-addiction research and that casinos take much stronger measures to bar problem gamblers from wagering. The commission may recommend that gaming taxes be used to underwrite treatment of pathological gamblers and that insurance companies be encouraged to cover gambling addiction. Similarly, the commission will try to reduce gamblers' access to cash by limiting the size of ATM advances and prodding casinos to remove the machines from their floors. It will call for heavier regulation of Indian gambling and will probably try to ban or severely regulate Internet gambling, perhaps by forbidding gambling companies from running online casinos. In short, it will treat gambling as a tobaccolike vice. Gamblers don't quite accept the cigarette analogy--though commission member Bill Bible, a former chief of the Nevada Gaming Commission, did concede that gambling was like alcohol--but they're happy to sign on to the specific measures. It has already established a (mostly) independent center to fund research into pathological gambling. It medicalizes the problem of compulsive gambling, blaming it on psychological abnormality rather than industry machination. In exchange for losing a few compulsive gamblers, the casinos will (falsely) appear more concerned with the health of their customers than with profits. A few years ago, gambling was confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. What the commission ought to be investigating is whether the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. But it can't, because the gambling industry has become so powerful that it's politically untouchable. The antis can call gambling "tobacco." "Gaming"? Once upon a time, the casino owners decided that "gambling" was too crude, too avaricious, to describe their fair business. So "gambling" disappeared in Las Vegas, and "gaming" has risen in its place. People who own casinos are not "casino owners," they are "gaming visionaries." Pathological gamblers are "problem gamers"--as if they're having trouble mastering the rules of Monopoly.
 Gaming doesn't have the negative connotation that gambling does.
 Gaming sounds more fun than gambling.  Gaming sounds young, gambling sounds old.  Gaming sounds classier than gambling.  Gaming doesn't have the negative connotation that gambling does.