Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
Tags: #technology #design #psychology #addiction #consumerism #gambling #ethnography #culture
Authors: Natasha Dow Schüll
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Overview
This book explores the complex relationship between product design and addiction, focusing specifically on the rise of electronic gambling machines over the past two decades. I argue that the swiftly spreading, highly profitable, and increasingly controversial phenomenon of machine gambling addiction cannot be understood as a problem solely of ‘problem gamblers’; rather, the problem is also one of ‘problem machines’ and the increasingly sophisticated ways in which they are designed to keep players in a continuous state of play and financial investment. I explore the design of machine gambling as a ‘co-production’ between industry and players, examining the interplay between gamblers’ motivations to escape the anxieties of everyday life by ‘getting into the zone’ of machine play and the gambling industry’s profit-driven mandate to keep players at machines for as long as possible. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among gamblers and former gamblers in Las Vegas, as well as industry executives, engineers, game designers, and casino floor managers, the book investigates the complex interplay between the changing experience of gambling and the changing technological configuration of gambling activities over time. Throughout the book, I use the specific case of machine gambling to explore broader tendencies and concerns that characterize the contemporary landscape of interactive technologies, consumption practices, and risk management.
Book Outline
1. Interior Design for Interior States: Architecture, Ambience, and Affect
Contemporary casinos are designed to guide players toward slot machines and keep them playing for as long as possible. Drawing on the expertise of casino architect and former slot machine addict, Bill Friedman, this chapter details the numerous design strategies used to create a sense of protected isolation and to continuously reorient players towards machines as they traverse the space. The ‘maze layout,’ for instance, manipulates player perception and lines of sight in ways that accelerate movement through the casino while simultaneously impeding a clear understanding of the space.
Key concept: The key is duration of play. I want to keep you there as long as humanly possible—that’s the whole trick, that’s what makes you lose.
2. Engineering Experience: The Productive Economy of Player-Centric Design
This chapter describes the design of player-centric gambling machines, focusing on those features calibrated to maximize player engagement and time-on-device. Rather than simply adapting to pre-existing gambler preferences, these design features – which involve visual, acoustic, tactile, and ergonomic elements of the machine interface – work to shape player experience and create the conditions for longer, faster, and more intensive play.
Key concept: Just as responsive, experience-based casino design entails ‘a constant adjustment of the building’ to patrons’ spatial movements, player-centric gambling machinery adjusts to the idiosyncratic range and rate of their wagering movements. Although the ultimate objective of this machinery (that is, to ‘increase the rate at which revenue can be generated for the proprietor of the machine,’ as stated in the dynamic play rate patent) remains the same as that of manufacturing machinery, designers’ approach to this objective changes in the transition from the factory floor to the casino floor. In the latter context, there is a strong concern with the subjective state of the machine operator—his desires, his frustrations, his enjoyment, his sense of interaction.
3. Programming Chance: The Calculation of Enchantment
This chapter explores the inner workings of gambling machines, emphasizing the transition from mechanically actuated reel spinners to contemporary computerized devices. The move from mechanical to digital technology enabled game designers to program payout schedules in ways that intensified play and heightened the industry’s control over odds. It also heightened player intrigue and fascination with the inner workings of the machines, prompting gamblers to develop theories about how the devices determine their outcomes, and whether it is possible to predict those outcomes.
Key concept: The “mystery chip,” as Rose called it earlier, is programmed with mathematical algorithms that execute a game’s particular scoring scheme and predetermined hold percentage (or “house edge”), working in concert with a random number generator (RNG) to generate its outcomes. Even as a gambling device sits idle, its RNG cycles through possible combinations of reel symbols or cards at approximately one thousand per second.
4. Matching the Market: Innovation, Intensification, Habituation
This chapter analyzes the relationship between the changing technological configuration of machine gambling and the changing styles of play in the marketplace. It traces the dynamic feedback loop between the evolving design of video poker games and the emergence of a new kind of gambler for whom the duration of play, rather than the outcome of play, becomes paramount. Along the way, it describes how game developers use player tracking systems and other market research tools to calibrate payout schedules to the preferences of their most dedicated customers, and how those customers, in turn, recalibrate their play expectations and practices in response to the newer game formats. In a tight feedback loop, technology and player preferences converge.
Key concept: Players, markets, and game features are dynamic entities with their own fads and trends. New games are continuously being introduced, and markets change in dynamics. Technology changes and so do the players.
