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 author terms this "semantic displacement" and attributes it not to deliberate targeting but to institutional defaults. The central claim is that the foundational assumption that gaming and gambling are independent categories requiring separate frameworks was never achieved in the Philippines, making the challenge one of building conceptual infrastructure rather than policing a border between two distinct industries.

The analysis rests on a qualitative document analysis of 28 Philippine government legal instruments spanning 1907 to 2025, read as active tools of governance. It identifies four parallel definitional tracks for "game": a dominant gambling track rooted in Presidential Decree No. 1869 (1983), a professional sports track under the Games and Amusements Board, a school sports track anchored in the Palarong Pambansa Act of 2013, and a proposed folk-heritage framework. None accommodates digital games. Evidence includes PAGCOR's 2025 labeling of 32.117 million registered online gambling users as "electronic gaming players," set against a statistic that 96% of Filipino internet users played video games in the same period. Several 2025 bills, including House Bills No. 5812 and 4732, define gaming as a subordinate form of gambling, while every esports bill filed since 2022 avoids the word "gaming" altogether.

The author frames this exclusion through nondecision-making and the concept of semantic space occupation, drawing on established political science and policy scholarship. The paper also contends that chance-based monetization in games, such as loot boxes and randomized mechanics, poses regulatory questions that institutional separation alone cannot resolve, pointing to rating-system models like PEGI and ESRB as potential responses. Its implications extend beyond the Philippines, suggesting that Anglophonic and European convergence frameworks may need recalibration.