Addiction by Design : Machine Gambling in Las Vegas / Natasha Dow Schüll.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schüll, Natasha Dow, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Casinos--Nevada--Las Vegas.

Casinos.

Gambling--Equipment and supplies--Nevada--Las Vegas.

Gambling.

Compulsive gambling--Nevada--Las Vegas.

Compulsive gambling.

Gambling--Nevada--Las Vegas.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (457 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2012]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Schüll 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, 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--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and 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 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 Schüll'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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Informant Anonymity

Introduction: Mapping the Machine Zone

Part One: Design

The Defibrillator Experiment

1. Interior Design for Interior States: Architecture, Ambience, and Affect

2. Engineering Experience: The Productive Economy of Player-Centric Design

3. Programming Chance: The Calculation of Enchantment

Part Two: Feedback

The Rat People

4. Matching the Market: Innovation, Intensification, Habituation

5. Live Data: Tracking Players, Guiding Play

6. Perfect Contingency: From Control to Compulsion

Part Three: Addiction

Convenience Gambling

7. Gambled Away: Liquidating Life

8. Overdrive: Chasing Loss, Playing to Extinction

Part Four: Adjustment

Terry's Machines

9. Balancing Acts: The Double Bind of Therapeutics

10. Fix upon Fix: Recipes for Regulating Risk

Conclusion: Raising the Stakes

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 385-423) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9786613923493

9781400834655

1400834651

9781283611046

128361104X

OCLC:

845246342