aether

About the casino issue in Las Vegas, I have also read some related books before, most of which are about mathematics and psychology, and very few are about sociological investigations of casino design and gamblers. This book fills in the gaps. The author is a researcher in cultural anthropology, and in this book, the author interviews and investigates casinos, slot machine designers, and gamblers.

It is worth noting that the author's investigation focuses on video gambling machines like slot machines. If you have a basic understanding of the principles of gambling, you will know that when the gambler's opponent is another gambler, as long as you are smart enough, you have a chance to win. However, if your opponent is the casino, it is impossible to win. The psychological mechanisms of these two types of gamblers are very different. This book mainly focuses on the latter, where slot machines are used as opponents by the casino, and as long as they are repeated enough times, it is certain that the gambler will lose all their money. Gambling is as ancient as human civilization, but gambling against machines is not, and the book mainly discusses machine gambling.

Although this article is a personal reflection, the focus and content are very different from this book. After reading the book, you may feel that I am talking about a completely different book. The thought system and some concepts mentioned belong to my personal thoughts. Since this is not a formal academic article, I will not distinguish between the author's ideas and content and my own ideas.

1. Gamblers as Life Losers#

Gambling is as ancient as human history because human evolution was in a state of incomplete information and uncertainty, requiring risky decisions and the courage to compete. Even the famous game theory is based on this image. However, historically, it was dominant males who had to make these risky and competitive choices. Due to the mechanisms of evolution, males tend to choose competitive games when faced with an uncertain world in order to win.

Here, there is a common misunderstanding that taking risks does not necessarily mean getting rewards. In fact, the probability of failure is higher after taking risks, but the mechanisms of evolution reward the minority of successful risk-takers. As for the losers, there are so many humans, and the mechanisms of evolution do not care about them.

This mechanism is not only cultural but also based on human physiological structure. The hypothalamus, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex are all related to the tendency to take risks and produce a large amount of adrenaline and dopamine hormones to generate pleasure. All addictive substances or mechanisms come from the hormone secretion mechanisms that have evolved in the human body, which provide rewards for certain behaviors. For example, the pleasure caused by the taste of sweetness and the direct supply of energy from sugar were rewards for our ancestors who lacked this substance in their diet, which was beneficial for their evolution. However, it is no longer applicable to modern artificially designed stimuli.

The evolutionary mechanism of gambling psychology is that male players prefer competitive gambling against other people. However, the author found that in gambling against machines, such as video slot machine gamblers, the majority are white women aged 30 to 50. This difference is worth noting.

The author interviewed slot machine players of various genders and identities. Most of the interviewees were constantly aware that they were destroying themselves. They lived in a state of confusion or closed loop. They entered a state of complete immersion, even if someone around them was dying, they would not even look at them. The gamblers described by the author had several cases:

Josie is an insurance broker who must work hard to reassure and persuade her clients. "I have to deal with their financial and scholarship issues all day long, help them take responsibility. I sell insurance and investment products and make money for them, so I have to adjust myself to make them believe that what I sell is real. After work, I have to go find a slot machine." Only with the machine can she temporarily escape from the demands of her profession and interpersonal pressure. "On the machine, I feel safe and away from the crowd. No one talks to me, no one asks me questions, no one asks me to make major decisions: whether to keep a K or a Q is the biggest decision I make."

Carol O'Hare was a machine gambler and served as executive director of the Nevada Problem Gambling Commission since 1996. She also found the same temporary relief in the machine. A reporter wrote, "During the day, she sells computers and explains the value and performance of random access memory to parents. After 5 p.m., O'Hare will find a video poker machine and sit down to heal herself through the rhythm of card selection and discarding."

Sharon told me about her experience playing video poker during a painful breakup: "Dealing with machines is not as troublesome as interpersonal communication. The machine takes my money, and I can have some alone time playing a few hands. The interaction is clear, and the parameters are defined. It's that simple for me to decide which cards to keep and which to discard. I don't have to do anything else except choose 'yes' or 'no'. I know that after pressing these buttons, the machine will respond to me as I want and need." Machine gambling addicts all emphasize their desire for "clear and simple" interaction, and the machine can satisfy them, while interacting with other humans is full of various demands, dependencies, and risks. Sharon recalled, "I feel safe on the machine, but not with people. On the machine, I may win or lose, and if I lose, the relationship ends. It's really understandable, it's an agreement between us. Then I start over, smoothly."

