Gambling Crime

Edging Your Bets: Advantage Play, Gambling, Crime and Victimisation

James Banks, from the Sheffield Hallam University, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Traditional and New Forms of Crime and Deviance,” under the title “Edging Your Bets: Advantage Play, Gambling, Crime and Victimisation”. Here is the abstract: Consumerism, industrial development and regulatory liberalisation have underpinned the ascendance of gambling to a mainstream consumption practice. In particular, the online gambling environment has been marketed as a site of ‘safe risks’ where citizens can engage in a multitude of different forms of aleatory consumption. This paper offers a virtual ethnography of an online ‘advantage play’ subculture. It demonstrates how advantage players have re-interpreted the online gambling landscape as an environment saturated with crime and victimisation. In this virtual world, advantage play is no longer simply an instrumental act concerned with profit accumulation to finance consumer desires. Rather, it acts as an opportunity for individuals to engage in a unique form of edgework, whereby the threat to one’s well being is tested through an ability to avoid crime and victimisation. This paper demonstrates how mediated environments may act as sites for edgeworking and how the potential for victimisation can be something that is actively engaged with.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

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Further Reading

• “Edging Your Bets: Advantage Play, Gambling, Crime and Victimisation”, by James Banks (Proceedings)