The Eighth Deadly Sin, Continued

The siren song of the Wheel of Fortune (Flickr image)

Excerpts from the Engineers of Addiction [bold added]:

A modern slot machine, at its core, is nothing more than a [Random Number Generator] going through millions or billions of numbers at all times. When a player hits a spin button, they are simply stopping the RNG at a particular moment. Everything beyond that — the music, the mini-games, the actual appearance of spinning reels, Rachel, Monica, and the rest of the gang keeping you company — is window dressing to keep you hitting spin.

the company commissioned a study to find out why people love the Wheel of Fortune line so much. "People said it was as much about the brand as anything...People said, ‘That brand — I used to hear it in the living room at my grandma’s house.'"

Player tracking systems revealed more than a pit boss ever could: over time, Harrah’s can create a portrait of the person’s risk profile, including how much money a player typically loses before they stop playing and what kinds of gifts to give them to keep them on the gaming floor.

The small slots customer, over a lifetime of spending, is just as valuable as the high roller.

In 11 years of legalized gaming, the state [of Pennsylvania] has earned $3 billion from table games and $17 billion from slots.

The "zone" is flow through a lens darkly: hyperfocused, neurotransmitters abuzz, but directed toward a numbness with no goal in particular.

capitalism can harness the human play drive for better or worse — and that increasingly, games aren’t allegories that say something about our lives; they are our lives. As people move toward more data-driven existences where points are accumulated from health apps (the subject of Schüll’s latest research) and status is accumulated in identifiable quantities on social media, gamification becomes so total that it can sometimes mask whether what we’re doing has any inherent utility outside the game that surrounds it.

[The Hook model of tech product addiction]: a trigger turns into an action turns into a variable reward turns into a further personal investment back into the product.

This article was so interesting that your humble observer put down his iPad slot-machine game for 15 minutes in order to read it.