Addiction By Design

Product Description

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels & card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling an increasingly popular & absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human & machine compulsion & control risk & reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas anthropologist Natasha Dow Schll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the machine zone " in which daily worries social demands & 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--even at the cost of physical & economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms & machine ergonomics casino architecture & "ambience management " player tracking & cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives from gambling industry conventions & 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 & machines of chance offering clues to some of the broader anxieties & predicaments of contemporary life."