Addiction by Design

spent, and money spent in retail spaces are all highly

People like to get into that particular zone.”11 “Gambling is not a movie,” echoed a casino operator in the course of a G2E panel, “it’s about continuing to play.”

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.

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.”

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 mone

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.

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

Behavioral-psychological explanations for why near misses are so compelling include the “frustration theory of persistence,” in which near misses “have an invigorating or potentiating effect on any behavior that immediately follows it,” and the related theory of “cognitive regret,” in which players circumvent regret at having almost won by immediat

The key is to cultivate “structured chaos” rather than “inhospitable commotion.”37 “The maze,” Friedman promises, “is the antidote.”38 He explains: “A maze layout