Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll

[rachelmanija]

A dense and academic but enlightening book about what it says on the can; I got through it by skipping all the Foucault and other philosophy, along with some of the math.

(In general, I take the position that any paragraph involving certain types of non-standard word usage is skippable. For instance (not actual example AS FAR AS I KNOW) Re-Membering Herstory: Men Con/Descending to Women.)

Addiction by Design is an in-depth look at how machine gambling, like video poker, is designed and regulated, how it affects gamblers, and what gamblers get out of it.

The parts about game and casino design are infuriating and sad; the details are fascinating and new, but the overall thrust is unsurprising. Huge amounts of money, market research, and brainpower are spent to make the machines and the environment around them addictive and deceptive, and to keep gamblers going until all their money is gone. Machine gaming is not regulated in any meaningful way. Habitual machine gamblers in Las Vegas often lose all their money, and find it very difficult to quit because gambling machines are literally everywhere, including in grocery stores.

What gamblers get from machine gambling is the surprising part. They're not gambling in the vain hope of winning lots of money, which is what I always assumed. (The vain hope of hitting it big does seem to be a big factor in non-machine gambling.) The machine gamblers are gambling for its own sake. Their hope of winning isn't for money per se, but because money will enable them to play longer. People who end up at Gamblers Anonymous often gamble for twelve hours straight, not stopping to eat or drink or, in some cases, even to use the bathroom.

According to this book, and it's intensively researched, gambling machines are better understood as dissociation machines. Gamblers play to enter "the zone," in which they lose themselves and enter a dissociative state in which they forget not only their problems, but their very selves. It's a highly addictive state, though like many addictions it quickly stops being actually enjoyable.

Casino designers know exactly why the machine gamblers are there, and employ an astounding amount of money and cleverness to encourage and enable their dissociation addiction. Everything from the game design itself to the casino layout to the machine placement to the chairs to the bathroom access is meticulously researched and optimized. In one case, a team of experts spent a month working on a single "bing!" sound to make it satisfying and comforting rather than annoying or distracting.

Unsurprisingly, the casino owners and designers focus on the design itself rather than on what they're doing to the gamblers, and wave off the addictive elements as the gamblers' own responsibility.

This is a depressing and infuriating book. It's not just how exploitative and predatory the whole thing is, but that so much time and effort and money and cleverness is poured into making something that preys on people and makes their lives worse.

For instance, they designed incredibly expensive and sophisticated comfortable, ergonomic chairs so people won't get uncomfortable while gambling for hours and hours. Why not design and provide those chairs to office workers, for whom they would actually make their lives better? Welcome to capitalism, where the office workers get cheap chairs that cause orthopedic problems that they have to pay to fix, if they even can with their inadequate paychecks and medical care, and the gamblers get perfect chairs to lull them into an addictive dissociative state that will ruin their lives.

Schüll notes that the gamblers' subjective experience of "the zone" sounds very similar to something you've probably heard of in a positive sense, which is "flow."

I find machine gambling very boring and have never found a video game more than mildly enjoyable, but I absolutely understand the appeal of repetitive tasks. I can weed or prune or do other repetitive garden tasks pretty much indefinitely, in a blissful state of losing myself in the task. I join with the garden in a way that sounds very similar to the way gamblers say they become the machine. I also love arranging things, like alphabetizing books or putting rocks in a border. I can also get in the zone via certain types of repetitive exercise, like lifting weights.

We tend to draw a hard line between dissociation (bad!) and flow (good!) but if you think of it as a state of absorption in a repetitive task to the point that you lose yourself and feel that you become the task, it's clearly something that a lot of humans experience and enjoy and and seek to experience over and over. If gardening was cleverly optimized by teams of experts, I might well slide from doing it for fun to doing it addictively.

In the chapter on treating machine gambling (insanely difficult when the gamblers are living in Las Vegas, where they can't escape it) it's noted that people tend to switch one addiction for another. I wondered if the machine gamblers specifically might be able to do some harm reduction by switching to home video gaming, which at least won't suck their money. You can play video poker at home just as a game, with no money involved. It wouldn't be in the casino environment, but it might serve as a kind of methadone for the casino's heroin.

via landingtree. Their review here.