5. Live Data: Tracking Players, Guiding Play
This chapter describes the development of increasingly sophisticated data-gathering tools deployed by the gambling industry to track and analyze players’ behavior. The emergence of player loyalty cards in the 1980s, coupled with the growing application of digital technology to gambling machines, yielded unprecedented quantities of live play data that could be mined for valuable insights into player preferences and predilections. In recent years, behavioral analytic software programs have been developed to help interpret this data.
Key concept: By tracking gamblers’ machine play, managers were able to collect “vital information” about their customers, as one trade journalist phrased it in 1990. Gambling machines, he noted, were transformed from stand-alone game boxes into networked “electronic surveillance devices.” While the terminals continued to function as objects of attention and absorption for players, they were now also “capable of monitoring, recording, and cross-referencing attentive behavior for purposes of productivity
6. Perfect Contingency: From Control to Compulsion
This chapter examines how player-centric design features can function as mechanisms of control that accelerate gamblers’ self-dissolution in machine play. It explores how features like stop buttons, skill-based bonus rounds, and the option to configure the game’s volatility give players the illusion of influence over the device’s random outcomes. Finally, it describes the development of downloadable gaming technology, which allows casinos to track and adapt to players’ preferences in real time.
Key concept: You can’t do it behind his back—switch things up while he turns around to get a drink. What should be happening instead is that the player himself is voluntarily asking for changes to the game. Switching a percentage in the back room is not that difficult technologically—but having the player himself ask for it is the fundamental change that downloadable technology brings. Maybe he wants lots of cash back and game flow instead of a big jackpot. By setting up options and making them extremely visible to a player—giving him choice—’just tell us what you want and you can select it’—you make it the player’s full conscious decision. The player can now better tell you how to market to him. He has complete control.
7. Gambled Away: Liquidating Life
Through the lens of individual case studies, this chapter examines the interplay between the isolating dynamics of machine gambling, the rise of the service economy, and the changing cultural and economic demands on selfhood in contemporary capitalist societies. By suspending social exchange, money value, and clock time, and replacing the ordinary demands of work, family, and social life with the absorbing routines of repetitive machine play, intensive gamblers enact what I call ‘machine life.’
Key concept: In a society such as ours, asks the cultural historian Jackson Lears in his book on gambling in America, “where responsibility and choice are exalted, where capital accumulation is a duty and cash a sacred cow, what could be more subversive than the readiness to reduce money to mere counters in a game?
8. Overdrive: Chasing Loss, Playing to Extinction
This chapter explores how gamblers use machine play to convert the accidental, unchosen losses they have experienced in life into a chosen, actively produced form of loss they can regulate and even master. It then considers how this seemingly paradoxical behavior of ‘willing loss’ expresses a drive that may run deeper than that of control over loss – namely, the drive to move past the need for control itself, to suspend selfhood and the existential anxieties that accompany it, by giving oneself over fully to the deterministic flow of machine play. Drawing on the work of Freud, I analyze gambling addiction as a pathological intensification of the death drive.
Key concept: Rather than take the chance of living with the fear of when they would do it to me, I would rather start from a place where I knew they were going to do it and by God, I was going to pick who was going to do it and when it was going to happen [she slaps her leg rhythmically to emphasize the words]. I would gravitate to risky people, almost like I was causing my own losses, not them—I was the one controlling it, like with the gambling.
9. Balancing Acts: The Double Bind of Therapeutics
This chapter explores the paradoxical ways in which remedies for problematic machine gambling become implicated in the very problem they are designed to ‘fix.’ It focuses on the blurry distinction between the self-regulating routines of the gambling addict and the self-regulating routines of the recovering gambler, as both draw on an array of technological and non-technological tools to manage their moods and behaviors. By examining the elective affinity between the ‘zone’ of machine gambling and the state of balanced affect sought by gamblers in recovery, I aim to show how the design of addiction treatment programs and the technologies of self-care they promote may unwittingly recapitulate the logic and dynamics of machine gambling itself.
Key concept: At the moment, I am in remission, keeping my illness maintained, contained—just like my son does with his ADHD meds, just like my husband does with his diabetes meds, like my mother-in-law with her cancer support groups. Like someone with cancer, diabetes, or even the common cold, I MUST take care of myself, I MUST take my medicines. I take my meds every day—counseling, prayer, reading posts, e-mailing with my fellows, going to meetings, learning about myself, helping my fellows, and even taking a medication for anxiety/compulsive behavior. Now I have the “medicines” to keep me from ever being that sick again.
10. Fix Upon Fix: Recipes for Regulating Risk
This chapter explores the regulatory schemes that have crystallized around machine gambling, paying close attention to the contradictory assumptions about player agency, responsibility, and consumer choice that inform various approaches to risk management. The chapter traces how the gambling industry has positioned itself in relation to the problem of gambling addiction and the regulation of its machines, and how it strategically employs the rhetoric of ‘responsible gambling’ and the findings of neuroscience to deflect blame for the harmful effects of its products. Finally, it describes emerging systems of digital surveillance, tracking, and data analysis designed to manage problem gambling risk and to indemnify casinos against liability.
Key concept: The debate around gambling machines expresses tensions that trouble the field of consumption more broadly in the West, where a free-market ethos and ideals of consumer sovereignty so often clash with the realities of harmful consumer-product interactions and stark asymmetries in the design-consumption chain.
Essential Questions
1. How has the rise of electronic gambling machines transformed the landscape of American gambling and the experience of gamblers?
Machine gambling has become a ubiquitous and highly profitable industry, significantly impacting the landscape of American culture and economy. This shift is largely attributable to the technological innovations incorporated into contemporary gambling machines, which have transformed the experience of gambling from a social activity involving risk and strategy to a solitary, continuous, and rapid mode of play that can induce a trancelike state of absorption. Schüll argues that the design of these machines, far from simply responding to pre-existing gambler preferences, actively shapes player experience in ways calibrated to maximize time-on-device and industry profits.
2. How does the design of gambling machines create a paradoxical dynamic of control and compulsion in players?
The book highlights the paradoxical relationship between control and compulsion in machine gambling. The industry designs machines with features like stop buttons, multiline betting, and skill-based bonus rounds that give players a sense of agency and control over chance, yet the very exercise of these controls in the fast-paced, repetitive environment of machine play can lead to a loss of control and a state of immersive absorption in which agency recedes. This paradoxical dynamic is central to Schüll’s argument that addiction to machine gambling is a ‘co-production’ between the design of the machines and the player’s engagement with them.
3. What is the ‘zone’ of machine gambling, and what makes it so alluring to gamblers?
Schüll’s analysis suggests that the allure of the ‘zone’ for machine gamblers lies in its capacity to offer a reprieve from the anxieties and uncertainties that riddle everyday life in contemporary capitalist societies. The continuous, predictable rhythms of machine play, along with the suspension of social exchange, money value, and clock time, offer an escape from the demands of the actuarial self, the risk-management imperative that has become a defining feature of selfhood in service-based economies. By isolating, intensifying, and ultimately ‘distilling’ these very elements to a point where they become something else, machine gambling offers a fleeting experience of freedom from their constraints.
4. How does the gambling industry respond to the problem of gambling addiction, and what are the limitations of its approach?
The book argues that the gambling industry’s efforts to address the problem of gambling addiction are often paradoxical and even counterproductive. The industry primarily focuses on promoting ‘responsible gambling’ through informational campaigns and self-regulating tools, attempting to manage rather than eradicate risk. This approach serves to shift responsibility onto individual gamblers and to obscure the role of machine design in facilitating addictive behavior. Schüll’s analysis suggests that the industry’s embrace of the ‘responsible gambling’ paradigm is as much a strategy to protect its own financial interests as it is a sincere effort to mitigate the problem of addiction.
5. What are the broader societal implications of the rise of machine gambling and the gambling industry’s evolving design and marketing strategies?
Schüll concludes that the rise of machine gambling and its extension into new markets and new technological interfaces reflects a broader societal shift toward ‘control societies,’ as Deleuze described them. In such societies, power operates not through the disciplining of individuals, but through the regulation of continuous, mobile flows of data, capital, and affect. Machine gambling epitomizes this logic by creating a ‘continuous circuit’ of risk and reward, choice and consequence, that is designed to keep players in a state of uninterrupted engagement and financial investment. As the gambling industry’s tracking and data-gathering capabilities become ever more sophisticated, the author suggests that the line between consumer preference and industry manipulation risks becoming increasingly blurry.
Key Takeaways
1. Product design can have unintended consequences
Machine gambling illustrates how seemingly innocuous design choices can have unintended, even harmful, consequences for users. Features intended to enhance player enjoyment and agency, such as rapid play, near misses, and multiline betting, can actually lead to a loss of control, financial hardship, and addiction.
