I just read an article in a ski magazine reporting that primary businesses in Heavenly Valley, California, are tourism, gaming, and then I shut the thing because I am clearly way too easy to annoy.
Gaming is Monopoly, Pictionary, Scrabble, chess, Dungeons and Dragons, paintball, or dominoes. Gambling is any of those games played for stakes, money or otherwise. If you play chess as a game, checkmate is the end of it. If you or your opponent has to pay the winner a nickel, it's a wager as well as a game. If you put your money into a slot machine, or anything that similarly operates with no input from you, it's only a gamble and not a game at all.
Anything that relies wholly on luck is not a game. I can barely accept blackjack, and craps I'm generously iffy about only because you do at least hold the dice in your own hands. Participating in a sport could be called "gaming" but it's probably running or swimming or playing football; betting on an event that you're not involved in is gambling; betting anyone other than your single opponent on an event that you participate in is cheating.
"Gaming." Renaming it doesn't remove the stigma. Not being stupid with your money, or greedy about others' stupidity, might do that.
These stories have a few good lines but treat, not women of the West as its hype claims, but women who want men of the West. My neighbor is beginning a book club with this, which is why I read it. Good writing, except it was the same story a dozen times over, from different angles. An exception, "Blizzard under Blue Sky," was my favorite: a woman and her dogs instead of a woman and her man.
Pam Houston is going to be at the Tattered Cover tonight. This might be interesting, plus maybe I can get over my exasperation before the book club.