The Dangerous Allure of Slot Machines: Addiction by Design

Introduction

Anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, the author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, spent 15 years studying how casinos and slot machines are designed to pull users into a trancelike state called the “machine zone” where social demands, worries, and bodily awareness fades away. While in this zone, gamblers are not just playing to win, but rather, to play for as long as possible, regardless of the physical, mental and financial costs. While the gambler loses themselves, the gambling industry profits. She extends this research into digital / smartphone gambling as well.

Quotes

“When I talked to designers, whether they were telling me about how they designed carpets or where they put the windows or how they structured the floors, everything seemed to be in the service of getting people to machines. It was all about having the customers end up in front of these devices. And when I started hanging out with gamblers and going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings, I’d say 90-95% of the people in those rooms only talked about slot machines. You didn’t hear a lot about horse races or blackjack or poker.”

“You can play up to 1,200 unique games on a slot machine in one hour … addiction researchers would call that event frequency – the number of events in time are so incredibly frequent that it intensifies that and doesn’t really leave you any room to think or be in time and space, you’re just drawn into the next game.”

“These devices [slot machines] are the biggest money-makers by far in the casino. In some casinos, it’s over 90% … of revenue coming from these devices because people play them for an incredibly long period of time.”

“The people in Gamblers Anonymous I spoke to, they’re gambling every day and sometimes, if they don’t have to work the next day, they’ll go through a whole 24-hour cycle. I’ve heard people staying for 72 hours – quite rational, reasonable people who’ve had successful lives, who will talk to me in astonishment at themselves at buying adult depends so they don’t have to leave the machine.”

“Not everyone is a gambling addict, but I think everyone who has played regularly on these machines understands that it’s very easy to play longer than you intended and spend more than you intended.“

“It’s a mental state in which time falls away, space falls aware, and importantly for the gamblers, a sense of monetary value disappears, and sometimes even a sense of self.“

“B.F. Skinner already knew back then what made the perfect patterning of rewards to addict an organism, and you see that same patterning across the board in slot machines to games like Candy Crush.”

“There are many ways we could structure gambling and games through technology that doesn’t depend on monetizing every second of people’s time. We always talk about the financial costs. I think the temporal costs, the cost of time spent, is incredible and we really need to think of ways of delimiting that, as some governments have begun to do.”