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Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll
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Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.
Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.
Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.
- Sales Rank: #97241 in Books
- Brand: Schll, Natasha Dow
- Published on: 2014-05-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x 1.10" w x 6.10" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 456 pages
Review
Winner of the 2013 Sharon Stephens First Book Prize, American Ethnological Society
Honorable Mention for the 2013 Gregory Bateson Prize, The Society for Cultural Anthropology
The Atlantic Editors' "The Best Book I Read This Year" for 2013, chosen by senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal
"Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at MIT, has written a timely book. Ms Schüll has spent two decades studying the boom in casino gambling: the layout of its properties, the addicts and problem gamblers who account for roughly half its revenue in some places, and the engineering that goes into its most sophisticated products. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas reads like a combination of Scientific American's number puzzles and the 'blue Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous."--Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times
"Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed to entrance them."--Laura Norén, PublicBooks
"Schüll adds greatly to the scholarly literature on problem gambling with this well-written book. . . . Applying an anthropological perspective, the author focuses especially on the Las Vegas gambling industry, seeing many of today's avid machine gamblers as less preoccupied with winning than with maintaining themselves in the game, playing for as long as possible, and entering into a trance-like state of being, totally enmeshed psychologically into gaming and totally removed from the ordinary obligations of everyday life. . . . The book offers a most compelling and vivid picture of this world."--Choice
"If books can be tools, Addiction by Design is one of the foundational artifacts for understanding the digital age--a lever, perhaps, to pry ourselves from the grasp of the coercive loops that now surround us."--Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic
"Natasha Schull's Addiction By Design is fascinating, absorbing, and at times, a bit frightening. . . . Schull's work will have wide relevance to many audiences, including those interested in technology studies, media studies, software studies, game studies, values-in-design, and the psychology and sociology of addiction and other technologically mediated behavioral disorders."--Hansen Hsu, Social Studies of Science
"Original, ambitious, and written with elegant lucidity, Addiction by Design presents us with a narrative that is as compulsive as the behavior it describes. The book repositions debates in the field of gambling and will surely become a classic text in studies of society and technology."--Gerda Reith, American Journal of Sociology
"Based on fifteen years of ethnographic work, Addiction by Design is an ambitious and thought-provoking book that challenges the neoliberal ethos currently governing the way in which governments and professionals think about gambling addiction."--Kah-Wee Lee, Technology and Culture
"A handbook on regaining our proper orientation to the world. Schüll's book offers a grim warning about the ways others can deliberately cut us off from natural and supernatural joys."--Leah Libresco, Commonweal
From the Back Cover
"A stunning portrayal of technology and the inner life. Searing, sobering, compelling: this is important, first-rate, accessible scholarship that should galvanize public conversation."--Sherry Turkle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
"A fascinating, frightening window into the world of gambling in Las Vegas and the technological innovations that deliberately enhance and sustain the 'zone'--the odd, absorbed state for which extreme machine gamblers yearn. An astute and provocative look at addiction and its complex moral, social, and emotional entanglements."--T. M. Luhrmann, Stanford University
"At the heart of Schüll's book is the interplay between the players and the machine; between the players and the machine manufacturers; between the players and the math program; and between the players and the 'zone' that the machines help produce. A tour de force that changes the dialogue on gambling addiction."--Henry Lesieur, author of The Chase: Career of the Compulsive Gambler
"Schüll's clear and dramatic writing style is itself addictive. One is drawn into the ways in which the interactions among the different stakeholders lead to players' experience of being drawn into a 'zone' where they remain until all resources are gone. This is a must-read narrative that points to the many variants of screen addiction possible today."--Don Ihde, author of Bodies in Technology
"This gripping, insightful, and poignant analysis of machine gambling offers a kind of object lesson in the intensified forms of consumption that computer-based technologies enable. An exemplary case of the way in which close, critical investigation of specific sites of capitalism can provide a deeper understanding of both intimate experience and widespread socioeconomic arrangements."--Lucy A. Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations
"Schüll offers a provocative and important study of the imperative some people feel to lose themselves in a machine. The ethnography is rich and deep, shedding original light on the significance of addiction and gambling in American culture. The story told in the book is absolutely riveting."--Emily Martin, author of Bipolar Expeditions
About the Author
Natasha Dow Schüll is associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Most helpful customer reviews
57 of 62 people found the following review helpful.
"In the zone" or "zoned out"?
By Brenda Jubin
Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design is one of the most compelling books I've read in the past few years. Not because I was ever captivated by slot machines or video poker. In my entire life I lost a total of $5 to a slot machine and, quite frankly, even then I didn't consider the experience worth anywhere close to $5. But the experience has changed, thanks to technology and mathematical algorithms; it has a deeper hook.
