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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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There's an anecdote about a gambler who worked at a slot machine factory to try to demystify them (it didn't work) and learned to build them, but the one thing she was never able to understand was the chip that contains the actual game data. She was never allowed to access that, as it's proprietary.
It's possible that an individual could buy or lease a machine, but I don't think the makers would allow them to be generally available in a non-commercial manner.
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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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(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.)
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"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.)
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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).
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The very careful and conscious tailoring on the part of the casinos in order to exploit the addiction was where I was thinking of capitalism, because of the extra effort to get the resource extraction just right.
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