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rachelmanija Jun. 22nd, 2022 10:53 am)
rachelmanija Jun. 22nd, 2022 10:53 am)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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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.
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