Schüll, an associate professor at MIT, argues that addiction to machine gambling stems from the interplay between the gambler and the machine. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas and extensive interviews with both designers and addicts, she shows how the "duty to extract as much money" as possible from customers and the desire to play for as long as possible combine to produce a recipe for potential addiction.
Slot machines have come a long way from the coin-fed mechanical one-armed bandits. They now use video technology, which speeds up play significantly. On average, pulling a handle resulted in 300 games an hour. Video poker players can complete 900 to 1,200 hands an hour; the rate is similar on video slots. (p. 55) The financial flow in casinos has also sped up. Players no longer have to carry around heavy cups of coins or wait for payouts. Instead, casinos are "cashless." Moreover, players who run out of money can easily tap into their checking accounts, credit cards, or debit cards--in numerous jurisdictions right from their machines--to keep on going.
Early on programmers devised techniques "not only to distort players' perception of games' odds but also to distort their perception of losses, by creating `near miss' effects. Through a technique known as `clustering,' game designers map a disproportionate number of virtual reel stops to blanks directly adjacent to winning symbols on the physical reels, so that when these blanks show up on the central payline, winning symbols appear above and below them far more often than by chance alone." (p. 92)
Increasingly, mathematicians are designing games that match "math with markets, player types with schedule types." (p. 109) There are two basic types of players--jackpot players who prefer "high volatility, low hit frequency" games and escape players (play-to-win-to-play players) who prefer "low volatility, high hit frequency" games. "On both machines you end up in the same place, which is zero. ... It just takes longer to get there on the second one." (p. 111)
The gamblers that Schüll interviewed were escape players. As a casino executive said, "What they really want to do ... is to play and forget and lose themselves. ... [They want to] get in the zone" where "their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine." (pp. 170-71) This zone is not a happy place. Unlike Csikszentmihalyi's flow, which is "life affirming, restorative, and enriching, ... repeat machine gamblers ... experience a flow that is depleting, entrapping, and associated with a loss of autonomy." (p. 167) It is decidedly worse than T. S. Eliot's melodramatic description of playing solitaire as "the nearest thing to being dead."
Schüll's book is masterfully crafted; it "hooks" you to keep reading until there is nothing left to read. You come away, however, enriched, not depleted. The interviews are gripping, the analysis is sophisticated, and the topic is important--not least because we are all being bombarded with technology that enables us to be "in the zone" in a host of deleterious ways.
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting information, but works better as a dissertation than a book.
By J. C. Stroissnig
I have no idea what to rate this book because one, I can't finish it, and two, my beef isn't with the contents per se.
I'm shocked that this book received nothing but 4 and 5 star reviews. Must've all been by academics. I'm trying, for probably the 5th time, to read some of this book and I just can't focus. It's written like a thesis paper. It reads like a thesaurus exploded all over a psych degree to impress an english professor. I was excited to get this book after hearing an interview on a radio program about it. I am researching design manipulation (for practical reasons, not academic) and this was absolutely perfectly the type of thing I was looking for.
The concepts are simple enough, and quite fascinating, but the writing is just awful. I'm not normally one to be so blunt (nor mean), but I can't help it, mostly because I'm shocked that I seem to be the lone voice. Here is a very typical example of the writing:
"To ignore the continuum of problematic experience among gamblers is to minimize the extent of the phenomenon, they suggest. Departing from the dominant medical emphasis on the psychological, genetic, and neurophysiological factors that might predispose an isolated subset of individuals to "maladaptive gambling behaviour," they seek to understand how commercial gambling activities and environments might create the conditions for - and even encourage - such behaviour in consumers."
