The Naming of Gaming (and Its History)

In Word Through The Times, we trace how one word or phrase has changed throughout the history of the newspaper.

On Page 8 of a Saturday issue of The New York Times in 1931 appeared the headline “‘Old West’ Returns in Nevada Gambling.” It announced a historical moment for the state, which, at the time, was the only one with legal casino gambling. “The hum and hubbub of gambling, the click-clack of machines and the clatter of poker chips were partly drowned by the staccato noise of a compressed air drill operated by a construction crew engaged in cutting through massive walls to enlarge the gaming room,” the article read.

The term “gaming” originally referred to “the act or practice of gambling,” according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Nevada legalized gambling to bring in revenue after the Great Depression. Once word spread, the introduction of open gambling received mixed reviews. In 1934, The Times ran excerpts from sermons from two churches in New York City in which the pastors denounced lotteries. One said gambling was a “leprous touch on sport.” He continued, “It is anti-social. It breaks down character and corrupts public life.” Below the article’s headline, The Times referred to gambling as “public gaming.”

In the late 1970s, the term “gaming” became more closely associated with electronic gaming, thanks to a rise in coin-operated arcade games and video games. In 1981, The Times published a Style article titled “The Videogames: How They Rate,” compiled by Bill Kunkel, the executive editor of Electronic Games, the world’s first video game magazine, and Arnie Katz, the magazine’s co-publisher. The two ranked games and systems in “America’s fastest-growing hobby.” The game Space Invaders, they wrote, “in its original coin-operated form, helped inspire today’s electronic gaming boom.”

The use of “gaming” in The Times spiked in the early 2000s. In the column The Gamer, Seth Schiesel covered video game culture. In 2006, he wrote that he had attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas “to speak on a panel about next-generation gaming and to see if Sony would say anything substantive about the PlayStation 3.”

Over time, gambling and video games began to overlap and The Times covered the new world of virtual gambling. It reported on the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a federal ban on sports gambling in 2018, and it published an investigation late last year of the lobbying blitz that made sports betting ubiquitous. Reporters interviewed lobbyists, executives and lawmakers and read thousands of pages of documents. They found that the gambling industry often saw sports betting as “a steppingstone to an even loftier ambition: the legalization of online casino gambling,” also known as “iGaming.”

More recently, The Times described the emergence of “cloud gaming,” which enables players to stream video games rather than install them. The Federal Trade Commission sued Microsoft last month to stop its purchase of the video game maker Activision Blizzard. Among other concerns, the F.T.C. argued that the acquisition would “give it an unfair edge in the nascent market for cloud gaming.”