Betting on sporting events is a common form of gambling around the world, involving billions of dollars annually. Large events such as the Super Bowl or the World Series alone can generate wagers totaling billions of dollars. In addition to legal sports betting, such as wagers made in casinos, illegal sports gambling flourishes globally. Rigid enforcement of sports gambling laws remains difficult because much of the betting is placed with private individuals or with companies located in countries where such wagering is legal. Internet gambling sites, which can be based anywhere in the world, are a growing source of sports gambling.Legal in many other parts of the world, betting on individual sporting events in the United States is allowed only in Nevada. In part this is because of the potential for events to be fixed, or illegally influenced.There have been a number of high-profile sports gambling scandals in history, including the fixing of the 1919 World Series by Chicago White Sox players, who were paid by gamblers to lose the series. Another scandal involved professional baseball player and manager Pete Rose, who was banned from the sport and barred from entering the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his gambling. Most sports leagues and associations have strict rules against players betting on sports or associating with gamblers. Sports betting typically involves odds or point spreads that affect the bet or the payout. A bet with odds of five-to-one means that a winning bettor will collect five dollars for every dollar bet. With a point spread, one team is favored by a certain amount of points. For example, if a bettor decides to wager on a team favored by 12 points, then he or she wins only if that team wins the game by more than 12 points. If there are no odds or point spread given, then the wager is known as an even-money bet. There are many other types of sports wagers, including combination bets, depending on the sport and the specific regulations that apply to it.Horse racing has long been one of the most common types of legal sports gambling. Many large cities have tracks dedicated to horse racing. More than 150 racetracks were operating in the early 2000s in the United States. Gambling at these tracks is governed by the pari-mutuel betting system.Under this system all money bet on a race is placed in a pool and split between winning bettors, minus a percentage that goes to the track. The odds are determined by how much money is bet on each horse, with the more money bet, the lower the odds. By the beginning of the 21st century pari-mutuel betting on horse racing in the United States-including wagers allowed away from the track, know as off-track betting-totaled more than $16 billion annually. See also Harness Racing.Dog racing, which also uses the pari-mutuel system, is legal in some states but is not as widespread as horse racing. Betting on animal fights, such as cockfighting or bullfighting, has become even more limited because of animal cruelty laws that outlaw these sports. Animal fighting is an example of a type of gambling that has been banned in the United States but is still legal in some other countries, which have different cultural traditions and often less stringent gambling laws. It is also operated illegally in many places.
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Casinos
One of the fastest growing forms of gambling today is the casino. A casino is a gambling establishment where players bet against the casino in games of chance. These games can include poker, blackjack, keno, dice games such as craps, and mechanical devices such as roulette wheels and slot machines. All casino games have a house edge, which means the casino has better odds than the players. In the few games where players compete against each other, such as poker, the house edge usually consists of a small percentage taken from each pot..Since the early 2000s poker has soared in popularity, mostly because of widespread television coverage of major tournaments.Although many states and foreign countries have legalized casinos, Nevada dominates the casino market in the United States and the world. In an area known as the Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, billion-dollar theme hotels attract millions of tourists annually with flashy entertainment, amusement parks, and huge casinos. Other cities with a high concentration of casinos include Reno, Nevada, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Some states, including Iowa and Louisiana, have legalized floating gambling parlors known as riverboat casinos. All together, legal casinos in the United States collected about $40 billion annually in the early 2000s, with the total revenues making up nearly two-thirds of all legal gambling in America.Native American casinos have begun to make inroads into the U.S. gambling industry. In 1988 the United States Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which allowed for the possibility that Native American tribes could open up gambling on their lands, partly to help stimulate the depressed economies of many reservations. By the early 2000s more than half of the states had licensed some form of Native American gaming. A number of these casino resorts, such as the giant Foxwoods complex in Connecticut, have been phenomenally successful. This trend has increased the pressure in many states to expand legalized gambling so that other outlets can compete with Native American casinos.
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FORMS OF GAMBLING
There are many different types of legal and illegal gambling. Legal forms are run directly by government agencies, for-profit companies, and charitable organizations. Illegal types include bets placed with individuals or underground gambling services, as well as informal gambling among friends, such as poker games or sports pools. Complex laws dictate which types of gambling are legal in a particular city, state, or country, and these laws are subject to change. Because of varied regulations from city to city and state to state, gambling is often used by communities and vacation destinations to attract tourism.
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NEW PLATFORMS
Friday, May 14, 2010.