Practical Application:
In the development of AI-powered products, it’s crucial to consider the potential for unintended consequences, particularly those related to user engagement and habituation. For instance, an AI-powered news feed that optimizes for click-through rates could inadvertently create ‘filter bubbles’ or promote ‘doomscrolling’ by continuously feeding users information that confirms their biases or exacerbates anxiety. Recognizing this potential, designers should prioritize ethical considerations and incorporate features that promote user agency and well-being, such as options to customize content feeds, set time limits, or access diverse perspectives.
2. Human-machine interaction is shaped by feedback loops
The book highlights the dynamic interplay between player preferences and industry innovations in a ‘tight feedback loop’ where each element continuously shapes the other. This underscores the need for AI designers to carefully consider the co-constitutive nature of human-machine relationships and the potential for unintended consequences to emerge from such interactions.
Practical Application:
Understanding the dynamics of feedback loops in human-machine interaction is crucial for designing ethical and effective AI systems. For example, an AI-powered chatbot designed to assist customers with product inquiries should be carefully calibrated to avoid creating a ‘feedback loop’ of frustration, where the user’s repeated attempts to obtain information are met with unhelpful responses, leading to escalating anger and a negative user experience. By incorporating strategies to detect and respond to user frustration, designers can improve the effectiveness of the system and prevent negative feedback loops.
3. Technological systems can be used to manipulate human behavior
The book explores the paradoxical relationship between rationality and the ‘zone’ of machine gambling. While machines are designed with precise mathematical algorithms to ensure long-term profitability for the casino, players are drawn to them for the very experience of escaping rational choice, suspending awareness of time, money, and consequence, and giving themselves over to the unpredictable flow of machine outcomes.
Practical Application:
AI systems are often promoted as tools for enhancing rationality and facilitating informed decision-making. However, as Schüll’s analysis of machine gambling suggests, such systems can also be used to exploit cognitive biases and undermine rational choice by creating environments that are deliberately designed to disorient, distract, and manipulate users. AI designers should be aware of this potential and prioritize ethical considerations when developing systems that impact human judgment and decision-making.
4. The line between self-care and compulsion can become blurred
Schüll highlights the blurred line between addiction and recovery, showing how machine gamblers and recovering gamblers alike employ a variety of tools and techniques to manage their moods and behaviors. This suggests that AI applications designed to promote well-being should be carefully calibrated to avoid replicating the logic and dynamics of the very behaviors they are meant to address.
Practical Application:
In developing AI for mental health, it’s crucial to recognize the blurred line between self-care and compulsion, especially when it comes to self-modulating technologies. For instance, an AI-powered app designed to alleviate anxiety could inadvertently become part of a self-reinforcing cycle of avoidance if users rely on it excessively to manage discomfort, rather than addressing underlying issues. Ethical design requires incorporating strategies to promote self-awareness, prevent over-reliance, and encourage users to engage in a balanced approach to mental health care.
5. The rise of AI raises ethical concerns about control and manipulation
Schüll argues that the rise of machine gambling and its associated technological infrastructure are part of a broader societal shift toward “control societies,” as Deleuze theorized them. In such societies, power operates not through the disciplining of individuals but through the regulation of continuous, mobile flows of data, capital, and affect. As the gambling industry’s tracking and data-gathering capabilities become ever more sophisticated, she suggests that the line between consumer preference and technological control risks becoming increasingly blurry.
Practical Application:
As AI systems become more integrated into diverse aspects of life, it’s crucial to consider how they might be used to monitor, manage, and even manipulate human behavior in real-time, blurring the line between consumer preference and technological control. This awareness is crucial for developing ethical guidelines and regulatory frameworks for AI development and application in diverse social, political, and economic domains.
Suggested Deep Dive
Chapter: Chapter 2: Engineering Experience: The Productive Economy of Player-Centric Design
This chapter provides a deep dive into the specific design elements that contribute to machine gambling addiction, offering valuable insights for AI product engineers. Understanding how these elements - such as button design, sound engineering, and ergonomic features - can be manipulated to influence user behavior is crucial for developing ethical and responsible AI systems.
Memorable Quotes
Chapter 2. 67
"We keep player experience in mind at every step," I heard a slot machine manufacturer say in 2007. "We do a brilliant job of creating that in-the-zone experience," said a casino operator in 2008.
