LIVE Baccarat calculations: Macau machine gambling and the production of the post-socialist subject

ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.

KEYWORDS:

• Calculation
• gaming
• market devices
• performativity
• agencement

Acknowledgements

This research has been presented to The India China Institute at The New School, New York; the Alberta Gaming Research Institute, University of Alberta, Canada; and the Geomedia 2017 International Conference, Karlstad University, Sweden. The author would like to thank Andrew W. Scott, CEO of O MEDIA, for permission to use the photos, which originally appeared in World Gaming Magazine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tim Simpson is Associate Professor of Communication, and Associate Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the co-author (with UK-based photographer Roger Palmer) of the book Macao Macau (Black Dog Publishing, 2015), and the editor of the volume Tourist Utopias: Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). His recent publications about glass architecture, themed environments, and urban planning in Macau have appeared in such journals as Theory, Culture & Society, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Planning Theory. He is currently working on a manuscript, under contract with University of Minnesota Press, entitled Macau: Casino Capitalism and the Biopolitical Metropolis.

Notes

1 Also, as an electronic game it circumvents a government-imposed cap, initiated in 2012, on the quantity of conventional table games in the city’s casinos.

2 Schüll (2013) has analyzed the attempt by the global gaming industry to address and produce this ‘Chinese gambler’ as a knowable subject.

3 Although I have conflated these positions, we can differentiate the so-called ‘new’ economic sociology of embeddeness (Granovetter 1985, Polyani 2001, Zelizer 2013), and the economic anthropology of consumption (Miller 2002). For Callon’s response to each approach see Caliskan and Callon (2009).

4 Agencement combines two French words: agencer, meaning ‘to arrange’ or ‘to fit together’; and agence, or agency, the capacity to act, and to ascribe meaning to action (Hardie and MacKenzie 2007, p. 58). Agencement (aka assemblage, apparatus, dispositif) refers to this hybrid configuration of humans, fixtures, and devices through which agency is enunciated.

5 US Patent App. 11/198,218, 2006; US Patent App. 11/725,719, 2008; US Patent 7,922,587, 2011; US Patent App. 13/042,633, 2011; US Patent 7,914,368, 2011; US Patent 7,918,723, 2011; US Patent 8,182,321, 2012; US Patent 8,210,920, 2012; US Patent 8,323,105, 2012; US Patent 8,308,559, 2012; US Patent App. 13/685,226, 2013; US Patent App. 14/217,623, 2014; US Patent 8,956,210, 2015; US Patent 9,098,981, 2015; US Patent 9,214,060, 2015; US Patent 9,240,095, 2016; US Patent App. 14/939,019, 2016; US Patent App. 14/961,398, 2016; US Patent App. 15/417,357, 2017; US Patent App. 15/645,378, 2017; US Patent App. 15/648,999, 2017; US Patent App. 15/654,435, 2017; US Patent 9,710,995, 2017.

6 In Macau both conventional baccarat and LIVE Baccarat are commonly played by both men and women, although further research would be needed to identify the role of gender in baccarat play more precisely.

7 For a discussion of the historical evolution of baccarat and the nature of probabilities related to different versions of the game see Ethier and Lee (2015).

8 These card combinations are meaningful in poker, but have no meaning in baccarat.

9 This focus on the economic function of the casino in processes of capitalist subjectivation differentiates my approach to ‘casino capitalism’ from the conventional use of the phrase as an analogy whereby the risk indicative of casino gambling is understood to mirror the volatility of the post-1970 global economic regime (see Strange 1986).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Macau Research Committee: [grant number MYRG2014-00017-FSS].