Addiction by Design Quotes

“Csikszentmihalyi identified four “preconditions” of flow: first, each moment of the activity must have a little goal; second, the rules for attaining that goal must be clear; third, the activity must give immediate feedback so that one has certainty, from moment to moment, on where one stands; fourth, the tasks of the activity must be matched with operational skills, bestowing a sense of simultaneous control and challenge.”
― Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

“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.”
― Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

“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).”
― Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

“Let the player lose all the time and you will lose control over him, he is no longer your player. Reward is very important in the game, even if it's a fake reward. Only a doomed casino wants to defeat its players all the time.”
― Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

“The continuity of machine gambling holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance, granting her an otherwise elusive zone of certainty—a zone that Mollie described earlier as “the eye of a storm.” “Players hang, it could be said, in a state of suspended animation,” writes one machine gambling researcher.43 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.”
― Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

“they are charged with the task of governing their own tendencies while participating in activities designed to stimulate those tendencies.”
― Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas