A commenter recommended the book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, and I checked it out of the library. It’s a study of people who play slot machines and video poker, focusing on the locals: Vegas residents who have some low-level gambling addictions as part of their lives.
Nowadays, I guess that much of this business has been supplanted by machine gambling that you can do on your phone in the comfort of your own home. But the market for gambling must be far from being tapped: I imagine that there are many millions of potential gambling addicts out there, available to be hooked by some form of gambling or another.
As a statistician, I have mixed feelings about gambling. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve thought that probability is cool, and I like to bet. When we were kids we had a toy roulette set that we would play (just betting chips, not real money) and I’ve enjoyed poker and informal sports betting. The last time I’ve bet on anything was about 20 years ago, but that’s just more me getting older than anything else.
At the same time, there are all these addicts, and all the people who might not be addicts but who still degrade their standard of living, not to mention reward evil people (even if they’re pleasant as invididuals, they’re in an evil business; sorry, Nate!). And it just keeps getting worse.
To a statistician, this is all an endlessly fascinating topic: the odds and all that, but also whatever it is in people’s brains that motivate them to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, etc.
As Schüll writes in her book, the popularity of machine gambling (which she says is the source of the majority of casino gambling profits in Vegas) is particularly puzzling in that people are just pulling the lever over and over again, without the sense of human context or any feeling of agency.
There’s also the interaction between the players and the people who make money from the machines:
For extreme machine gamblers, the experience of play is an end in itself–an “autotelic” zone beyond value as such, in that “no other reward than continuing the experience is required to keep it going.” Conversely, for the gambling industry the zone is a means to an end; although it carries no value in and of itself, it is possible to derive value from it. . . . In effect, gamblers’ drive to remain indefinitely suspended in the zone is rerouted, via the technological detours of the gambling industry, toward a destination of complete depletion.
It’s not just “the technological detours of the gambling industry,” it’s also politics: the industry doing what it takes to keep all this going, a gradual effort over many decades that continues to this day.
Later, Schüll summarizes:
Gambling addicts play machines to suspend themselves in a state of equilibriated affect.
This seems pretty accurate.
I would just add two things.
First, this equilibrium is not flat. It’s periods of stress, punctuated with the occasional excitement of winning and the frequent relaxing calm of losing. The best analogy I can think of is the way that a baby is calmed, not by lying completely still, but by being rocked in a somewhat irregular fashion.
Second, stakes matter. That “state of equilibriated affect” can only be achieved when real money is involved. I guess this is related to the phenomenon of habituation in drug exposure. Schüll talks with someone who started on a zero-stakes poker video game but them moved to the machines that take real dollars. We discussed this general idea recently in our post, Why isn’t it possible to play a fun and serious game of poker not for money?
It’s a good thing that babies don’t work that way–you can rock them a reasonable amount and they’ll be happy. No need to keep upping the stakes until the crib does a loop and the baby flies out the window. Although I guess that might happen if there were money in it.
‘I imagine that there are many millions of potential gambling addicts out there, available to be hooked by some form of gambling or another.’
When I read that sentence, I imagined a consultant telling that to a board of gambling executives, and it gave me the creeps.
I absolutely think the equilibrium affect thing happens without real money. There are lots of phone based games that reward you with in game value (achievements) that people play like slot machines. I guess the makers set them up that way so they can show you ads by keeping you playing for long times.
Daniel:
I think it depends on the person. Some people can have a mild addiction to phone-based games so that they waste a bunch of time, but it doesn’t go further. Other people are gambling addicts and seem to require the stimulation that can only be gained by actually losing money. Those people might start on a phone-based zero-stakes video poker game but then feel the compulsion to move to the real thing with real money at stake.
Andrew –
That “state of equilibriated affect” can only be achieved when real money is involved.
Daniel –
I guess the makers set them up that way so they can show you ads by keeping you playing for long times.
For a lot of people these games aren’t just showing you ads – they’re actually selling you the ability to continue playing. They’re mining an addictive allure although there’s no monetary payoff and only a monetary loss. Players pay money for the ability to stay in the loop a little longer: more lives, more energy, more weapons, more “power-ups,” whatever keeps the experience going. It’s the ability to maintain the “equilibriated affect” with, importantly, no monetary payoff, ever.
I’d be interested to know what percentage of players never pay for that continuation versus how many eventually do.
FWIW, a quick Google says the amount who make in-app purchases (IAPs) might be around 3%, but the number of dollars that small % spends is far from trivial. I got an estimate of $82 billion in IAPs – the bulk of which would be spending only on the ability to continue playing.
17 Black.
Where I live there are casinos that proclaim ownership by native Americans. I have a native American friend, Turtle band of the Mohawk nation, according to his father. I asked my friend if he goes to any casinos. He said casinos are for Whites. They are a plot by his people to win the country back for its rightful owners.
Citizens of Monaco are forbidden from entering the casino in Monte Carlo. It’s a publicly owned venture for milking foreigners allowing Monaco to be essentially tax-free for its residents.
The television series The Red Road (starring Jason Momoa and Martin Henderson – available on Netflix) touches on Native American ownership of casinos and the friction it causes within Native American tribes.
I used to be one of those ‘evil’ people working in the gambling industry. Part of my role involved developing models to detect early signs of addictive behavior or financial distress. If an account was flagged as problematic, it triggered a series of immediate restrictions. It is a tragic irony, but I suspect that if those detection models were made even marginally more accurate, their positive social impact would eclipse the lifetime achievements of many NGOs.
Ethics, as it turns out, is rarely black and white. Given that humanity seems inherently driven to gamble—whether through the traditional casino floor, the stock market, or the lottery—I have come to believe that it belongs in a strictly regulated environment. If prohibition is impossible, a heavily monitored market is the lesser of two evils. At the very least, it allows the activity to be managed, taxed, and used to generate legitimate employment.
Anon:
It’s my impression that what some of these companies do is the opposite of what you were doing: they look for signs of addictive behavior and then use that to target the addicts to squeeze more out of them. See here.
I guess their reason is that humanity seems inherently driven to gamble, and if they’re gonna lose their life savings at the casino, it might as well be at Caesars so that Caesars gets the legitimate employment.
Andrew:
I absolutely see your point about the unethical practices in the industry, and that’s actually what led me to mention the need for tight regulation and oversight. The reality is that the most vulnerable demographic—often lower-income men without a strong support network—bears the brunt of this.
From a business perspective, I believe at least the larger operators have likely realized that keeping customers engaged over the long haul is more profitable than pushing them to immediate financial ruin. I guess my main takeaway is simply that we are out of good alternatives; without regulation, this remains a growing public health challenge.
Anon:
Agreed that it’s not an easy problem!
LLM are the new slot machines. Ask any programmer trying to “one-shot” some code.