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.

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 t

As it happens, in 1953 Skinner had pointed in the other direction, using the slot machine to exemplify the most potent of reinforcement schedules—in which subjects never know when they will be rewarded, or how much.

Drawing on his intimate familiarity with the zone of machine gambling, Friedman goes on to describe the play that gamblers seek as an “inward focus into their own private domain [that] makes them oblivious to everything around them.” He insists that “the designer, marketer, and operator who best caters to this personal, introspective experience wil

It’s not about winning, it’s about continuing to play.”

Multiline video slots’ subtle yet radical innovation is precisely their capacity to make losses appear to gamblers as wins, such that players experience the reinforcement of winning even as they steadily lose. “Positive reinforcement hides loss,” a designer at Silicon Gaming explained to me. Compounding this reinforcement are the ambient and sensor

Finally, these two pieces coalesced—and evolved—into the present book, which explores the relationship between the technologies of the gambling industry and the experience of gambling addiction.

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.

Gamblers most readily enter the zone at the point where their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.