Jimmy McGee
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2024
1:09:54 · 222K views · Aug 14, 2022
A 70-minute video essay by Jimmy McGee on gambling, addiction and game design, tracing horse racing, slot machines and collectible card markets. It is the first in a series on making money from games.
Recommended as an engaging, well-researched look at the history of gambling machines and how games borrow their psychology.
3 comments from Hacker News
Though the video is fairly long, it's a genuinely interesting exploration on the murky history of video games and gambling. This is part two of a video series, I highly recommend watching both. Part 1: this video
I recently saw a good video[1] covering the history and appeal of gambling machines. My takeaway is that the primary reason people play these is not because they think they're going to win money. This especially true of pachinko where "cashing out" is a convoluted process of trading balls for prizes for cash. > If they never paid out, people would never go and the casinos would not exist This is self evidently false based on the linked article. Random chance games that have no possibility of ever having a net payout attract tons of players and make a lot of money. I think the problem is analyzing this with the economic "rational consumer" model of human behavior. Gambling is not rational but extremely popular because people are not rational. The whole industry is a trap that feeds users dopamine rewards in exchange for money. Once you're in, the payouts have little to do with it. [1] this video
This is tangential but I watched an interesting video essay about slot machines recently[1], based on the book Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll, and one of the surprising things Schüll's research turned up in interviews with slot machine gamblers was that for some winning was jarring and not really satisfying. It took them out of the trance-like "machine state," and their goal was not to win but to linger in the machine state. [1] this video