Addiction by Design

Natasha Dow Schull is associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• Acknowledgments vii Note on Informant Anonymity xiii Introduction: Mapping the Machine Zone 1 Part One: Design 1. Interior Design for Interior States: Architecture, Ambience, and Affect 35 2. Engineering Experience: The Productive Economy of Player- Centric Design 52 3. Programming Chance: The Calculation of Enchantment 76 Part Two: Feedback 4. Matching the Market: Innovation, Intensification, Habituation 107 5. Live Data: Tracking Players, Guiding Play 137 6. Perfect Contingency: From Control to Compulsion 166 Part Three: Addiction 7. Gambled Away: Liquidating Life 189 8. Overdrive: Chasing Loss, Playing to Extinction 210 Part Four: Adjustment 9. Balancing Acts: The Double Bind of Therapeutics 239 10. Fix upon Fix: Recipes for Regulating Risk 257 Conclusion: Raising the Stakes 290 Notes 311 References 385 Index 42

Winner of the 2013 Sharon Stephens First Book Prize, American Ethnological Society Honorable Mention for the 2013 Gregory Bateson Prize, The Society for Cultural Anthropology The Atlantic Editors' "The Best Book I Read This Year" for 2013, chosen by senior editor Alexis C. Madrigal "Natasha Dow Schull, an anthropologist at MIT, has written a timely book. Ms Schull has spent two decades studying the boom in casino gambling: the layout of its properties, the addicts and problem gamblers who account for roughly half its revenue in some places, and the engineering that goes into its most sophisticated products. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas reads like a combination of Scientific American's number puzzles and the 'blue Book' of Alcoholics Anonymous."--Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times "Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed to entrance them."--Laura Noren, PublicBooks "Schull adds greatly to the scholarly literature on problem gambling with this well-written book... Applying an anthropological perspective, the author focuses especially on the Las Vegas gambling industry, seeing many of today's avid machine gamblers as less preoccupied with winning than with maintaining themselves in the game, playing for as long as possible, and entering into a trance-like state of being, totally enmeshed psychologically into gaming and totally removed from the ordinary obligations of everyday life... The book offers a most compelling and vivid picture of this world."--Choice "If books can be tools, Addiction by Design is one of the foundational artifacts for understanding the digital age--a lever, perhaps, to pry ourselves from the grasp of the coercive loops that now surround us."--Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic "Natasha Schull's Addiction By Design is fascinating, absorbing, and at times, a bit frightening... Schull's work will have wide relevance to many audiences, including those interested in technology studies, media studies, software studies, game studies, values-in-design, and the psychology and sociology of addiction and other technologically mediated behavioral disorders."--Hansen Hsu, Social Studies of Science "Original, ambitious, and written with elegant lucidity, Addiction by Design presents us with a narrative that is as compulsive as the behavior it describes. The book repositions debates in the field of gambling and will surely become a classic text in studies of society and technology."--Gerda Reith, American Journal of Sociology "Based on fifteen years of ethnographic work, Addiction by Design is an ambitious and thought-provoking book that challenges the neoliberal ethos currently governing the way in which governments and professionals think about gambling addiction."--Kah-Wee Lee, Technology and Culture "A handbook on regaining our proper orientation to the world. Schull's book offers a grim warning about the ways others can deliberately cut us off from natural and supernatural joys."--Leah Libresco, Commonweal