Sublime

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.

Incredible Technologies’ ContinuPlay—“sound technology that rewards steady play.”

Although interactive consumer devices are typically associated with new choices, connections, and forms of self-expression, they can also function to narrow choices, disconnect, and gain exit from the self.

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.

Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange.

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.

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

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

With the introduction and development of a game whose mode of reinforcement—and thus profit—relied on minor but continuous rewards rather than on significant but sporadic rewards, a new gambler profile was taking center stage in the experience of gambling addiction. This profile embodied, in extreme form, the broader market’s gravitation from actio