Comments

[scioscribe]

That bit about the ergonomic chairs for gamblers vs. office workers is so profoundly illuminating and depressing. I always find the kind of intense, hyper-detailed design choices that go into highly controlled experiences--even terrible ones--to be interesting, but this is really one of the bleakest examples of that.

I tried slot machines once and actively disliked them, thankfully, but I've gotten sucked into video games before (albeit in a much more temporary and manageable way). I'm really interested in the idea that they could be used as a kind of methadone.

[ratcreature]

Just how expensive are these machines? Couldn't a gambler just buy one, set it up and do it in their living room if it's not about the chance for money? I mean, I expect the real deal to be quite expensive, but considering how much people lose even spending five or ten thousand on one could be worth it.

[rachelmanija]

The problem is that they're proprietary. AFAIK the casionos wouldn't sell one for personal use.

[lilacsigil]

My grandfather bought my grandmother an old one for her 75th birthday - she enjoyed poker machines (as they're called here, or "pokies"). It was difficult to do even in the late 80s and apparently impossible to do now because they're all computerised and the data is all proprietary. Even then the one he found was old and no longer manufactured, because anything being currently used was impossible to acquire.

[ambyr]

This is pretty much the state of mind I get into while doing jigsaw puzzles, and I have definitely spent some time considering the line between “enjoyable hobby” and “harmful addiction.”

[oracne]

The dissociation thing is profoundly disturbing and also makes terrible sense. If machine gambling is a way of self-treating emotional problems, of course people get trapped because it's better than the alternative. But the trap prevents them from getting other treatment or making human connections that might help.

The unconscionable part is how the industry is institutionalizing this harm, enabling and profiting off of pain.

I had never really thought about casinos much before, so this was an enlightening post.

[sabotabby]

The chair thing is fucking horrifying. Especially because I wanted an ergonomic chair at work after my surgery for a spinal tumour and they said it would have to come out of my tiny department budget, and wasn't that money better spent on the kids?

I find this kind of thing fascinating, though, as while I do not gamble and I don't enjoy video games, the odd game that I have played (really simple stuff like Neko Atsume) I get incredibly compulsive about. And the only way to not be compulsive is to delete the thing. So clearly I'm as vulnerable to these designs as anyone else, but they tend to be used in pastimes that I have nothing to do with.

[rachelmanija]

It says a lot about what we value socially. It's not people.

[sovay]

According to this book, and it's intensively researched, gambling machines are better understood as dissociation machines.

I have read multiple science fiction novels in which people become addicted to dissociation, but there tend to be float tanks or brain wires involved. I don't think I have ever seen one that correctly predicted that all you need is a really comfortable chair, a lever, a screen, and the most satisfying "bing!" sound in the world. And capitalism, of course.

(The ergonomic chairs are an incredible epitome.)

[rachelmanija]

I feel like I've gotten into addictive states just with stuff like Twitter and TV Tropes.

[adrian_turtle]

It's amazing how many people were sucked right into dissociative states, to the point of serious addiction, with Tetris or computer solitaire. It didn't even take capitalism!

[alias_sqbr]

I was going to say something brief about how this works video games but it turned into an essay, hopefully since you just read a book on the subject this is interesting >.>

The 'flow' thing reminds me of the design of a lot of "free to play" mobile games, which get you quickly and easily into the zone...and then grind to a sudden halt right when you're JUST about to achieve something satisfying. To progress further, either you do something annoying which breaks the flow (wait a day, do a bunch of less fun repetitive actions, etc) or pay money to keep the game going immediately. And my understanding is that if you do, it later grinds to a halt again until you pay EVEN MORE money, etc. There's often a randomised component to it as well, which hits that Gambling Button for some people and means there's no upper limit on how much you can spend. Some of these games are really beautifully designed, I would happily buy a regular version without the microtransactions, but that's not where the profit is. Especially since you can aim these games at children... :/ :/ The fact that there's no possibility of winning any real money back is often cited as a reason these mechanics are harmless but they're intensely addictive, so you saying slot machine gamblers aren't actually there for the money either makes a lot of sense.

Luckily I have resisted the urge to spend money on any of these games myself and there are plenty of less predatory games out there which hit a similar button for me. But I can definitely see how people get sucked in, and unfortunately it's not a neat line. Video games CAN be a cost efficient way to get into the zone, but the industry is RIFE with predatory design.

