Even online role-playing games that engage multiple participants in an evolving social narrative give occasion for narrowed interactive processes involving predictable input/output scripts, during which players have been observed to “settle into mechanistic, operational play” and become “functionally autistic,” as one game scholar has put it.

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote of early infancy as a state of seeming merger with the mother’s body (and by extension, with the wider environment) that derives from the seamless adaptation of the mother’s responses to her infant’s needs, wants, and gestures. Over time, as a mother gradually lessens the immediacy of her response—in other

After the system identified players who were losing, the Ambassadors would approach them—Hi! Are you feeling lucky today?—and offer them $5. Usually, the players would look at them like they were crazy, because to get the five bucks they had to fill out a form and go through a whole process.

“We come up with really impressive things that aren’t so great for revenue, because often they have nothing to do with what’s good for game play,” said a speaker for a panel on “Sensory Overload.” “Unless you give people a ‘play through’ button, you get real problems.”13

A member of the gambling industry suggests one explanation for why casinos so often prove to be sites of innovation and testing for these new forms of tracking and control: “The unique advantage of our industry is that we have hundreds of touch points a week or month, thousands per year, so you’ve got a profuseness of data that you don’t have in

This “control in steering” has evolved into a networked system of real-time monitoring and modulation. “You get a full response history,” a game developer told an audience at G2E 2004, “and you can answer the question: Have we induced them to do what we wanted them to?” The system has become adaptively flexible, managing at once to place players at

Meanwhile, gamblers remain in the intuitive domain of “emotion and guesswork.”

In 2005 Harrah’s came up with a way to measure, act upon, and optimize player value within the span of an individual play session. Enacting a Pavlovian system of real-time relationship management, software feeds a player’s data through an algorithm that calculates how much that player can lose and still feel satisfied, thereby establishing

Player value algorithms set calendars and budgets to predict when and how much a player can be expected to gamble, generating “behavior modification reports” that suggest what kinds of solicitations he or she might respond to. A gambler “overdue” for a visit gets a mailer, followed by a telephone call. “We get him motivated, back in an observed