The Capacitive Touchscreen System (as Immersion’s system has been renamed) affirms play gestures as a way to “capacitate” continued gambling.

machine gambling is not a symbolically profound, richly dimensional space whose “depth” can be plumbed to reveal an enactment of larger social and existential dramas. Instead, the solitary, absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. “You can erase it all at the

The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.” Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”

The French sociologist Roger Caillois, author of Man, Play, and Games, believed that games carried clues to the basic character of a culture.34 “It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there,” he wrote in 1958. Caillois argued that one could make a cultural diagnosis by examining games’

The less predictable the outcome of a match, he observed, the more financially and personally invested participants became and the “deeper” their play, in the sense that its stakes went far beyond material gain or loss.

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.

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

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

players valued time-on-device and saw a way to glean their own sort of value from it. “If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video-poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,”