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rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-22 10:53 am
rachelmanija) wrote2022-06-22 10:53 am
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Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll
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.
vialandingtree. Their review here.
(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.
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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.
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And then it does something really diabolical: it encourages you to join a guild. Once you're in a guild with other players, the pressure really ratchets because you don't want to let your teammates down, and some of them spend a lot (a LOT) of money on the game which normalizes it for everyone else, and you think, well, I could spend a few bucks, that's not nearly as much as Guildmate is spending... It's terrible and I am ashamed to admit the number of hours I spent in 2020 playing this stupid game, and that I actually did spend money once on (I think it was like $20 all together, not that much, but before that I had been proud of never giving in to that kind of pressure in a mobile game).
After a while I was able to stop because my pandemic existential crisis got a little better, I guess, but it gave me a whole new understanding of how your mental health can be just a little off and something like this can be a vampiric-like horribly-backfiring way of compensating for it.
And yeah, there were people in my guild, ordinary people, who were literally spending more than a hundred dollars a month on this game. They weren't even the biggest spenders, either -- my guild wasn't that competitive as it had people like me in it who spent almost nothing. The top guilds, yeesh.
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