When Will Mobile Gambling Be Culturally Accepted?
One of my favourite subjects to write about, discuss with friends or even just think about relates to the cultural acceptance of various gambling activities. Cultural acceptance, of course, refers to just how okay society in general is with a certain activity. Let’s take, for example, videogames. Before the year 2000, videogames were mostly viewed as entertainment for children – you mostly saw little kids in the arcades playing Pac-Man and Centipede. When the NES came out, the overwhelming majority of purchases were made by parents for their children, which is why there were almost no games for adults released in that era. When “Mortal Kombat” came out and featured highly comical (by our modern standards) blood and gore, everyone went nuts over it and insisted that the game be banned due to the idea that videogames were simply for children. But at some point gamers grew up, and by the early to mid 2000s, when consoles such as the PS1 started appearing on the market, for the first time in history they were being bought by adults for themselves as well as for their kids, which saw an increase in release of games that were more mature in tone, such as “Metal Gear Solid”.
The problem was that society as a whole still saw games as children’s toy, so the adults who still played them were largely considered to be juvenile nerds. It wasn’t until the mid to late 2000s when that myth gradually began to dissipate (and, honestly, it still hasn’t dissolved completely thanks to shows like “The Big Bang Theory”). Eventually, as more and more adults began to play videogames, playing them naturally became more socially acceptable, and these days it’s not all that uncommon to see someone with a 3DS or a PS Vita, or even just gaming on their phone in the subway or while waiting for the bus stop. As a matter of fact, according to studies we’re playing handheld videogames a lot more than we used to, so that should end the debate once and for all – it’s now, more or less, socially acceptable to be an adult who plays videogames in public.
But what about online gambling? Well, believe it or not, but there was actually a reason why I spend so much time talking about gaming! See, gambling and gaming aren’t just very similar words, they’re also quite similar as industries, at least as far as cultural acceptance is concerned. Just like many people considered videogames to be for children, there’s a common misconception that only old people with no education looking for a quick win are interested in online gambling. And sadly, as far as I’ve personally noticed, that particular notion hasn’t really gone away. Despite the efforts of sites like bestmobilecasino.org.uk to raise awareness, online gambling – especially mobile gambling – is in the same boat that gaming was 15 years ago, and that’s a real shame. Who knows, maybe things will change for the better – the industry keeps growing in the West and starts to gradually be adopted in the East, so maybe there’s hope for it yet. I just hope we won’t have to wait as long to feel comfortable playing blackjack in the bus than we did playing a videogame.