I think about this Australian woman[1] all the time. It’s clear that the prospect of winning money isn’t the primary motivation for most problem gamblers and gambling addicts and it scares me to think of the implications, especially when helped along by technology. I think those of us who aren’t problem gamblers have an easier time turning a blind eye to the predatory nature of gambling because for most of us the fun is winning a few bucks on a penny slot or putting $10 on black. (Or at least we think it is!)
But, like the app in the article I linked, what’s a casino that takes in real money but never pays out? It’s hard to see it as anything other than predatory. And while the woman shouldn’t have embezzled funds from her employer we’ve sent her to prison and then allowed the obviously exploitative app to continue operating. And when some other unlucky person who is, for whatever reason, predisposed to problem gambling becomes addicted to this app and it ruins their life and possibly the lives of their friends and family we’ll again focus on the “personal responsibility” of the victim and ignore the system and industry that not only facilitated but targeted and then nurtured the victim’s problem in order to profit.
Which anecdotally is what I've noted playing poker against phenomenal losers (and also in a few poker blogs) - it's all about the moment where their "life" hangs in the balance and the final cards haven't been dealt yet. The results don't matter, wins are celebrated just because they allow to play longer.
Interesting. Do you know whether this is true for all gamblers? Or only for problem gamblers? If it’s true of everyone then I wonder what the difference is between people who can walk away and those who feel compelled to keep playing.
There's a fairly large section in Addiction By Design (the book which the OP is talking about) dealing with the specifics of machine gambling industry in Australia. Highly reccomend it!
“It’s the flow of the experience that people are after. Money to them is a means to sit there longer, not an end. They don’t win a jackpot and leave, they win a jackpot and sit there until it’s gone.”
Addiction By Design is one of the very best non fiction books I've read. I highly recomend it to anyone interested in the intersection of tech/ society/ psychology/ capital/ design and a whole bunch of other stuff. It really is fantastic (if occasionally more than a a little bit bleak)
I briefly worked at a company that created online slot machine games for online casinos. We didn't handle any money directly, just licensed out the slots to casinos who would buy them. Every game was fundamentally the same, it was just different skins on top along with slightly different mathematical models for each one. Occasionally a game would have a "minigame" on certain rolls but those never changed the outcome of a spin.
I always felt sort of bittersweet when the company would announce metrics about how high performing our games were. Since every slot game is essentially the same the only reason a game might perform higher was because the art, sound or minigames were more attention grabbing and addictive. There was also an autospin feature where you could spin at high bet amounts (The largest I remember was $200) over 100 times. Every time metrics would be celebrated I always thought about the potential person playing those game's wasting a whole bunch of money on "Just one more spin" (Although the article suggests that's not the primary motivation behind the addiction).
A coworker told me a story of how some of the slots went down over a long weekend, and they were inundated with angry emails asking for a fix. There were a lot of nice and talented people at that company, but It definitely wore on me the feeling that the work I was doing was making other's lives worse.
I will forever maintain that loot boxes are inherently worse than casino gaming because they target people who haven't had the education to understand probability, and laws should be altered to regulate them just as all casino games are regulated. What is a loot box but a way to groom children to gamble away their money? And even worse, there's no return on these boxes. Not only are they randomized, but in the event that you win a desirable prize (and these are few and far between... the game developers know this), you receive a digital asset that can't be traded. Some companies are going into NFTs in order to justify this behavior by allowing people to trade these assets, but that's essentially just gambling one step removed.
EA made $1.6B last year from "Ultimate Game Mode" in their FIFA game, which essentially allows gamers to gamble away their money to access players from across FIFA leagues to build into a custom team. A reddit thread I found showed that many people were spending $1K+ annually just to have access to the same characters year after year in this gambling scheme because the characters are not transferable to next year's game.
Framing gambling in that matter is quite interesting and does line up with the allure of the quite recent explosion in streamers doing straight up "online casino" gambling. Also shines a light in the other forms of gambling videogame streamers do related to lootboxes and why it attracts so many eyes, you're almost living in this "zone" thru the broadcaster.
It does seem to be kind of similar to the "zone" in programming, it's not uncommon to finish a task you were planning and just to keep in the zone I started doing extra features, many times that would be scrapped later because it was not relevant but just due to the inertia and to not have to switch context.
There's also an interesting question there regarding adhd and gambling, I'd imagine the hyper fixation would definitely make the issue more acute. A quick search got me this[0] meta-study which seems to find some link between adhd symptoms and problem gambling, I'm no medical scholar however so don't take my word for it.
ADHD has a very well-established connection to substance abuse and addiction so a link to gambling makes sense as well. ADHD can be difficult to diagnose but the substance abuse connection is frequently discussed in the community as it relates to compulsive behavior.
The article doesn't explicitly say it, but "the zone" certainly sounds a lot like flow state[0].
Like when you're really engrossed in a task it certainly is pleasurable, and it like really does make you forget about all the other worries and problems and anxieties of the rest of your life.
This framing does match my own personal experience with video games, I could waste hours grinding queues - it's like just putting everything else on pause.
And mine as well ... but in art. I would lose track of hours during a pencil sketching session. It was partially meditative, partially distraction and partially hyper-focus, but 100% relaxing and enjoyable.
I believe that the human mind is a symphony of signals, and a cacophony of contradicting forces at work. Flow-state is a broad description of "active and steady" but that could describe lots of very different things.. the torpid insensate cocoon of the opiate user, to the comfortable zen of a regular meditator; an accountant doing their third week Wednesday "rollups", an aerobics instructor doing a regular routine with thirty students at a gym; the captain of a small sail boat going down a regular route.. many more. These mental states are quite different, yet could be described as "flow"
I wonder if the term 'hyper fixation' isn't a bit misleading when it comes to ADHD. It's often marketed by sufferers as a light superpower, but rather than being able to focus it's more an inability to defocus, which is a significant difference even if the end result seems similar.
As someone with addiction issues this rings true. You're looking for something that completely blocks the world out and gives you some relief from it. For whatever reason, the normal world is suffocating and demoralizing. Playing sports or attending sports works for some people, but some of us need much more to escape.
This seems like a very superficial conclusion, they're very different in practice.
- you can't go broke from spending too much time on facebook/twitter/instagram
- doing something dumb on social media usually doesn't come with the same feeling of regret that's common in people who try to stop gambling but can't
- social media might be addictive but it's a weakly negative, comfy, it-feels-good-when-my-attention-is-here type of addiction, gambling is a whole other beast
- there is very little shame in talking about how much time you spend on social media, hiding gambling losses on the other hand is much more common
Sure, dopamine is probably something they have in common, that's where the similarities end.
Or to build things that use that attention/addiction in less harmful ways. Gambling addiction is only a serious problem if gambling is a process of consistently losing things of value. Casinos (defined broadly) are not an inherent feature of the world; they are an optimization to convert other people's attention and/or addiction into revenue.
I have an addiction (not gambling) and my life has been changed by a 12 step program. I can't say it will work for everyone, but it's worked for a lot of people.
I would actually be okay with both online gambling and online pornography being made illegal. I certainly don't buy this notion that free speech includes pornography.
Maybe I'm young and didn't experience it, but in the 90s you would plan a trip to Vegas and lose a few hundred dollars.
Today I see people doing this from their phone on every random sports game. Further there are constant ads on TV, the Internet, and on billboards.
I'm fortunate for a teacher who says "gambling is a tax on people who can't do math". And having tried gambling, it was a labor intensive way to lose money.
I got introduced to a gacha game for the first time about 2 years ago, compared with classic mid 2000's Gamecube games. Gacha is a type of Japanese gambling game that is found on mobile phones, and can be tied to various media properties to link into pre-existing fondness for characters.
I don't consider myself as having an addictive personality (only got a smartphone about the same time, etc) but it has been an education in how much effort one has to put into not making it take over your life. If I didn't have a strict "only money you spend on this is the flat 5$ monthly subscription fee, no more" rule, I can easily see a bad night wrecking havoc on a pocketbook. The thought with the subscription for me, is that the gameplay's fun enough for me to spend a starbucks-a-month on it.
The wildest thing is, this specific gacha (Fire Emblem Heroes) is considered very tame compared to most gachas, when it's all said and done.
Given the popularity (an order of magnitude larger than FEH) of other gachas like Genshin Impact among Gen Z ... and the horror stories I've been hearing of former friends backstabbing each other and sabotaging fandom projects to steal money for gacha addictions ... this worries me.
It's DEFINITELY much worse that before, for the sufficient and simple reason you stated, it's just that much easier to gamble these days. I know a colleague at work with a problem, who comes into work after the weekend cussing out his wife for hiding his credit card after he loses a few hundred bucks on Friday night.
I know another guy who only ever talks about his wins, which has me guessing he must be badly in debt just based on the long odds. Both of these colleagues are Asian-American, and for them it seems just culturally OK to do these things.
Kids have been at it for way longer than that. What are packs of trading cards, if not loot boxes in the physical world? I knew plenty of kids who spent all their allowance money on packs of Pokémon cards, hoping to score that rare Charizard.
And removed all of the friction. They’re available 24 hours a day in unlimited quantities. You don’t have to wait until after school. You don’t have to wait for the local toy store to open. You don’t have to wait for the store to have them in stock. The next box is always just one push of a button away.
