The latter is explained by Natasha Dow Schüll in her deeply disturbing book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. The goal for compulsive machine gamblers is not to win money, as one might suppose, and you cannot understand their addiction without keeping this in mind. The goal is to get in the zone: the place where “their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.”1 You hit the button and the machine responds every time.
