Addiction by design
An anthropologist looks at the new "crack cocaine" of high-tech gambling 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.
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77% recommend23% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- Yes. Gambling goes a long way. I just recommended Natasha Dow Schüll and Addiction by Design.
That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.
Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.
Where should we head next?
- IIRC, the lovely book Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas claims that gambling addiction was a concept pushed by the casinos, to put the blame onto individuals, rather than the machine.
- There’s a few books I recommend for you, if you’re open to learning more about this subject.
The first is “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” by Natasha Dow Schüll. The second, and arguably more direct and fascinating, is “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff. Both are incredibly eye-opening in their treatment of technology and how it is designed to influence behavior.
- There’s a good book that discusses dark patterns in Gambling games, making it easier to appreciate how they extrapolate to other contexts as well. The title of the book is:
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
Author: Natasha Dow Schüll
- This seems to be touching on an intriguing concept from a classic book on addiction with machine gambling (Addiction by Design by Natasha Schüll)
Instead of looking at gambling addictions as personal failing she asserts they are a result between “interaction between the person and the machine.”
Similarly here I think there's something more than just the propensity of crazy people to be crazy that was already there, I do think there's something to the assertion that it's the interaction between both. In other words, there's something about LLMs themselves that drive this behavior more so than, for example, TikTok.
- I think this might underestimate how gambling + kids games can reinforce destructive behavior.
There are lots of similar tools that casino owners/game designers/sports betting apps/social media/&c use to build addiction into their products, all while offloading responsibility onto individual consumers.
A really interesting study of this is the book 'Addiction by Design' by Natasha Dow Schüll examines this in the context of slot machines/video poker/casino games, but you can see the same process at work basically wherever you look.
