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Addiction by Design

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Addiction by Design

Machine Gambling in Las VegasBy Natasha Dow SchüllNarrated by Kelly Burke

Addiction by Design

Length14h 32m

About this audiobook

This audiobook narrated by Kelly Burke traces the intimate connections between gambling addiction and casino industry design tactics Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life.

Audiobook details

GenrePsychology, Technology

Length14 hrs 32 mins

Narrated byKelly Burke

FormatAudiobook

Publish dateNov 11, 2025

LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Opening Credit

12Chapter 5 - Live Data: Tracking Players, Guiding Play

2Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition

13Chapter 6 - Perfect Contingency: From Control to Compulsion

3Note on Informant Anonymity

14Part 3 - Addiction

4Introduction - Mapping the Machine Zone

15Chapter 7 - Gambled Away: Liquidating Life

5Part 1 - Design

16Chapter 8 - Overdrive: Chasing Loss, Playing to Extinction

Show all chaptersShow less

6Chapter 1 - Interior Design for Interior States: Architecture, Ambience, and Affect

17Part 4 - Adjustment

7Chapter 2 - Engineering Experience: The Productive Economy of Player-Centric Design

18Chapter 9 - Balancing Acts: The Double Bind of Therapeutics

8Chapter 3 - Programming Chance: The Calculation of Enchantment

19Chapter 10 - Fix upon Fix: Recipes for Regulating Risk

9Part 2 - Feedback

20Chapter 10 Continued - Fix upon Fix: Recipes for Regulating Risk

10Chapter 4 - Matching the Market: Innovation, Intensification, Habituation

21Conclusion - Raising the Stakes

11Chapter 4 Continued - Matching the Market: Innovation, Intensification, Habituation

22End Credit

About the author

Natasha Dow Schüll

View all by Natasha Dow Schüll

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