Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

“The opportunity for open-ended or excessive gambling is the fundamental configuration of [gambling machine] consumption,” observes psychologist Mark Dickerson, “built into the design and structural characteristics of [gambling machine] technology.”

“When I wasn’t playing,” she told us at the start of the chapter, “my whole being was directed to getting back into that zone. It was a machine life.”

“I was addicted to making decisions in an unmessy way,” Sharon remarks, “to engaging in something where I knew what the outcome would be.” As she told us in the introduction to this book, “Most people define gambling as pure chance, where you don’t know the outcome. But I do know: either I’m going to win, or I’m going to lose. … So it isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything.”

the efficacy of machine design lies not in its introduction of a foreign or corrupting force into the human psyche but in its ability to draw out and channel inclinations already present in gamblers.

The conflict between the industry’s responsibility rhetoric and the profit it reaps from irresponsibility leads some to the cynical conclusion that the promotion of responsible gambling, first and foremost, is a public relations strategy geared toward protecting revenue

Consumers of gambling products are left in a fix similar to that of addicts in recovery: they are charged with the task of governing their own tendencies while participating in activities designed to stimulate those tendencies.