I've been playing a lot of FFXIV, which is subscription based and quite enjoyable without paying anything above the base subscription, but there are definitely points where I've gone "This is going great, but it would be more satisfying if I had a bit more inventory space, is there a way to...ah, if I pay a bit more on my subscription :/" etc. Luckily it's not randomised so I suppose there's an upper limit on how much people can spend per month but once you include all the possible purchases it adds up.

A lot of mainstream games have a 'minor' microtransaction component which most players happily ignore, a few shell out a bit of extra money for, and a small number of people become massively addicted to. And this is by design: a lot of players avoid anything obviously designed to suck money out of them, but see these 'minor' microtransactions as innocuous, and while most people really don't get sucked in it only takes a few players paying large amounts to make them profitable. And what these sorts of video games often have that slot machines don't is peer pressure: cool cosmetic items to impress other players that you can only get for cash, often randomised so again there's no upper limit on how much you might end up spending. I've heard a lot of horror stories of people buying a randomised cosmetic item 'for harmless fun', and it spiralling into addiction, or children being bullied for not having The Cool Fortnite Dance.

Jimquisition has talked about all this a lot, The Addictive Cost Of Predatory Videogame Monetization is a general discussion.

[rachelmanija]

Well, that's depressing. It's not enough to sell a profitable game, you have to squeeze people for that extra bit of money at a huge cost to them.

[eglantiere]

sadly, a larger chunk of videogames, either computer, console or mobile, are the same slot machine designed with the same goal of hooking the 'whales' (addiction-prone people, young adults and children, people with poor impulse control, people who're mentally unwell) into spending thousands and thousands of money. design, repetition, rhythm etc. it's just a thing across the entire industry.

(i'm pretty sure facebook used to have a slew of games aimed at schoolkids where spending real money was intentionally undistinguishable from spending in-game money, so kids would spend a ton off their parents' credit cards. refunding to the parents who noticed was still profitable, because a ton of people didn't realize what happened/weren't up to requesting a refund/were intimidated by the idea of going to court etc. it was a whole business model.)

[eglantiere]

hell, i pay for a program on my phone that locks me out of most of my phone for the most of the day. otherwise a slightest hint of stress, and i get sucked into dissociation via instagram reels or something. it's just - sad. it's sad that this is how a wonder of human ingenuity and technology is designed to be used.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Schüll notes that the gamblers' subjective experience of "the zone" sounds very similar to something you've probably heard of in a positive sense, which is "flow."

"The zone" and "the flow" are both terms we use to describe the same mental state, which I'm pretty sure reflects the same neuroendocrinological state, of software developers writing code. The pattern of "one dopamine hit every few seconds, making you stick around for the next few seconds, oh shit it's been 12 hours" is the same. I've always said writing code is addictive in exactly the same way gambling is.

Writing code doesn't inspire this neurological state in everyone. But if you're one of the lucky ones for whom it does, you stand to make--instead of lose--a shit-ton of money in the current century.

Now we just need to figure out how to convince ergonomic chair researchers that they stand to make a lot of money by serving the software developer market :P. (And from there it won't be nearly as hard to get the chairs into the rest of the office.)

[sheron]

Absolutely, that's why I love my job. Dopamine hits from working? Hell yea.

[philomytha]

That is so depressing to read, all that effort going into ways to hurt people. And it's everywhere. I found that even things like Candy Crush had that kind of dissociative 'I just want to keep doing this' effect on me, so I ended up deleting it from all my devices.

[sheron]

I do like "the zone" you can get into with some video games doing repetitive tasks for shots of dopamine when you "succeed". Sometimes I use that to literally kill a few hours and get my brain to shut down after a long day when I can't really take in any new information anymore. It helps me focus on only one thing (e.g. city building).

But actual casinos are super uninteresting to me. I've visited some because they have free drinks and are conveniently located on my way hiking, but besides that they have zero appeal.

What is happening now though is they're bringing all those extremely well researched techniques into video games (mobile-style games) and basically you don't even need to leave the comforts of your own home to spent $50,000 on upgrades in something like Diablo Immortal (and people do, just to feel like they're l33t).

[rachelmanija]

$50,000?!

[carbonel]

There was a period in my life when I was addicted to the video game Tetris that way. This was when most monitors were monochrome, but a friend had a Mac with a color screen and he would let me come over to play on it. The limiting factor was my shoulder, which would eventually give out and hurt too much to keep going. I'm pretty sure I was clinically depressed at the time, so it was a form of self-soothing. But I do miss that "zone" feeling.

[lilacsigil]

They were legalised here as a social good (because they're heavily taxed) and a way to fund social clubs like the RSL (veteran's association) and football clubs, but of course they're largely a way of taking money from marginalised people. The more deprived your local area, the more pokies (Australian name for them) you are likely to have. The multiple cases of children dying because their parents forgot about them in the car while they were inside playing still didn't change anything.

[megpie71]

I'm in the one state where they aren't a fixture. (*waves from Western Australia*)

We still have a certain amount of gambling-generated "social welfare" money, through the Lotteries Commission (scratch lottery tickets, Lotto) and the TAB (betting on horses and sports). But we don't have pokies anywhere other than the Burswood Casino (and we only have the one casino, in Perth, and there are no plans to allow a second one, even from the most rapacious of Liberal governments, mostly because Crown presumably pays a fairly hefty premium for exclusivity), and as far as I'm aware, there are no plans to have them anywhere else in the state either.

I keep joking it's part of the reason the rest of Australia tries hard to forget we exist (there are some very big firms behind the pokies - at least one of our two major supermarket chains has a share in them). We're proving most of the arguments about the indispensability of poker machines in the Australian social fabric wrong simply by existing. No, we don't have the same sort of "social club" culture that a number of the Eastern States (NSW, the ACT, Victoria, SA, Tasmania, and probably Queensland) have - but what we have instead is a thriving restaurant and commercial dining sector instead. Bands don't go to clubs to perform - they go to pubs instead. Sporting clubs, community organisations, arts bodies, local councils, charities and so on get grants from the Lotteries Commission (and often commercial sponsors as well) to sustain things like festivals, sporting competitions, clubhouse extensions and maintenance, exhibitions, grants for building and so on - no need for the pokies, and because it's a government Commission, the grants are awarded based on merit rather than on things like "who has the largest population in their area amenable to having their pockets picked?".

It isn't perfect here. There are a lot of people (usually pensioners, unfortunately) who are addicted to the pokies at the Casino (and the Casino makes it easy for these people to gamble away their pension by laying on subsidised public transport for them, special buses and such which will take them straight there from some of the poorer suburbs). And certainly since the casino opened (and the pawn regulations were relaxed a bit, allowing firms like Cash Converters to gain a foothold) there's a lot more pawnshops visible in this city. Problem gamblers here in WA tend to be stopping in at the PubTAB instead, betting on the horses, the footy, the soccer, and whatever else is showing on the big Foxtel Sport screen in the local pub.

[starlady]

Weirdly, playing a few hours of Tetris has been shown to blunt the neurological effects of recent trauma. I got back into video games during the pandemic on the theory that those repetitive actions, while not quite as "pure" as the Tetris mechanic, would help--and I think it did.

The negative and positive ways dissociation can be used are really striking. All of this reminds me a bit of the pachinko industry in Japan, though the pachinko addicts I knew were pretty good at actually making money--some of them had very high daily goals (like ¥400,000) they would set before they would leave. Of course sometimes it took them six to ten hours to hit that.

[rachelmanija]

Yeah, I've suggested Tetris to clients! It really works for some people.

[sholio]

I should read this. This is something that Orion and I occasionally talk about, because - as people discussed in above comments - video games are addictive in a similar way, so as an educator he's essentially having to compete with those for his students' attention, and so we occasionally brainstorm ways to try to "gamify" learning somewhat to make it more compelling and interesting for people's brains. (The way that, say, Duolingo does.)

I've always understood it as an intermittent reward problem - that is, our brains are incredibly susceptible to the highly addictive properties of being rewarded at unpredictable intervals ... because searching for food in nature is exactly like that. Getting rewarded sometimes is far more compelling than getting rewarded always or never; we're literally designed to seek it out. And it's not even inherently a bad thing - like wanting fatty food, it's just part of how we're made, and in small doses it makes us happy and engaged and satisfied; it's just very easy to "game" it for unscrupulous purposes because it's such a potent reward for us (the same way fast-food producers use a bunch of little tricks to "game" our native drive to want high-calorie, high-fat food sources). So it doesn't surprise me even slightly that gambling addiction is about getting the hit and not about the money; that fits entirely with how I understand the human brain. (Though I had thought of it in terms of dopamine hits more than flow state - that's really interesting, and I wonder if other addictions work similarly? It wouldn't surprise me, especially since for some - a lot of? - people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs, it's not just about whatever the addiction is for, at least until it's really embedded, but also the rituals surrounding it, e.g. it's as much about being in a bar and sipping drinks, or kicking back after work and having one - two - ten drink, as it is about what's in the drink.)

