Spel - en fet bonus för samhället? : Legitimering av spelande i Svenska Spels reklamserie ”Världens svenskaste spelbolag”

Sammanfattning: Today, many people in Sweden suffer from gambling addiction, and gambling advertising is one of the contributing factors to people becoming addicted. The purpose of the study is to critically analyze how gambling advertising legitimizes gambling, in this case, Svenska Spel's commercials. To get answers to the purpose and questions of the study, multimodal critical discourse analysis has been applied, which enabled an analysis of both moving material and text through several analysis tools. The analysis is based on six analysis categories inspired by previous research to be able to comment more thoroughly on the meaning and significance of the text in a wider social context. The six categories of analysis are lexical choices, implicit messages, scene setting, color, sound, and characters. Multimodality, social semiotic theory, and the ideal and the real have been applied to study the commercials and investigate which semiotic resources have been used to legitimize gambling. Based on the empirical material, three themes were identified that indicate the legitimization of gambling. The first theme was Gambling is positive!: which showed several factors that gambling at Svenska Spel can lead to benefits for society. The second theme that was identified was: We are not like other gambling companies, where it was demonstrated what advantages and differences Svenska Spel has compared to other gambling companies. The last theme identified was: Law-abiding gambling, which showed that Svenska Spel follows the laws and regulations that exist in the Swedish gambling market. These three themes have been identified through the discursive legitimation strategies which in turn have been constructed through various multimodal choices. Based on the results obtained, Svenska Spel's legitimization of games can be shown through some different factors. With the help of semiotic and multimodal tools, Svenska Spel tries to demonstrate the thoughts and ideas about how society and the world work in its commercials. In this way, Svenska Spel can influence the ongoing discourse about gambling. This is mainly done by demonstrating the knowledge they possess in the gaming industry, and Svenska Spel is aware of its great role. This leads to them being able to put themselves in a position of power and thus influence the tone of the discourse. The study concludes that ambivalence is created when it comes to Svenska Spel's commercials. The purpose of the commercials is to encourage viewers to play with Svenska Spel, as that is the purpose of the business, but they also want to demonstrate a social responsibility by, for example, investing billions in gambling addiction research. These are precisely the ones who are the problem with Svenska Spel, that there is a backside to gambling that they don't want to appear.