When Leshiell first started studying machine gambling addicts, he found that most of them were women. The self-reports of gambling addicts led Leshiell to imagine a gender-based distinction: one is "action gambling," and the other is "escape gambling." Men are action gamblers and prefer real games (such as card games, horse racing, commodity trading, etc.), while women are escape gamblers and prefer machines. Men seek social status, competition, and self-enhancement in gambling, while women pursue isolation and anonymity. Men seek excitement, stimulation, and pleasure, while women seek numbness and escape from the stress of excessive social interaction. Leshiell later no longer emphasized the gender assumption in the division of "action and escape" because he also encountered male gamblers seeking escape, especially truck drivers who play video poker at rest stops along the way. If there is pressure, the pressure on these people does not come from excessive social interaction but from a sense of loneliness. This indicates that excessive machine gambling is not so much a social requirement related to escape and gender, but an escape from all social connections, whether the pressure comes from too much or too little social interaction.

When playing gambling machines, gamblers enter a safe zone where their choices do not involve uncertainty and various consequences of the real world. This digital choice pattern is both a consolidation of the algorithmic self and a dissolution of the self. At this time, behavior is no longer about maximizing the self, taking risks, or competing, but about self-dissolution, buffering risks, and disengaging from society.

Chiksentmihai believes that any flow activity has "potential addictive properties." It tempts people to rely on the power of flow to suspend negative emotional states such as boredom, anxiety, and confusion, which he calls "psychic entropy." People who are focused on self-realization participate in positive, non-addictive flow activities (which he calls "forward escape"), creating new realities to surpass the limitations of existing realities. On the other hand, those who like to escape from society tend to participate in negative flow ("backward escape"), constantly repeating certain behaviors to numb themselves to the experience of reality, and these repetitive behaviors rarely lead them to empowering emotional states or new possibilities.

2. Casino Design#

The design of a gambling game requires the participation of 300 people, including scriptwriters, visual designers, marketing personnel, mathematicians, and mechanical video and software engineers.

The immersive interior design of the casino, with low ceilings, blurred spatial boundaries, and a complex maze-like texture. The locations are designed to accommodate large groups of anonymous individuals who have no obvious connections with each other.

The design of the casino space and its subspaces combines darkness and enclosure, creating a sense of privacy, security, focus, and control. The maze-like corridors under the low ceilings isolate the sunlight and space outside, making players lose their perception of time and space.

The "backward escape" of being unable to stop the flow is the characteristic of machine gambling addiction, and it cannot simply be explained as a product of the player's personal motivation because it is closely related to the machine's settings. The interaction parameters of the machine program do not leave much room for the player's strategy and operation. It is like running on a neat and uniform treadmill in the gym, rather than running in a varied outdoor environment. The interaction of gambling machines does not leave much room for the player to "play". On the contrary, the machine predicts and measures every action of the player and responds accordingly, firmly controlling the probability of the game and directing the player's actions in a predetermined direction. This is a trap-like encounter that will ultimately wear people out.

3. Certainty and Uncertainty in Gambling#

For machine gambling, the casino and the gambler present a strange paradox. Although gambling is based on probability and seems unpredictable, in reality, the casino always wins in the end, and the gambler loses all their money. The design of the casino is to make the gambler have nothing and be heavily in debt (with the help of credit tools).

The casino has even developed a method to calculate the player's expected lifetime value. That is, how much money the player may lose to this casino store throughout their life? The most profitable customers will receive special treatment.

Slot machines determine the result the moment you press the button, not after you visually see the reels stop. Even the program does not control the actual reels you see, but it lowers the probability of winning through an algorithm, so as to provide higher jackpot amounts. There is a gambling addiction therapist who started designing software to teach gamblers about gambling machines and explain the internal mechanisms of the machines. Very few people understand. They especially don't understand how gambling machines manipulate probability and randomness.

