Despite their persistent talk of “what players want,” when game developers try to explain what exactly that might be, a considerable degree of contradiction arises between what they say and the aspects of their design to which players appear most drawn. If asked directly, developers invariably claim that players want “entertainment” or “fun,”

Although the elements of choice making and skill might seem at odds with the dissociative flow of the zone, in fact they heighten players’ absorption by turning the passive expectancy of the traditional slot experience into a compelling, interactive involvement

Another acoustic element that must be carefully regulated to encourage play is music. A company called Digigram provides background music that can be scheduled by time of day, depending on the shifting demographics of a property’s clientele.

“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.

“A chess player in a tournament is typically unaware for hours that he or she has a splitting headache or a full bladder,” Csikszentmihalyi reports; “only when the game is over does awareness of physical conditions return.”42 But unlike chess, ritual trance, or the execution of a surgical operation, all of which have natural endpoints, machine

Inviting the player to voluntarily configure his own game and thereby giving him “complete control” would neutralize his fear of being controlled, Elsasser suggested. Instead of risking that the “rat people” become aware of the box, this logic goes, let the rats design their own Skinner box. Sylvie Linard, chief operating officer of Cyberview,

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.

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’

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