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The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.”
Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”
Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”
“It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there—you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”
Global Gaming Exposition,
“Game design is a process of integration, assemblage,” as one game developer told me. This process involves up to three hundred people, including script writers, graphic artists, marketers, mathematicians, and mechanical, video, and software engineers—
over 85 percent of industry profits came from machines.
members of loyalty clubs such as Station Casinos’ “Boarding Pass,” carrying player cards that document the volume of their play and reward them accordingly with free meals, free rooms, and other perks.
agon, or competition; alea, or chance; mimesis, or simulation; and ilinx, or vertigo.
the point is to stay in a zone “where nothing else matters.”
the point is to stay in a zone “where nothing else matters.”
national character is defined by a sharp tension between its “culture of chance” (epitomized by the figure of the speculative confidence man) and its “culture of control” (epitomized by the disciplined, self-made adherent of the Protestant work ethic).
“culture of chance” (epitomized by the figure of the speculative confidence man) and its “culture of control” (epitomized by the disciplined, self-made adherent of the Protestant work ethic).
As machine gamblers tell it, neither control, nor chance, nor the tension between the two drives their play; their aim is...
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their aim is not to win but simply...
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A zone in which time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process may seem an unpromising object for cultural analysis. Yet such a zone, I argue, can offer a window onto the kinds of contingencies and anxieties that riddle contemporary American life, and the kinds of technological encounters that individuals are likely to employ in the management of these contingencies and anxieties.
Although interactive consumer devices are typically associated with new choices, connections, and forms of self-expression, they can also function to narrow choices, disconnect, and gain exit from the self.
scientists have in fact long understood addiction to be a function of the interaction between people and things.
“The potential for addiction,” writes Howard Shaffer, a prominent academic researcher in the field of gambling addiction, “emerges when repeated interaction with a specific object or array of objects (a drug, a game of chance, a computer) reliably produces a desirable subjective shift.”
Just as certain individuals are more vulnerable to addiction than others, it is also the case that some objects, by virtue
of their unique pharmacologic or structural characteristics, are more likely than others to trigger or accelerate an addiction.
growing evidence that certain repeated activities stimulate the same neurochemical pathways as drugs do,
Without waiting for “horses to run, a dealer to shuffle or deal, or a roulette wheel to stop spinning,” it is possible to complete a game every three to four seconds.
it is possible to complete a game every three to four seconds.
To use the terminology of behavioral psychology, the activity involves the most intensive “event frequency” of...
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“It is the addiction delive...
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“It is the addiction delive...
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Each type of gambling involves players in distinctive procedural and phenomenological routines—betting sequence and temporality, frequency and amount of payouts, degree of skill involved, and mode of action (checking books, ticking boxes, scratching tickets, choosing cards, pressing buttons), producing a unique “cycle of energy and concentration” and a corresponding cycle of affective peaks and dips.
“The consistency of the experience that’s described by my patients,” he told me of machine gambling, “is that of numbness or escape. They don’t talk about competition or excitement—they talk about climbing into the screen and getting lost.”
the experience that’s described by my patients,” he told me of machine gambling, “is that of numbness or escape. They don’t talk about competition or excitement—they talk about climbing into the screen and getting lost.”
“You’re in a trance, you’re on autopilot,” said one gambler. “The zone is like a magnet, it just pulls you in and holds you there,” said another.
Action, Latour has argued, is not a preformed essence that resides within subjects or objects, but something they “co-produce.”
“You are different with the gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it.
It starts while I’m on my way to the casino. I’m in the car driving, but in my mind I’m already inside, walking around to find my machine. In the parking lot, the feeling gets even stronger. By the time I get inside, I’m halfway into that zone. It has everything to do with the sounds, the lights, the atmosphere, walking through the aisles. Then when I’m finally sitting in front of the machine playing, it’s like I’m not even really there anymore—everything fades away.
“The one thing you need to know about casino planning is that the whole point of a casino is to get people walking from the registration to the main body of the casino,”
“human engineering”
“We try to influence movement and the circulation pattern and therefore direct people’s experience.”
“Machines should not be hidden or camouflaged by attention grabbing décor, which
should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible so as to allow the equipment to announce itself.”
Instead of turning attention away from machines, every aspect of the environment should work to turn attention toward machines, and keep it focused there.
From ceiling height to carpet pattern, lighting intensity to aisle width, acoustics to temperature regulation—all such elements, Freidman argues, should be engineered to facilitate the interior state of the machine zone.
An empty void overhead, for example, “dissipates energy” and leaves individuals feeling exposed and anxious.
From any one point in the casino you never feel how big it is. What we really set out to do is control your perspective”
If a visitor has a propensity to gamble, the maze layout will evoke it.”
Casino patrons “resist perpendicular turning,” Friedman notes, for “commitment is required to slow down and turn
90 degrees into a slot aisle.”
The ideal scenario is one in which players “do not analyze the various things they observe as they meander along the passageways” but instead “just glance around without apparent purpose, hoping that something
will trigger their emotional passion to gamble.”
The job of casino layout is to suspend walking patrons in a suggestible, affectively permeable state that renders them susceptible to environm...
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Calling to mind a Deleuzian conception of affect as dynamic states of sensing, energy, and attention outside of conscious awareness yet critical to action, atmospherics are understood to be most effective when they operate at a level that is not consciously detectible.