There are several reasons why it is more accessible than before. One is internet gambling. Another is that SCOTUS struck down a federal law banning sports betting in 2018. So gambling used to be a "big thing" involving a trip to Vegas (or Atlantic City or whatever). Now it's something comparable to scrolling Facebook.
Many of the laws around gambling are still quasi-religious morality rules from the Prohibition era, focusing on Games of Chance. Regulation has not caught up to the current understanding of gambling as an addiction.
Here in the Netherlands the government decided to legalize online gambling smack in the middle of the covid crisis. There were adverts for it everywhere, to the point that even many regular people (who in my experience normally aren't against advertising at all) expressed their annoyance and there is talk of curbing advertisements for online gambling (not sure if and to what extent this has actually happened). Completely nuts that they were giving weekly press conferences about how vulnerable and lonely people are and that we have to take care of each other, and then do this at the same time.
I don't think it's just gambling. Gambling is a subset of a larger problem, which is that it's easier than ever for smart but ruthless people to extract money out of the rest of the population.
It's probably the case that the majority of the smartest people in the most recent generations are involved in rent-seeking, Ponzi schemes, advertising, and/or skinner box creation in the form of FAANGs or other tech/fintech/crypto companies.
The only gambling I've done was a Sunday poker night with friends for relatively low stakes and that was over 4 years ago. Right now I see ads for sports betting all the time and its ridiculous. Not only do I really not care much for sports (except formula 1 --- maybe football during end of season) I have never gone to a casino, never so much as looked at a sports betting site and I see them all the time. I'm simply not interested.
I keep blocking them on twitter and sharing not interested on reddit but it doesn't seem to change much.
I wouldn't minimize the gambling problem as just "plan a trip to vegas and lose a few hundred dollars", even before the widespread internet gambling was a serious issue. I can't speak for the US but from where I'm from "analog" gambling has a much wider array of options than just casinos(including illegal casinos), and those tend to be available locally everywhere in some manner even today.
It probably is worse than ever I do agree, the internet age gives far too much visibility and access to it, to the point where the most popular sports games have progression pretty much tied to some form of lootboxes, and that's before even getting into the rabbit hole of gacha.
The acceptance of loot boxes because "it was just cosmetic" was a tragic slippery slope, all the problems with having cosmetics on said loot boxes aside, that turned into "you can also buy it with in-game currency", which then started offering in-game currency for purchase and making the prices to buy said things extraordinary, which generated a lot of money and allowed for a free release that would then feed the circle over again.
Gambling is kinda fun if you stay in your limits. I think it really pulls in people who are just bored in life.
Online sports betting is just not fun for me. I want to get a betting slip and walk away with dollars. Doing it on the phone feels very lame to me for some reason. Probably for the best. I also just don't have time to actually learn stuff about what could affect the game, so I mostly just make fun bets.
I will counterpoint this. I seem to have very high risk aversion, but I still tried blowing a couple hundred for my brother's bachelor party. It was the first time I had ever done real gambling, in a casino. I was excited to play slots, because I've had times in one videogame or another to play an example of slots and it was fun to make the numbers go up.
Gambling isn't fun. The slot machines are just bright lights, and the vast majority of their exterior is spent on explaining the rules so they can have extremely complicated games so they can legally boost payouts, without violating the law. The very first machine I touched was something involving ducks. I put in a twenty, pressed a button, and lost ten dollars a second later. I literally sat there wondering if I had missed something, or didn't understand how to play.
Okay, whatever that's a higher stakes game than I should be playing. So I moved onto the "penny" slots, which are contrived bullshit machines. They "run" fifty "bets" simultaneously so that one actual play is 50 cents but can claim that each "game" is only a penny. So I got to actually playing, pressing the bet button, getting the reels spinning, and winning and losing.
There's nothing there. There are beeps and boops and things moving, but like, so what? It isn't the 50s anymore, we shouldn't really be entertained by the most basic beeps and boops that were possible before transistors were invented. We are well past pong in this day an age, shouldn't there be something more? It's also VERY obvious from right the first second that you WILL lose more than you win. After just ten plays you will have a pretty good idea of the downward trend you face, even if you somehow get big wins here and there.
So I move from machine to machine. I eventually find a machine made by konami, you know, the guys behind huge popular video game franchises, like castlevania and metal gear and DDR. Turns out they make a lot of gambling machines nowadays, and pretty much only those. This machine had a large high resolution display, and bright lights and loud sounds. But, it was exactly the same. It's just a few digital reels that pretend to spin and lock into whatever set up the RNG already decided you will get.
