Addiction by Design

Purposive obfuscation, his comment suggests, is key to the seductive appeal of gambling machines.

As machine gamblers tell it, neither control, nor chance, nor the tension between the two drives their play; their aim is not to win but simply to continue.

Corridors draw people in not only by way of cues but also by way of curves. Casino patrons “resist perpendicular turning,” Friedman notes, for “commitment is required to slow down and turn 90 degrees into a slot aisle.”44 As a fellow industry member recalls, the reduction of “sharp lines” and the introduction of “very frequent curvature lines” beca

(Play itself Friedman describes as “open,” “undifferentiated,” “boundless,” “extensive,” and “never-ending”—precisely the phenomenological characteristics he strives to minimize within the gambling environment.

The casino floor is like our own extended focus group. We sit and play, participate, ask players what they think about our machines, and about other machines. The whole team does this—it’s as important for the sound engineers to know the customer as anyone else; even the math guy spends some hours observing, asking questions. You have to experience

When it comes to the state of suspended animation that gamblers call the zone and the industry calls continuous gaming productivity, an uninterrupted flow of play funds is as important as the speed and duration of the play activity itself.

To illustrate the process, Katrina relates how one common feature of video slots, called “bonus rounds” or “free spins,” has affected her play. This type of feature randomly presents gamblers with an animated bonus game offering them a prize, a chance at a prize, or free spins on the machine—all of which grant more time-on-device.91 The “game-withi

The task of expediting “continuous gaming productivity,” as Cummings breaks it down, involves three interlinked operations, each of which this chapter will examine in turn: accelerating play, extending its duration, and increasing the total amount spent.

patron worth, recommending that casinos give each customer a “recency score” (how recently he has visited), a “frequency score” (how often he visits), and a “monetary score” (how much he spends), and then create a personalized marketing algorithm out of these variables.40 “We want to maximize every relationship,” Harrah’s Richard Mirman told a jour