"Gaming" and "gambling"

Over the weekend, I spent some time reading about last week's congressional hearings about online gambling. Among the predictable gripes from the enemies of anybody having any fun is always the accusation that the word “gaming” is an industry euphemism, devised to avoid the unseemly overtones of the word “gambling.” It is dishonest, they say, to call it "gaming."

That canard came up again in the context of this hearing. Annie Duke, after testifying at the hearing, engaged in an online chat sponsored by the Washington Post. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/11/13/DI2007111301841.html. The very first question submitted was this:

Gaming? GAMING? Where I come from, playing for money -- on the Internet or elsewhere -- is called GAMBLING. And that's okay by me, but why do you insist on calling it "gaming"? How can you have an honest debate when you don't use honest language?

This person is either deliberately misrepresenting the facts or, more likely, is just ignorantly repeating something he or she has heard, without bothering to investigate it.

In fact, “gaming” is a much older term. I learned this from “The Gambler’s Guide to Taxes,” by Walter L. Lewis. An appendix in that book reproduces a short essay by Basil Nestor, in which he traces the history of both words. (I'm not sure why the essay is in a book on taxes, since it has no real bearing on that subject, but I'm glad I found it anyway.) Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version:

“Gambling” was not even a word in English when Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," in which the title character, who plans to kill his uncle, says that perhaps he should do it when his uncle was “at gaming, swearing, or about some act that has no relish of salvation in’t,” rather than when the man was praying (Act 3, Scene 3).

“Gambling” still hadn’t been coined when the Statute of Anne (1710) declared legally unenforceable any debts arising from “gaming or playing at cards, dice… or by betting….”

George Washington in 1778 noted that “gaming is again creeping into the Army” and therefore prohibited cards and dice, whether played for money or not.

When the term “gambling” finally arose in the early eighteenth century, reports Nestor, it clearly had the connotation of cheating—a game that was covertly fixed against the player—as opposed to “gaming,” which signified honest wagering.

So now you know.