Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll

“A fascinating, frightening window into the world of gambling in Las Vegas and the technological innovations that deliberately enhance and sustain the ‘zone’–the odd, absorbed state for which extreme machine gamblers yearn.

Sherry Turkle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Searing, sobering, compelling: this is important, first-rate, accessible scholarship that should galvanize public conversation.” “A stunning portrayal of technology and the inner life.

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.” “Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. Alexis Madrigal, Senior Editor, The Atlantic “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.” reads like a combination of Scientific American’s number puzzles and the ‘blue Book’ of Alcoholics Anonymous.” At stake in Schüll’s account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion. Addiction by Design takes readers from industry conventions and casino floors into gamblers’ everyday lives, from the strategic planning of game algorithms to Gamblers Anonymous meetings and regulatory debates over whether addiction to slot machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll explores the dark side of machine gambling-a solitary, rapid, continuous form of play that has less to do with the competitive thrill of winning than with the pull of “the machine zone,” as gamblers call the trancelike state they enter. Slot machines, revamped by evermore compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry’s revenue mainstay. Honorable mention, Gregory Bateson Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology Winner, Sharon Stephens Prize, American Ethnological Association

Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll