Addiction Machines: How Slots are Designed for Compulsive Play

Your player card, please. The image of the compulsive gambler has traditionally been the male poker player, drink in hand, recklessly betting the night away. Slot machines? Those were for amateurs, the out-of-towners, the meek and the mild. But that irritating clang and buzz coming from over the card player’s shoulder is not just the sound of new money—it’s the sound of a new technology tuned to a ruthless edge. Digital slots and poker machines have become the new games of choice for pathological gamblers. In 1999, Harvard addiction researcher Howard Shaffer predicted that, “as smoking crack cocaine changed the cocaine experience, I think electronics is going to change the way gambling is experienced.” Modern gambling machines drive the casino gambling industry, and generate far more revenue than “table” gambling. Because of the manner in which they “facilitate the dissociative process,” as one psychologist puts it, excessive gambling is built into the design and structural characteristics of the technology itself. One physician has even suggested that machine gambling produces a trance state by closely matching human breathing patterns with its “basal slot play rate.” We don’t have to wait for the Singularity to observe the merging of man and machine. By 2000, digital gambling machines were generating twice the revenues of “live” games. Today, the modern slot machine “drives the industry,” said the president of the American Gaming Associ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs