Addiction by Design

Modifications to reduce speed of play would slow the rate at which video reels “spin,” pause reels between spins, and increase the time interval between a bet and its outcome. Modifications to reduce duration of play would mandate time-outs at certain intervals, display a permanent onscreen digital clock, and present periodic pop-up reminders alert

It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”

“It’s strange,” says Lola, “but winning can disappoint me, especially if I win right away.”23 As we have already seen, winning too much, too soon, or too often can interrupt the tempo of play and disturb the harmonious regularity of the zone.

Noting a trend toward the design of games with “interactional and auditory special effects [that] serve to give the experience of being able to control and manipulate the production of the effect,” she observes that although such effects would seem to invite active rather than passive participation, in fact they tend to bring about states of absorp

The tuning out of worldly choices, contingencies, and consequences in the zone of machine gambling depends on the exclusion of other people. “I don’t want to have a human interface” says Julie, a psychology student at the University of Nevada. “I can’t stand to have anybody within my zone.” Machine gamblers go to great lengths to ensure their isola

Gamblers most readily enter the zone at the point where their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.

At the same time that machine gambling alters the nature of exchange to a point where it becomes disconnected from relationships, it alters the nature of money’s role in the social world. Money typically serves to facilitate exchanges with others and establish a social identity, yet in the asocial, insulated encounter with the gambling machine mone

Immediacy, exactness, consistency of response: the near perfect matching of player stimulus and game response in machine gambling might be understood as an instance of “perfect contingency,” a concept developed in the literature on child development to describe a situation of complete alignment between a given action and the external response to th

The value of money reasserts itself precisely because money in its conventional, real-world state remains the underlying means of access to the zone.