Su Wan/Wen From the morning when we open our eyes, our eyes need to move back and forth between different electronic screens, and we extend our fingers and quickly touch all kinds of buttons. Socializing, working, shopping, gaming, machines make it easy. The entanglement of man, technology and machine has become a fundamental feature of contemporary life.
"Luck Bait: Gambling Design and Runaway Robot Students in Las Vegas" (2021) may not tell the story of this ubiquitous human-computer interaction routine, it shows the human-computer relationship that slides to the extreme, but it is also the story of ordinary people's addiction to machines.
Author Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at New York University, has been concerned with the relationship between technology and the spiritual life of contemporary people since the 1990s. She spent 20 years working in-depth fieldwork around the problem of machine gambling addiction in Las Vegas, writing her first academic monograph at the age of 40, exploring the impact of technological changes on gambling and its addictive behavior. The book is important because no book in China has yet been able to think like "The Bait of Luck" and conduct a long-term, follow-up study of modern entertainment-technology, even if such phenomena have been embedded in the daily life of Chinese.
Machine puzzle
Culture critic Neil Bozeman said in the '80s that to understand America, one need only look at Las Vegas. Casino tycoon Steve Win has also said that Las Vegas exists because it is the perfect microcosm of America. At the time, the majority of Las Vegas residents were directly or indirectly dependent on the gambling industry for their livelihoods, with two-thirds of people participating in gambling. Las Vegas is a huge laboratory, with capital giants from different fields experimenting with various combinations of entertainment, gambling, mass media and leisure consumption.
Experiments in the 1980s proved that the mechanization of gambling was the key to profitable growth. Take slot machines, for example. Until the mid-1980s, green-felted table games like Blackjack and Citi Dice were casino protagonists, and slot machines could only be placed in the corner. Early slot machines were little more than simple devices pieced together by coin slots, levers and wheels, unable to attract legitimate gamblers. As slots evolve mechanically to become complex machines assembled from over 1200 individual parts, the combinations of probabilities, bet sizes, and special effects that players can choose from become endless. Players began to be captivated, and in 1984 only 30% of local residents thought slots were a favorite way to gamble, and 10 years later that percentage rose to 70%.
The sociologist Poe Bernhard interviewed by the author, a Las Vegas native, believes that the rise of machine gambling is technically like a table game "deforestation campaign", which has a subversive effect on the ecology of the gambling industry, and this repetitive, simple, low-stake gambling has reached 2 times the income of real gambling.
There are also some unexpected key factors in the process of the slot machine counterattack: the state governments have made positive publicity about it in order to reverse the economic decline without increasing taxes, and they hope that public opinion will recognize this activity and see playing slot machines as a mainstream consumer entertainment, rather than a moral decline. The law followed suit, with the Nevada State Court passing the Corporate Gaming Act in 1969, which abolished the original one-by-one review of shareholder backgrounds and allowed anyone to acquire and build new casinos. With legal endorsements, capital flowed from Wall Street to casinos, and casinos moved from organized criminal groups to public companies. At the same time, the gradual maturity of digital technology into daily applications, so that consumers are more familiar with screen interaction, which enhances the appeal of gambling machines in the experience.
The original English version of "The Bait of Luck" is "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas", and "by design" should be a pun intended by the author to show that the source of gambling addiction lies in both design and planning. The translated Chinese seems to have lost the message the author was trying to convey, but in fact, luck is not at all the main temptation that the author thinks can attract players, on the contrary, "continuous control" is the most fascinating thing about machine gambling. In the words of the book, machine gambling reduces risk to a repetitive on/off, yes/no, loss/win, start/end, have/not... With every adventure, you can see results immediately with simple operations. Fast operation and immediate feedback are the needs that can only be met by high-speed machines. Therefore, people who are deeply involved in it are not so much gambling addictions as machine addictions.
Luck Bait: Vegas Gambling Design with Runaway Robots Born
Natasha Doe Shure/
Richie/Translation
Republic/Democracy and Construction Press
December 2021
"Player-Centric"
From mind-capturing casino interiors to vivid video images, from ergonomic grips to surround sound equipment, from full-service loyalty cards to player data tracking systems, it's all about keeping gamblers satisfied. Shure devotes considerable space to describing how the designers of gambling machines and the operators of gambling venues designed the machine puzzle that "clamps" the player with the goal of "maximizing profits". Neoliberalism pushes the responsibility for addiction on the gamblers themselves, and designers and operators do not recognize that severe addiction is the outcome they want to see.
However, in Shure's view, all kinds of designs are dangerous guidance to the inextricable situation. The aim is to extend the player's time-on-device (TOD). Yes, this is a specialized business term. Among the many gambling machine designs listed by Shure, the "virtual mapping wheel technology" born in the 70s is the most representative, which makes the lever no longer pull the physical wheel, but a programmable electronic chip, which makes mathematical programming a new god in the gambling industry. The master gambling machine programmer will add a virtual wheel mapping between the randomly generated number and the result displayed on the screen, which can be independent of the real wheel of the machine, mapping the vast majority of the "virtual stop bits" to the low or zero payout vacancies on the actual wheel, and only a very small number to the winning position. The game designers also mapped the virtual wheel stop level beyond the normal proportions to the empty positions on the physical wheel next to the winning pattern, thus creating a near miss effect of "almost winning", whitewashing the loss as a near success, and luring players to continue the game.
This black box modification of luck is not fair at all. Real-time monitoring of gambling data, analysis of user-type loyalty cards, and intensive research to continuously adapt to player technical tolerance, along with various "innovative" designs including virtual mapping wheels, have led to a "continuous gambling productivity" that allows gamblers to increase frequency, extend time, and spend more.
Ironically, this machine addiction, which appears to serve pastime and entertainment, borrows in principle from labor-time management and resource management techniques developed by manufacturing in the 19th and 20th centuries. The rhythm of the game is always controlled by the machine, just like the management of the assembly line workers, the gambling machine is designed to allow the player to compress as much of the output income as possible into the smallest possible unit of time.
"Reach", "Pain Point", "Tracking", "Engagement", "Personalization", "User Portrait"... These common terms in the gambling industry that appear in the book are difficult not to be reminiscent of the black words in Internet product design. It turns out that these methods were not invented after the popularization of Internet commerce, but shared the same logic as the Las Vegas gambling industry more than a decade ago: as far as possible to keep users on the interface of the app, and can not put down the machine in hand. "Forward another relative and friend to get a red packet", "Stick to the lottery opportunity to punch in another day", "Almost, almost a little"... Isn't that the magic "near-lost effect"?
Among them, profit maximization is the central idea of machine design, not the player experience and the life they may be trapped in.
Become a machine
How is machine gambling addictive? Is it the desire for money with a small and broad desire? Or seek excitement in unmeasurable luck? Shure rejects this seemingly common-sense explanation. Unlike traditional gambling games such as card, machine gambling lacks semiotic depth and does not have the stimuli of existential drama, and this lonely, immersive activity brings gamblers a high degree of security and certainty, as one interviewee in the book said, "I gamble not to win money, but to continue to play, in order to stay in the machine's zone and forget everything else." ”
Just for fun? If so, it's only because business discourse defines "entertainment" too broadly, and "entertainment" becomes a floating universal cover. Marketing innovators in the gambling industry say that what their users want is not the satisfaction and respect of stimulation, participation or subjectivity, nor is it pure entertainment, but about uninterrupted flow, immersion and selfless experience, which is even called "the sacred nature of gambling games".
The time when gamblers are most likely to enter a trance is when they cannot distinguish the boundary between their actions and the operation of the machine, which is a high degree of synergy between their own will and the response of the machine. Shure borrows a concept from child development research and calls it "perfect contingency," a state of fusion that seamlessly connects with the mother's body in the early stages of infancy. It stands to reason that young children over 3 months old begin to gradually accept the uncertainty and frustration of the outside world, except for children with autism, who still cannot tolerate unpredictability in society. The gamer in gambling also enters a state of "functional autism", in the absence of any real uncertainty, any other person's action interference, the player's close coupling with the machine makes the machine relative to the "other opposite sex" disappear.
Ergonomic seats, immersive audio visual effects, and high-speed feedback speed make players feel that technological objects have become an extension of their cognitive functions and even motor capabilities. As the player interviewed in the book put it: "I don't feel my fingers on the machine, I feel like I am connected to the machine when I play." Shure argues that it is not so much a "embodiment" as a "de-incarnation." In order to enter a state of human-machine unity, gamblers must "sacrifice" the flesh and the dignity of the flesh. There is a 75-year-old woman who gambles on the plane for 72 hours at a time, and she wears dark double-layered wool pants to the casino, just to urinate a few times directly without being noticed.
Along with the body is dissolved the life of the gambler, where high-intensity machine gambling suspends choice, socialization, monetary value, and time—almost the entirety of real life. The fate of the individual in every modern society is a lifelong choice and is responsible for every choice, and the gambling machine not only excludes the choice, but also gives the gambler enough control while becoming a risk simulator. Gambling machines free gamblers from socializing, freed themselves from complex emotional labor, and become the most maximized self.
The most paradoxical is the de-moneyization of money and the de-denunciation of time, because money has monetary value only in the transaction and circulation of people, and it immediately depreciates as soon as it enters the machine of severing social ties. For severe addicts, serial gambling as a rebellion against the monetary value system is intolerable without losing a single ounce. There will also never be a clock installed in a casino, which is meant to liberate people from the "tyranny of time". Here, the unit of time is not the minutes and seconds, but the length and number of points of a gamble. Actions and action feedback are compressed into tight moments, and as soon as a bet is placed, the results are immediate, and gamblers use every means (including the double layered sweaters mentioned above) to save time and maintain high-speed gaming. Shure believes that this coolness is consistent with the culture of modern capitalist society that advocates speed.
For some addicts, gambling is not a pleasant entertainment, but a "temptation" driven by death. This is even more evident in people who have had traumatic experiences. After experiencing a catastrophic medical resurrection Joanne's obsession with doing dangerous things, she feels that gambling is also a risk, and the process of losing a sperm has a feeling of "taking her life", which "helps her control the trauma of her near-death experience by repeating it, but also takes her into a zero-degree puzzle that transcends all traumas." Diane, who was raped at the age of 17 and nearly strangled, said it was a strange feeling to know that she had been killed and left to die. Gambling brought her closer to that numb sense of relief, a state in which the way she quickly moved into the finale satisfied her desire to both control life and make it disappear.
Flow and addiction
During a group therapy session for gambling addictions, the author participated in the production of an "Addiction Catalog". Everyone present contributed some potentially addictive entries. Drugs are a large category, in addition to common addictive drugs such as cocaine, hallucinogens, and sedatives, they also include laxatives, stomach medicines, nasal sprays, aspirin and other common drugs. Drinking, watching TV, driving fast cars, eating high-oil and sugar foods, spending money for the sake of spending money, chatting for the sake of chatting, and even fitness and religious activities are all on this long list of addictions. They concluded that anything can be addictive and anyone can be addicted.
Strange addiction is a disease of modern people. "Flow", a concept often used to describe "positive energy", is also used by the gambling industry to describe the immersion that machine gambling can bring. Mikhari Zixon Mihay, the psychologist who invented flow, acknowledges that any kind of flow activity is potentially addictive, and that in an "immersive" experience where attention is highly focused on an activity, one can step into hovering time and space and temporarily forget the chaotic reality. Flow is widely used to describe the principles of positive activities such as meditation, yoga, reading, and playing musical instruments. It's just that people who "run forward" can engage in creative activities or regain self-balance with full concentration in flow, while "backward escape" simply means losing oneself with repetitive actions without reaping any self-actualization. Machine gambling is a typical form of "backwards escape."
The general ethical proposition of neoliberalism is that individuals should be solely responsible for actions of their own choosing, and that addicts, having chosen to gamble, should take full responsibility for their robot students. Shure disagreed, arguing pointedly that the gambling industry and regulators needed to modify or order the machines to be retrofitted. Her findings show that a series of abstinence treatments that require gamblers to escape their predicament are either ineffective or repeated. This cannot be entirely attributed to the addict's weak willpower, but the design of the machine should not have been so framing human beings suffering from the disease of modernity.