Building on the success of interactive games played on consoles and computers, some companies have branched out into new platforms. One of the fastest-growing gaming platforms is the Internet. While the first multi-user dungeon game appeared in 1979, recent developments have made Internet, or online, gaming a unique platform unto itself.One type of popular Internet game is characterized by its “massively multi player online” (MMO) worlds, in which hundreds and even thousands of players can socialize and compete with one another. These games are also sometimes known as massively multi player online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. With 100,000 paid subscribers by 2000, Origin Systems’ Ultima Online was the first economically successful MMO game. Games such as Sony’s Ever Quest and Microsoft’s As heron’s Call built on this popularity and on the expanding availability of broadband Internet access. Other popular MMO games include The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Lineage. Developments in the console game market, such as Microsoft’s Xbox Live feature, were also able to take advantage of the Internet to connect gamers and enhance their games. Xbox Live had attracted about 4 million paid subscribers by the end of 2006.The rapid pace of technological growth appears to offer a bright future for the electronic-games industry. Several companies now publish games for handheld personal digital assistants as well as for cell phones. The popularity of electronic games today actually drives the development of new technologies because companies see a huge, lucrative market in which to release new products. Cutting-edge developments such as virtual reality may eventually be introduced to a mass audience through video games, breaking new technological ground in society through play.
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POPULAR COMPUTER GAMES
In 1993 id Software published Doom, one of the most influential computer games of all time. Doom popularized a three-dimensional, first-person perspective camera-allowing players to see the game through the eyes of the character they controlled. The game also popularized online multi player gaming.In the early 1990s a drop in the price of CD-ROM technology led to a wave of multimedia games. Compact discs (CDs) can store from 650 to 700 megabytes of data, more than 400 times the storage space of standard floppy disks. With this extra storage, designers could add voice files, digitized video of live actors, and other assets to their games. Companies such as Digital Pictures, Access Software, and Viacom published interactive movies, or games that combined digitized footage of real actors and virtual sets. In 1993 Broderbund published a game called Myst for Macintosh computers, and Virgin Interactive Entertainment published a game called The 7th Guest for the PC. In both games the player explores a rich virtual world, trying to solve puzzles. Millions of copies of these games were sold, popularizing multimedia technology and attracting large new audiences to computer gaming.In 1995 Microsoft launched Windows 95, an operating system that further simplified the use of PCs as a gaming platform. With built-in driver support for sound cards, graphics cards, joysticks, and other controllers, Windows 95 removed most of the compatibility issues that had long plagued computer gaming. The PC game market declined in the early 2000s as video-game consoles became more powerful, incorporating high-end graphics, hard drives, and Internet features that were formerly exclusive to home computers. Some popular console games continued to be simultaneously released for the PC, but others were designed solely for the console market.
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ADVANTAGES OF COMPUTER GAMES
Computers brought a new flexibility to electronic games. Because computers stored data, they made a good platform for lengthy adventure and role-playing games. Players could store their progress and continue the games at a later time. With consoles such as the Atari 2600, players could only start games from the beginning. This situation changed slightly in the mid-1980s, when Nintendo built a battery-backed chip into The Legend of Zelda that allowed players to record their progress. Computer systems such as the Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh brought other advantages to gaming. These machines used mouse controllers, devices that gave players fast and highly precise control. As technology progressed, computer monitors offered higher resolution than television screens, giving computer games a crisper look. This improved resolution made computers ideal for running strategy games such as Sim City and Civilization, which featured highly detailed graphics.Although some computer-game publishers dropped out of the business, others-such as Broderbund and Sierra On-Line-gained prominence. Electronic Arts, which was founded in 1982, became one of the biggest names in the industry. The company’s success was fueled by aggressively recruiting top game designers away from competitors and by packaging its games in attractive boxes. In 1984 Electronic Arts paid professional basketball stars Julius Erving and Larry Bird $25,000 each to use their names and likenesses in a game called Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One. The game was an instant success, leading Electronic Arts to strike up a similar relationship with National Football League (NFL) announcer and former coach John Madden to create a football simulation game for the Apple II computer in 1989.For many years personal computers (PCs) were plagued with compatibility problems that hampered them as a gaming platform. Because only Apple manufactured Macintosh computers, however, these machines had standardized parts and operating software. Programs that ran on one Macintosh computer could run on any Macintosh that had sufficient processing power. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Compaq, Packard Bell, and several other companies all manufactured different PC machines, seldom using standardized components. As a result, games that ran on one type of PC might not run on PCs made by other manufacturers. Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo began to solve this problem in 1989 when he introduced a PC sound card called the Sound Blaster. Although other companies previously had released sound devices for PCs, Sim succeeded at establishing Sound Blaster as the standard for PC sound. Future sound cards needed to be “Sound Blaster-compatible,” meaning they needed to use the same software. Having a standardized sound protocol enabled PCs to run games with robust music and voice files that sounded as good or better than the audio in console games.
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COMPUTER GAMES
While video-game systems are used solely for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, or sometimes both. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller.In 1972 Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players’ objective was to locate the beast and shoot it. In 1975 a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure, a highly influential text-based game later expanded by a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type “open chest,” then “down stairs.” Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s these text-based adventure games-another popular game in this mold was called Zork-dominated the field of computer games.After playing Adventure on her husband’s computer, a California woman named Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics. To tap into the growing excitement over video games at the time, many computer-game publishers marketed both authorized translations of arcade games and thinly disguised versions of arcade hits. Many publishers also created their own “arcade-style” action games. In 1982 Broderbund released Chop lifter, a game in which players flew a helicopter over a desert to rescue hostages. Marketed shortly after the Iranian hostage crisis, Choplifter was an instant success.
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