Gambling motivation and involvement: A review of social

lukuchuko game is rapid and hundreds of rounds may be played each day. Each man
bets objects that he can dispense with and keeps objects that he has won and has
use for. If someone is very lucky and wins a lot, he is urged by the others to continue
gambling until he starts to lose. Thus, gambling levels out resources between the
men, without the strain on social relations that would follow if the ideal of sharing
were invoked, e.g. by one person simply demanding something from another.
Woodburn notes that: “It is paradoxical that a game based on a desire to win and,
in a sense, to accumulate should operate so directly against the possibility of systematic
accumulation (p. 443–4)”.
The present author has elsewhere [92] discussed the further implications of gambling
viewed as a form of exchange. Drawing on economic and anthropological
theories of exchange [206–208], Binde [92] proposes a scheme for analyzing and
comparing gambling and attitudes to gambling in different cultures. The scheme
relies on the identification of a few elementary traits of societal exchange systems
– generalized versus balanced reciprocity, and voluntary versus involuntary transfers.
Accordingly, redistributive functions of gambling are principally found in non-
Western societies where there is an ethos of sharing. In modern Western societies, the
dominant mode of exchange is the commercial market. Hence, gambling becomes a
product that is sold and consumed, and the accompanying ethos is that of freedom
of choice. Gambling is thereby conceptualized as the voluntary consumption of leisure
and entertainment services, while heavy gambling is regarded as indicating loss
of rational choice, i.e. compulsive behavior or addiction.
RELEvancE tO pRObLEm GambLinG StudiES
While the function of gambling to redistribute valuable goods is at work primarily in
small-scale pre-modern societies, it is of more general interest to contrast the economics
of non-commercial gambling with the economics of commercial gaming. In
a non-commercially operated fair game of chance, losses and wins even out in the
long run. Even the most compulsive gambler would lose nothing more than time in
such a game. This means that there is no accelerating chase of losses, as chasing cannot
apply to time lost, only to money lost. Since chasing losses is a main component
of problem gambling – some see it as the very essence of the problem – it may be
that gambling in such circumstances would seldom become excessive and uncontrolled.
Thus, the phenomenon of problem gambling may exist primarily in commercial
gambling and in non-commercial gambling that is unfairly run or where there is a skill
element making some players more successful in the long run than others. Whether
this is true or not could be empirically tested in problem gambling prevalence surveys
where different varieties of commercial and non-commercial gambling are distinguished.
Whether the motives and involvement in games vary between commercially and
non-commercially arranged games is a related empirical question.
G A M B L I N G M O T I VAT I O N A N D I N V O LV E M E N T 39