Chapter 3. 92
"Man has chased [the Gods] away and has rationalized and made calculable and predictable what in an earlier age had seemed governed by chance."
Chapter 4. 123
"Math is the sharp end of my spear," game designer Nicholas Koenig told us earlier, implying that slot machines’ hidden mathematical programming was critical to the task of “hooking” players’ attention. Yet as much as math functions as an enchanting hook or “spear” (in the form of near misses and other visual distortions of odds), it functions as a reinforcing hold, as Koenig went on to explain: "Once you’ve hooked ’em in, you want to keep pulling money out of them until you have it all; the barb is in and you’re yanking the hook."
Chapter 5. 160
"I am watching everything. I see it all," said Richard Mirman, senior vice president of business development at Harrah’s.
Chapter 6. 186
"My eyes feel like they’re lining up the bars on the screen—I see them turning, and then stop, like they’re under my influence," said Lola of machines’ reels. "It’s like you go around in them and you decide where to stop."
Comparative Analysis
Addiction by Design stands out for its meticulous ethnographic approach, delving into the lived experiences of machine gamblers and the design philosophies of the industry. Unlike earlier works that focused on the social aspects of gambling or the psychological profiles of addicts, Schüll’s analysis foregrounds the dynamic interplay between human and machine, highlighting the role of technology in shaping both the experience and the consequences of play. While sharing some thematic overlaps with cultural critiques of consumption like those of Lears and Barber, the book diverges in its emphasis on the specific features and affordances of gambling machines as critical components of the addiction dynamic. Schüll’s argument about ‘machinic life’ and ‘willing loss’ resonates with Freud’s concept of the death drive and offers a compelling counterpoint to more individualized explanations of addiction.
Reflection
Schüll’s Addiction by Design offers a compelling and disturbing exploration of the hidden mechanisms at play in the world of machine gambling. The book’s strength lies in its meticulous attention to detail, weaving together ethnographic accounts, technological analysis, and cultural critique to illuminate a phenomenon that has become both pervasive and increasingly problematic. However, it’s important to acknowledge that the book focuses primarily on the extreme experiences of gambling addicts, which may not represent the full spectrum of player experiences. Moreover, while Schüll raises critical ethical concerns about the industry’s practices, her analysis sometimes leans toward a deterministic view of technology, potentially underestimating the role of individual agency and societal factors in shaping addiction. Nonetheless, the book’s insights into the persuasive power of design, the paradoxical dynamics of control and compulsion, and the ethical dilemmas of a technologically driven society are undeniably relevant and thought-provoking in our increasingly algorithm-driven world.
Flashcards
What is the “machine zone”?
A term coined by Natasha Dow Schüll to describe the subjective state of absorption and escape sought by machine gamblers.
What are “capacitive” design features?
Features designed to give players a sense of control over the machine’s outcomes, such as stop buttons, multi-line betting, and skill-based bonus rounds. They often have the paradoxical effect of increasing player absorption and reducing awareness of actual odds.
What is “player-centric design”?
The practice of designing products and services that are calibrated to individual user preferences and experiences, as seen in the gambling industry’s increasing attention to ergonomic design, sensory feedback, and customized reward schedules.
What are “losses disguised as wins” (LDWs)?
The phenomenon in which losses on multi-line video slots are disguised as wins through the use of sounds, lights, and celebratory graphics, even when the payout is less than the initial wager. This creates a continuous stream of reinforcement that can mask the actual rate of loss and prolong play.
What is “tolerance” in the context of machine gambling?
The tendency of machine gamblers to adapt to increasingly complex and intense forms of play, often spurred on by the introduction of new game features and technological innovations that push the boundaries of player engagement and immersion.
What are “responsible gaming devices” (RGDs)?
Systems that allow players to track their gambling expenditures, set spending limits, and self-exclude from play for a set period of time. They are often touted as solutions to problem gambling but can be incorporated into the addictive dynamic by becoming part of the gambler’s self-modulation routines.
What is “risk tracking” in the context of casino surveillance?
The use of player tracking data, biometric recognition, and behavioral analytics software to monitor players’ gambling behavior in real time, identify those at risk of addiction, and intervene with personalized marketing appeals and other interventions designed to keep players gambling.
What are “control societies”?
A term coined by Gilles Deleuze to describe societies in which power operates through the regulation of continuous flows of data, capital, and affect, rather than through the confinement or discipline of individuals. Machine gambling and its networked infrastructure are presented as a prime example of this logic.