Addiction by Design

machine gambling is not a symbolically profound, richly dimensional space whose “depth” can be plumbed to reveal an enactment of larger social and existential dramas. Instead, the solitary, absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence. “You can erase it all at the machin

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

much as repeat machine gamblers want speed, they want to play for as long as possible. Their desire for “time-on-device,” as the gambling industry terms it, moves in tandem with the industry’s desire for continuous productivity. “The key is duration of play,” a consultant told me. “I want to keep you there as long as humanly possible—that’s the who

players valued time-on-device and saw a way to glean their own sort of value from it. “If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video-poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,”

While all forms of gambling involve random patterning of payouts, machine gambling is distinguished by its solitary, continuous, and rapid mode of wagering. Without waiting for “horses to run, a dealer to shuffle or deal, or a roulette wheel to stop spinning,” it is possible to complete a game every three to four seconds.71 To use the terminology o

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.

When addiction is regarded as a relationship that develops through “repeated interaction” between a subject and an object, rather than a property that belongs solely to one or the other, it becomes clear that objects matter as much as subjects.

engineering experiences,”

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.