I literally just turned to a random page and wrote down the first thing I saw. Do I understand every word in those two sentences? Sure do. Do I understand what the author is trying to say here? Sure do. Is it enjoyable to read in the slightest? Sure isn't. It reads like a dry textbook as opposed to a book you read out of want. It's extraordinarily clinical. Yes, it's supposed to be a book about findings, not opinions. That's no excuse. You can write about facts and findings in a far more enjoyable, warm, readable way. This book screams 'academia'. For scholars, by scholars. I haven't been in a scholarly environment in 20 years, and nobody I encounter (or have ever encountered) speaks like this so I have to actually "think" about what I'm reading as opposed to just reading and absorbing. If your first reaction to that is "If you have to "think" to understand these words, then maybe you're not smart enough to 'get' this book" then this review isn't for you. It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of familiarity. Unless you're in this niche world where people communicate like this, it won't be a natural read. You'll find yourself reading the same sentence 3 or 4 times. Not because you don't know what the words mean, but because your brain quickly glazes over and you can't focus.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
great book on machine-human interaction
By Rebecca L. Tushnet
The best book on the techno-human intersection I've read in a long time, and also highly depressing. If you've read Temple Grandin on humanely getting cattle through the slaughtering chutes, you might recognize the same spirit in this depiction of best practices for casino design: "`passageways should keep twisting and turning through gradual, gentle curves and angles that smooth out the shifts in direction.' Aisles leading into gambling areas `should narrow gradually, so walkers do not notice the approaching transition until they suddenly find themselves immersed in the intimate worlds of gambling action.'" The games themselves are designed to create a false sense of efficacy in the gambler--players who feel they can have an effect on outcomes will keep playing longer. And they are designed to create a false sense of the odds of winning and the magnitude of wins: reels are programmed so that there are fewer opportunities to win than it looks like there should be based on the number of symbols on the reel; reels are programmed to stop so that it often looks like there was a near miss (and regulators ignored the deceptive potential, because it was good for the industry); "teaser" reels display before you play with more winning combnations than actually available; and then payoffs less than the original bet are rewarded with "winner!" notifications, creating "a sense of winning" and allowing people to play longer and more smoothly as their money drops to zero. It was pretty chilling to read that the most recent "subtle yet radical innovation is precisely [new machines'] capacity to make losses appear to gamblers as wins, such that players experience the reinforcement of winning even as they steadily lose." Gamblers "collude in the delusion," turning off their rational knowledge as they play to what's known as "extinction." They play to play, not to win, seeking a zone of nonbeing/noninteraction with the human world.
Casinos then collect information about each player, tracking to make sure they're losing on target and offering coupons, meals, etc. at the moment that the gambler might decide to cut her losses and leave. Now technology allows this to be done in real time: customer reps carry devices that indicate when a consumer at one of the machines is reaching a pain point and needs a boost to keep playing. The casinos are removing the emotion and guesswork; the gamblers are living in it, creating a "profound imbalance" between the parties' abilities to know and understand each other, and change in response to the other's actions.
Schüll situates this in the context of a modern economy that demands ever more surveillance and control of the self from each worker: "individuals must be extremely autonomous, highly rational, and ever-alert masters of themselves and their decisions; constant contingency management is the task." Gambling is both an escape from this constant choice-making and a retreat into it, distilling choice into something simple and smooth. Schüll's player informants, mostly problem gamblers, repeatedly state that they don't want human contact; she suggests that gambling takes them away from painful demands and painful absences, reducing uncertainty if only to the certainty of loss.
When Schüll turns to managing problem gamblers, she finds the same data-driven and choice-based dynamics. Both gambling therapies and casinos are "geared around the idea that behavior can be modified through external modulation; like gambling machines, therapeutic products are designed to be `user-centric' and amenable to custom tailoring." Moreover, both aim to provide a psychic state of balance that insulates people from shocks internal and external. Even consumer protection aims target consumer misperceptions, or target machines that are designed to exploit consumers' rational expectations. However, the machines aren't designed for rational appeal; she describes many of the strategies promoted by the industry as "like trying to talk sense into alcoholics who are passed out." The gambling industry is interested in consumer protection as a way to limit its potential legal liability/additional regulations; locating the "problem" in the gamblers is a way of claiming innocence of their own activities. So the industry advocates concentrating on helping specific people, rather than indirect behavior modification--when its economic foundation is indirect behavior modification, as noted above. Schüll details nascent attempts to create responsible gaming devices that will slow play through "voluntary acts of self-governance," but it's hard to imagine they'll work if nothing else changes, especially since they rely on the same ideology of self-management--indeed, there's some evidence that addicted gamblers use self-monitoring as part of their addictive behavior. It's difficult to "appeal[] to personal responsibility through the very same machine interface that short-circuits personal responsibility in the first place," but it's part of a system that offloads risk and the duty to manage risk onto individuals.
Schüll almost amusingly recounts how casinos started to worry that their careful data collection would be used against them, since they'd be able to see how much of their business came from problem gamblers or people exhibiting addictive behavior (extended play hours, multiple ATM visits, maxing out credit cards, etc.). Would they be liable for tracking players? Or for not doing so? Anonymizing data became a self-protective measure.
The final level of addiction is governmental: casino revenues are so attractive that governments find the temptation too hard to refuse. "Some have gone so far as to enumerate the classic defense mechanisms of addiction by which industry stakeholders, caught in the maximizing momentum of a drive for revenues, rationalize their actions: `blaming others, belittling contrary viewpoints, disavowing responsibility for negative outcomes, preferring to avoid conflict, and not tolerating straight talk, honesty, or directness.'" Schüll is great at expanding focus from the individual gambler (where the industry wants us to look) to the larger structures interacting. Collective action and inaction got us here; the question is whether, going forward, the collective that does the shaping will be the corporation or the people.
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