Experienced video poker gamblers can play a hand every three to four seconds, completing an astonishing 900 to 1,200 hands an hour.12

Evoking the scene that Lola recounted at the start of this chapter, Adams told me of his own style in the field. “I go out there and sit down at a machine. I turn to the person next to me and say I design these things, that’s why I’ve been sitting here playing this machine next to you for twenty minutes, because this is what I do. Let me show you

“Once my mom put $20 in one of my games and it took her money right away. She was pissed and I pretty much lost her as a customer. The best way for me to get all of her money is not to take her first $20 quickly like that; instead, I need to keep giving her back most of what she bets, so she’ll keep playing until it’s all gone.”

Gamblers are precise in their accounts of how their tolerance is continually built up via technological advances. The Australian gambler Katrina, for instance, recalls how apparently small and innocuous changes to game design ended up pushing her habituation to higher and higher levels. “I have been associated with electronic gaming machines for

their experience differs in a crucial respect from that of the artists, athletes, and scientists who appear in Csikszentmihalyi’s writings. For these professionals, flow is life affirming, restorative, and enriching—a state of “optimal human experience” that enhances autonomy in day-to-day life. Repeat machine gamblers, by contrast, experience a

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

When addiction is regarded as a relationship that develops through “repeated interaction” between a subject and an object, rather than a property that belongs solely to one or the other, it becomes clear that objects matter as much as subjects.

When addiction is regarded as a relationship that develops through “repeated interaction” between a subject and an object, rather than a property that belongs solely to one or the other, it becomes clear that objects matter as much as subjects.

The degree of fascination that a given machine holds for its users, she argues, is directly related to the degree of unpredictability and aliveness that it conveys.