Addiction By Design (2012)
457pp, Non fiction
Notes
2019-04-15
Recently I finished reading Natasha Dow Schüll’s excellent Addiction By Design: Machine gambling in Las Vegas. I knew early on that the book was going to hit the sweet-spot for me, there’s so much in the material that plays into my interests: gaming, probability, social impacts of technology, user focused design, Las Vegas being a terrible apotheosis of capitalisms pathologies etc. etc. The writing is clear (only occasionally swaying too the academic for my taste) and even handed in cataloguing the appalling ways in which the gambling industry exploits its patrons.
The scale and depth of the research is humbling, it really exemplifies what academic study can produce that no commercial organisation could match: Over ten years of close study of the industry and interviews with its customer/victims compressed into a package where barely a paragraph goes by without delivering startling facts or nuanced insight. I hesitate to recommend it too broadly only because I know it’s right up my street and that my street isn’t everybody’s street. It may be a bit forbidding if you’re not really into the subject matter.
A few highlights…
The books treatment of user centered design. I tend to reflexively think of user-centered/centric design as an unalloyed GOOD THING but Dow Schüll deftly shows how users have many requirements from and uses for a system, often in opposition to one another and to the users own best interests. I knew this in theory but this book makes it concrete.
Similarly the book develops the idea that the gambling machine is not fully embodied in the physical machine but also includes service design and surveillance components. I understood at some level that of course that’s how these things work but a forensic examination of all the parts really brings it home.
(having worked recently with local councils it’s startling how much money corporations are able to spend creating these systems for the exploitation of vulnerable people whilst so little money exists for creating counter systems to ameliorate their effects)
Also, the idea that pathologising ‘problem gamblers’ is supported by the gambling industry was one of those “aha!” moments for me. Like when I was told that the purpose of PIN numbers was to protect the banks – putting the onus on the customer to protect their PIN rather than on the bank to not give your money out willy-nilly. Of course they want the problem to be located in the individual rather than in the toxic choice architecture that the casinos and gambling machine manufacturers create.
(Toxic choice architecture is a great phrase that I saw the author use in a talk about wearable self monitoring devices, the subject of her next book. I can’t wait to read it.)
Also, just a whole load of stuff about the specific way in which the slot machines are designed to push right up against and mold the regulatory environment.
I could go on and on about this.
Recommended.