At the “opening ceremonies” for Aria, U.S. Green Buildings Council CEO Rick Fedrizzi said that Aria was an example of what architecture should be, and that schoolchildren should be brought in to see the building for itself as an example of what the future would be.
“Wow,” I thought, “Bringing kids to a casino to to be inspired. That’s something I haven’t heard before.” So I thought that maybe this was evidence that gambling was becoming even more mainstream in American culture.
Around that time, NBA commissioner David Stern said that his league was now willing to talk about supporting legal sports betting. Again, this seemed like a historic shift in attitudes.
With a little editorial suggestion, I put these and a few other ideas together, did some additional research, and the result was a featured story in the March 2010 Global Gaming Business magazine:
If you're reading Global Gaming Business, odds are you're pretty comfortable with the idea of gambling as an acceptable leisure pastime for adults. You're not alone, and you haven't been for a long time: Since the past decade, about one in five Americans has visited a casino at least once a year. With legal casinos breaking out of Nevada in 1978 and spreading steadily across the nation, there has clearly been a tolerance-at first often grudging-for casinos.
Yet the past few months have given the impression that gambling has now reached unprecedented levels of public sanction that goes beyond toleration and reaches toward outright approval, a historic change in attitudes.
via Gambling Goes Mainstream | Global Gaming Business Magazine.
I’d say this is evidence that we’ll see more, not less, gambling soon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see online poker be the next big domino to fall. There is a vague public support for it and a smaller group of devoted players who would be grateful to any politicians who voted for it, but more importantly there are well-funded parts of the industry now in favor. I’m not enough of a political scientist to say whether the current partisan politics will make any specific bill more or less likely, but looking at it from a general cultural and historical perspective it seems that in retrospect no one will be surprised when this happens.