Documentary - History of Gambling Research

History of gambling

There have been signs throughout all of human history where gambling has been present. In this blog post, I'll be looking into the earliest signs of gambling and how it has evolved over centuries to become the modern game today.

The earliest signs of Gambling:

Back in 2300bc is the earliest evidence of gambling, proving that gambling has been a part of our nature since the dawn of time. The evidence comes from Ancient China where they would play a game of chance using tiles. This game was referenced in the Chinese book 'Book of Song' where it would then talk about what they would draw onto wood, this implies that this game may have been part of a lottery.
This is interesting as we could potentially incorporate something like this in our documentary, maybe by using graphics or even asking to film inside a museum. This would have to be discussed with the rest of the group.

Some believe that dice were invented by a mythological hero during the battle of Troy, telling us that the greek invented the dice. However, dice existed far earlier than that. As some were discovered in an Egyptian tomb in 3000bc proving that we were familiar with dice 2500 years before we thought they were discovered. Skipping ahead to Ancient Rome where all forms of gambling, which included dice games were illegal. This is when the citizens of Rome then made poker chips, so if the guards did catch them gambling they could then get away by just telling them that they were playing for chips and not real money.
I like this idea about having some dice being rolled this could be used as cutaways to break up the interviews that we're going to have.

Roman Gambling (image found on google images)

The first casino:

As gambling started to come into everyday life more often may people saw this as an investment idea to make money from the business. Gamblers would then come to these locations to gamble, which resulted in businessmen opening up dedicated gambling establishments all over the world. Venice Italy was the first place known for opening a casino in the sixteenth century and if you were to translate the word casino from Italian it would translate to 'small villa'. To begin with, casinos would only be a place to gamble but in the nineteenth century, this all changed. In the era, they changed the lifestyle of a casino as they started offering food, drinks, and live performances. This changed the way the world would associate with gambling.
I'm very interested in this form of gambling and exploring how gambling went from just going into a place and hopefully winning money to a luxury. This could be an interesting route to talk about as many people today wouldn't have thought casinos would have been like that. I know for a fact whenever I think of casinos I immediately think of parties. I also don't think it helps when we see in movies like Hangover when we just see the winning side and not the losing side.



The modern age:

In 1910 America there was a nationwide prohibition on gambling, this is similar to when they also had the same as the alcohol prohibition in the same era. This was difficult for a lot of people to adjust to the new lifestyle so they would gambling discreetly. When The Wall Street Crash happened this is when the states finally legalised gambling again as everyone had then lost all of their money. however, it wasn't legal in most of the state only in Las Vegas and Nevada. This is still the same nowadays in the states as gambling is still a grey area in many states.
This would be an interesting topic to include into our documentary, however, as the brief says it needs to be relevant about online gambling so we can't include all the history on the subject. We need to be brief in the history we want to talk about as we only have 10 minutes to include all the information we want to talk about. We spoke as a group before and made it clear that we want to show more on how it's evolved into the online aspect.

Modern Gambling (Image found on google images)

Bibliography

N/A. (N/A). The History of Gambling . Available: https://www.gambling.net/history/. Last accessed 28th Mar 2019.
N/A. (N/A). History of Gambling. Available: https://www.bestonlinecasino.com/new-to-online-gambling/online-gambling-history/. Last accessed 28th Mar 2019.