Okay, fine, I've always wanted to play blackjack and I have $100 here I've decided to play until gone. So I go look at the card tables. Turns out, every game has bespoke rules on how you are allowed to bet, how you can play, and the game runs at an absurd pace. Not only can you not use simple and classic blackjack strategy because of the limited betting system, but it nakedly shows how stupid gambling is at all, because the rules unilaterally limit any possible upside for the player, while leaving their downside wide open. A simple house edge was not enough for this rule set, instead you are required to set a personal max bet before each round, and it doesn't matter how good you do that round you can't bet more than that ante. The quick pace also makes it impossible to actually think on your cards, decided how good you think that is, and bet accordingly. Meanwhile, all the other players at the table have obviously been here every day this month, are losing hundreds every few hands, and keep telling you about their "system" that totally works and definitely beats the super stacked rules in this game.
That was it. That's when I realized that gambling isn't fun. Gambling games simply are not designed to be fun, because nobody plays them for fun. A more fun game does not bring in more money for the casino. Instead, they make more money by simply running more "games" per second, because most regulation is around the odds you are allowed to set up "per game" essentially. Look back at that konami slot. They make ACTUAL games, for ACTUAL fun, at least at one point. Compare the konami slot machine to an arcade cabinet of Gradius; It's literally designed to kill you and take your coin once every minute or so. And that is still less greedy, over-engineered, optimized, and hollowed out than even the simplest slot machine I could find. Castlevania is fun. Metal gear is fun, even though I think the story is dumb. DDR is incredible fun. Slot machines and gambling are not fun unless you get that magic hit of dopamine every time you press that button, and if you do, you are directly susceptible to being physically addicted to gambling, and every single light, sound, smell, touch in that building has been expressly optimized to give you that hit of dopamine and get you addicted.
I feel like I shouldn't be selling you on gambling, but I actually have very similar thoughts about some of the games you mentioned.
Slots: are a waste of time imo. I don't know why people like these.
Blackjack: is kinda fun but you really gotta print out a card that tells you how to play with which hands. You can kinda try to guess when you'll get a run of luck but I am also not super into this game. Feels very formulaic.
Poker: Ah yes, poker is FUN, texas hold em with friends is a great way to spend an evening. But I think it would be a lot less fun at a casino tournament because enough of those people are very serious about it and they will roll me.
Roulette: Good for a quick bet or two, but lingering at the table too long is a road to despair.
What does that leave me with? Craps!
Yes, craps. it is very easy to understand the basic bets and it is a communal game. Generally speaking, the people playing at a craps table are winning or losing together. As long as you avoid any of the exotic bets on the board, the payouts are actually fairly even for a casino game. I usually enjoy craps, but there's a catch of course. You can win a lot or lose a lot very quickly. It's important to stop when you lose your limit, and it's important to walk away once you've been playing a certain amount of time imo.
That's my take on casino games anyway. I go maybe every few years.
I was born in Miami and I would say its become far more accessible, specifically fantasy sports betting.
Maybe Miami isn't a great example, but you had every form available, cock fighting, dog fighting, grey hound racing, horse racing, dice, cards, illegal street racing...
Any event that brought people together had its gambling, it just wasn't available in an app.
My guess is the apps have actually reduced the amount of gambling in these other areas (both illegal and legal).
Everything from kids arcades to sports has turned into a grand casino. The sports thing is a particular bummer as it will change sports in what imo a bad thing.
Not sure if I want to advance brain science, maybe these companies can be legally held accountable... Or maybe gambling companies will get to the research first and manipulate us.
The comment you replied to above, expressed that organizations and people involved in exploiting gambling addicts should be punished for doing so.
Sure, they said “legally held accountable” and you replied that these organizations are already operating legally.
So then the matter is: should these companies be allowed to continue operating as they currently do because it’s legal? Or should we push for laws/regulations to be changed so they stop exploiting people?
This is not a matter of fact issue. It’s a moral, political, and yes subjective, issue.
So your question, even if you didn’t intend it to, very much has to do with morality.
Sympathy and empathy are hard, and to be sympathetic means stepping out of your own shoes to try to understand people and situations that you don't understand.
I looked it up and you're right! I thought they were more or less interchangeable but it looks like that's not true. Similar to how jealousy and envy are different
But, like the app in the article I linked, what’s a casino that takes in real money but never pays out? It’s hard to see it as anything other than predatory. And while the woman shouldn’t have embezzled funds from her employer we’ve sent her to prison and then allowed the obviously exploitative app to continue operating. And when some other unlucky person who is, for whatever reason, predisposed to problem gambling becomes addicted to this app and it ruins their life and possibly the lives of their friends and family we’ll again focus on the “personal responsibility” of the victim and ignore the system and industry that not only facilitated but targeted and then nurtured the victim’s problem in order to profit.
[1]https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7547225/woman-stole-9...