Las Vegas and the casino: towards a gamified city?

More than a simple urban archetype, Las Vegas seems almost like a popular culture in itself. The number of literary and cinematographic works, which have treated this city as a complete personality are excellent proofs. Nevertheless, we shall not get into that in any detail - preferring instead to look more closely at two recent works which have distinguished themselves by presenting a very different post-apocalyptic vision to the traditional depictions: the film Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) and the video game Fallout: New Vegas (2010).

Each in its way portrays a counter-Utopian and prospective vision of the emblematic Sin City. Resident Evil's version is the more realistic of the two for obvious ecological reasons - which had also inspired the essayist Alain Weisman, author of a worst case scenario ommented on by Transit-City (cf. How Las Vegas will disappear). But the one described by Fallout is more interesting vis-à-vis our subject. 

This transition is revelatory: it demonstrates the passing from postmodernism to urban postmodernity. According to Hari Kunzru in  The Guardian (translation published in Courrier International) : «Postmodernism was, crucially, a pre-digital phenomenon. In retrospect, all the things that seemed so exciting to its adherents – the giddy excess of information, the flattening of old hierarchies, the blending of signs with the body – have been made real by the internet. It's as if the culture was dreaming of the net, and when it arrived, we no longer had any need for those dreams, or rather, they became mundane, part of our everyday life. We have lived through the end of postmodernism and the dawning of postmodernity.»

It then becomes interesting to question the manner in which it translates itself in contemporary urban thinking by following the thought models presented in the Dreamlands exhibition (see the exhibition's educational material). We have seen that it is no longer the decor of casinos, but their substance which influences urban thought. It is logical that this evolution be translated by a shift in the disciplines concerned. There is thus a transition from an influence on architectural and urban thought (material dimension) to an influence on urban life itself (immaterial dimension). 

This transition is most clearly discernible in the introduction of recreational elements - from the casino - into the city's everyday life, in the manner of Stockholm's speed Camera Lottery, part of the Fun Theory contest organized by Volkswagen. To encourage better driving, the lottery proposes to use the money from speeding tickets to reward more law-abiding drivers. We will not question here the ethical dimension of such a course, concentrating instead on the problematics of the imaginary. Nevertheless, it seems essential to keep in mind that such an influence of the casino in the public sphere must be subjected to debate.

We can see a double influence in this advertisement. The first is that of gambling, which till now had been reserved for casinos, and thus was generally distinct from the traditional concept of a city (excepting Las Vegas, obviously). The second is that of gamification, «he transfer of game mechanics [especially the video game] into other domains [...] Its aim is to increase the acceptability and usage of these applications by taking recourse to the human predisposition for play». Let us note that this second influence is a direct echo of what Hari Kunzru has to say regarding the role of digital cultures in the passage from postmodernism to postmodernity.

This is precisely what Bruce Bégout explained in Zéropolis : The Las Vegas Experience (2001), n which he highlighted the predominance of the recreational dimension in Las Vegas' modern influence: «The consumerist and recreational culture that has transformed Las Vegas over the past thirty years continues to gain ground in our day-to-day relation with the city, wherever we might be living» (see also here). In other words: Las Vegas is dead... Long live Las Vegas!

It is in this context that we have the city of tomorrow. Tired of the kitschy pastiche of Las Vegas «models» and amusement parks, the modern city is on the lookout for other recreational influences - finding it mainly in gamification. Dubai and its Chinese, middle eastern or other cousins thus appear, in contrast, as the final survivors of an obsolete conception of the leisure city. The reign of the Dreamlands thus seems to have given place to that of a gamified city, which the dreamers are still looking for.