Many activities can bring about a strong sense of immersion and a weakening of bodily awareness, and these activities are not entirely related to the technology itself. Chiksentmihai wrote, "Even chess players in a match may not notice even if their bladder is full or they have a splitting headache. Their awareness of their physical condition only returns after the match is over." "But whether it's playing chess, ritualistic trance, or performing surgery, these activities have their natural endpoints, while machine gambling has endless possibilities. The only certain endpoint is when all the gambling capital is gone. Some gambling industry executives call this endpoint the 'burnout point,' and the logic of the machine's operation is to ensure that players keep playing until the burnout point."

Weber asked: Does rationalization mean that our understanding of our own living conditions has surpassed that of Native Americans in the Americas? He believed that it was just the opposite. With the process of rationalization, we have become more ignorant of the design and operation of technology. He pointed out that unless you are a physicist, a person sitting on a tram has no idea how the battery moves, and he doesn't need to know.

4. Gambling and Modern Discipline#

For casinos, they have carefully designed game machines and casino layouts based on psychology, mathematics, computer science, etc. The casino designer mentioned in the book, named Randy Adams, knows exactly how to get into the minds of 50-year-old women and figure out what they want. With the help of big data, casinos can now predict the behavior patterns of each gambler.

In Skinner's box with rats, the lever press of the rat has a certain probability of obtaining food, and the food is randomly given. Sometimes the rat gets nothing, sometimes it gets zero to a few, and sometimes it gets a lot. The rat never knows when it will get food. So it keeps pressing the lever, even if it gets nothing. For gamblers, they want to escape the uncertain risks of the real world and enter the well-designed Skinner's box.

The mechanism of gambling is not about winning or losing. The winnings and losses of regular customers are not stimulating enough to trigger dopamine secretion. It is about the continuous repetition of automatic actions to escape the unpredictability of reality. Just like Skinner's rats.

The gambling mechanism is not about winning or losing, but about escaping the unpredictability of reality through continuous repetitive actions. It is about escaping the uncertainty and consequences of the real world. It is about finding certainty in an uncertain world and the illusion of being able to choose and control the world. In a 1902 article "The Impulse of Gambling," psychologist Clemens Frans also believed that the "conviction of assurance" longing for security is the psychological basis of all gambling. However, gambling addicts have not escaped choice. On the contrary, this reconstructed choice itself, after being manipulated by the machine, leads to their compulsive behavior.

Advocates of laissez-faire liberalism have two views. First, they believe that addiction can be avoided through rational control. In reality, due to the different innate and acquired conditions of individuals, some may become addicted to gambling and some may not. However, there will inevitably be a susceptible group of addicts, and these addicts contribute the majority of the casino's revenue. Without these addicts, the casino would go bankrupt. Second, they believe that addiction can be overcome through self-control. However, the so-called methods of overcoming addiction are all based on precise control and rewards and punishments of human behavior, which do not address the root causes of addiction. Addiction itself can be seen as a manifestation of compulsive personality, and the treatment methods are to construct another type of compulsive personality.

The dilemma of human beings is that they are controlled by the environment, products of the environment, and have little autonomy. Hannah Arendt said: "The human condition is such that human survival is constrained by the condition, and for such a person, everything, whether natural or artificial, will immediately become part of the condition for their continued survival." If so, at the moment when humans design machines, they "adjust" themselves to adapt to the environment with machines.

From the perspective of modernity, what the advocates of free will do not say is that this world is prepared for so-called normal people. Various addicts are the products of failed discipline, and at the same time, various addictive substances are also products of modernity. They are waste products that are both killed and buried. Addicts can be seen as unqualified products eliminated by industrial society, and the release of addictive substances is both a containment, poison, and antidote for the losers. This also includes short videos and online games designed using similar behavioral psychology mechanisms, using data collection, behavior analysis, increasing daily activity, inducing consumption, information cocoons, and constant repetition.

This concludes the review of this book. Finally, I will briefly mention the methods I believe can break free from this psychological behavior mechanism:

1. Try to find and engage in work that you are interested in and willing to do.

2. Actively seek opportunities for learning and growth in daily life and work.

3. Lower your expectations of controlling life, and accept risks and uncertainties.