La métaphore ludique chez les joueurs de poker : le jeu de la négociation marchande

Abstract

Jacques Henriot’s predecessors defined play as a free activity separated from everyday life. How then can we think the influence of gambling practice in a player’s daily life ? Based on the interviews of two poker players, this article analyzes the use of a metaphor that leads to consider gambling as a trade negotiation rather than a play form. Poker serves as a model to describe an experience that is not play though it offers a similar bidding system: buying and selling a sofa. The two poker players use this same metaphor in their interviews and even mention transfers of know-how between game and negotiation. In Sous couleur de jouer, Henriot examines how the word “game” extends by transposition beyond its traditional boundaries and concludes that the idea of play itself can be defined as a metaphor. This definition allows us to understand how poker has invested these players’ everyday life in the form of a speech act.

Keywords

• Henriot
• metaphor
• gambling
• trade negotiations
• poker