Anyway, you were saying that replacing it with home gambling might work, but I would think that it could be anything that generates similar states of flow and intermittent-reward dopamine hits ... so if they could find something that also engages them in a similar way - gets them "high," so to speak - it could be as far removed from gambling as e.g. gardening or fishing or square dancing, but still engage the brain in a similar way. It would just need to be something that genuinely does give them the dopamine hit, which not everything is going to do for everybody.

[rachelmanija]

Yes, the variable reinforcement is a big factor. Duolingo rewards with little badges, right?

I think anything that provides a similar flow state would probably be a reasonable substitute. The actions/rewards of machine gambling are really specific. Probably the closest equivalents are certain types of video games, the non-narrative type that are based on repetitive actions and quick reflexes.

[cahn]

This is fascinating and depressing.

I was particularly interested because my mom really likes slot machines -- she's not severely addicted, she's too practical and cynical and has too much self-discipline for that, but before the pandemic she would absolutely go to Vegas once a year and blow some predetermined wad of "fun money" on them. She took me to Atlantic City once when I was in college, and gave me some money to spend on the slot machines, trying to get me into them, which I think is sort of hilariously depressing. (This is the same parent who tried really hard to get me to be a medical doctor because of the job security.) I do think I have an addictive personality but fortunately for me, it's keyed to things other than slot machines, so it didn't take. (But mom, what were you thinking??)

[vass]

See also: doomscrolling on Twitter. :(

[rachelmanija]

I definitely have a problem with that. I've been setting a 30 minute timer before I get on Twitter.

I could just block it, but there's a lot of actual stuff I want or need to know there that isn't anywhere else.

Chairs

[julianr]

Wow, now I'm imagining a heist movie where a gang of researchers infiltrate the casino to steal and replicate the ergonomic chairs

Re: Chairs

[rachelmanija]

Would watch.

[yhlee]

Yeah, I have to say that I am cynical about the prospect of video games (not even microtransaction games necessarily) being "better" for addiction-prone people. There was a notorious case in South Korea in 2010 when two parents who had just had a baby were so addicted to playing video games that they spent all their time gaming and the baby starved to death. Article here. There are a couple other horrible examples of video game addiction in that article.

Rachel, I have a possibly more hopeful book rec for you, which is Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, on BENEFICIAL ways to use gamification. McGonigal is a game designer (ARGs - alternate reality games, video games, other types of games) who works to use her powers for good. For example, she designed a gamified habit tracker called SuperBetter when she had a IIRC stroke and was working on recovery, and gamified the experience of her recovery, and then worked on generalizing it to benefit other people. Obviously this has not resulted in world peace but it was interesting food for thought, and I promise the math is minimal.

Obviously there are still hideous addictive microtransaction games and so on out there, but it was nice to see a game designer explicitly call out the ethics of her profession.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! That sounds fascinating.

[nancylebov]

It seemed weird to me that casino chairs can't just be bought by businesses and individuals. (I know that isn't your point, but I was still curious.)

So far, I've found out that there are operator chairs-- chairs that businesses buy for people who have to work long hours, and durable enough that they can be in use 24/7.

I haven't found anything about whether non-casinos can buy casino chairs.

And I haven't found any comparison reviews for casino chairs and operator chairs.

Other than that, I'm intrigued by the idea that flow and the zone are really the same thing. Is it plausible or researched that someone in a state caused by an appropriate challenge is feeling the same thing as someone who's doing a very easy thing again and again?

I can get snagged for astonishing periods by untangling yarn. One more loop! One more loop!

Also, what's the difference between someone who can tell there's something going wrong when they're addicted and stop compared with someone who can tell there's something going wrong but can't stop or has a lot of trouble stopping compared with someone who doesn't notice there's something wrong?

[nancylebov]

I meant that I found some sites comparing operator chairs and casino chairs, but it was comparing them to official ergonomic standards, not comparisons from users.