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Who Owns Gaming?: Analyzing Gambling's Semantic Displacement in Philippine Cultural Policy

This paper argues that in Philippine statutory and policy discourse, the word "gaming" has been legally appropriated by gambling, so that digital game developers are structurally excluded from policy recognition.

• The paper argues that in Philippine policy, the word "gaming" has been legally appropriated by gambling, structurally excluding digital game developers from policy recognition, a phenomenon the author calls "semantic displacement" and attributes to institutional defaults rather than deliberate targeting.
• The foundational assumption that gaming and gambling are independent categories requiring separate frameworks was never established in the Philippines, so the core challenge is building conceptual infrastructure rather than policing a border between two industries.
• Analysis of 28 Philippine government legal instruments from 1907 to 2025 identifies four definitional tracks for "game" (gambling, professional sports, school sports, and a proposed folk-heritage framework), and none accommodates digital games.