Anthropology

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

An anthropologist looks at the new "crack cocaine" of high-tech gambling

Paperback

Price:
$32.00/拢28.00
ISBN:
Published:
May 11, 2014
2012
Pages:
456
Size:
6 x 9.25 in.
Illus:
29 halftones.
Main_subject:
Anthropology
Buy This

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry’s revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.

Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Sch眉ll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the 鈥渕achine zone,鈥 in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible鈥攅ven at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Sch眉ll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and 鈥渁mbience management,鈥 player tracking and cash access systems鈥攁ll designed to meet the market’s desire for maximum 鈥渢ime on device.鈥 Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers鈥 everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.

Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Sch眉ll’s account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.


Awards and Recognition

  • Winner of the 2013 Sharon Stephens First Book Prize, American Ethnological Society
  • Honorable Mention for the 2013 Gregory Bateson Prize, The Society for Cultural Anthropology
  • The Atlantic Editors鈥 "The Best Book I Read This Year" for 2013, chosen by senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal