She quotes a gambler named Maria who says, “The only real control you can have over the end is to make it come faster.” This sounds like the peculiar, self-negating agency of suicide, and the analogy is apt (quite apart from the prevalence of actual suicide among gambling addicts, which is higher than for any other addiction). The design script of the machines—to enact “player extinction”—mates up with a deep human tendency, one that I believe is not confined to addicts and suicides.
