aether

Regarding the issue of casinos in Las Vegas, I have also read some related books before, mostly about mathematics and psychology, and very few about casino design and the sociology of gamblers. This book fills in the gaps. The author is a researcher in cultural anthropology and interviewed casinos, slot machine designers, and gamblers for this book.

It is important to note that the author's investigation focuses on video gambling, such as slot machines. If you have a basic understanding of gambling principles, you would 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 the slot machine serves as the opponent, and as long as you repeat it 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. The book mainly discusses gambling against machines.

Although this is a personal reflection, the focus and perspective are quite different from the 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, like human history, has a long history. Because the human evolutionary environment is in a state of insufficient information and uncertainty, it requires risky decision-making and the courage to compete. Even the famous game theory is based on this image. However, historically, it was dominant males who needed to make these risky and competitive choices. Due to the mechanism of evolution, males tend to choose competitive games against others to face the uncertain world and achieve victory.

Here, it is worth mentioning a common misunderstanding, which is that risk-taking does not necessarily mean rewards. In fact, the probability of failure is higher after taking risks, but the mechanism of evolution rewards the few successful risk-takers. As for the losers, there are so many humans, and the mechanism of evolution does not care about them.

This mechanism is not only cultural but also based on the 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 mechanism evolved by the human body, which rewards certain behaviors. For example, the pleasure caused by the taste of sweetness is a reward for the ancestors who lacked direct energy-providing substances like sugar. This was beneficial for evolution at that time, but it is no longer applicable to the modern world filled with intentionally designed artificial stimuli.

The evolution mechanism of gambling psychology is that male players prefer competitive gambling against other people. However, the author found that in gambling against machines, specifically 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 gender 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 glance at them. The author described several cases of gamblers:

Josie is an insurance broker who must work hard to reassure and persuade her clients. "I have to deal with their financial problems and scholarship issues all day long, help them take responsibility. I sell insurance and investment products, making 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 the K or the Q is the biggest decision I make."

Carol O'Hare was a machine gambler. Since 1996, she has been the executive director of the Nevada Problem Gambling Commission. 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 pm, 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 playing video poker during a painful period of heartbreak: "Dealing with machines is not as complicated as interpersonal relationships. 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 as simple as deciding which cards to keep and which cards to discard. Besides choosing 'yes' or 'no,' I don't have to do anything else. I know that after pressing these buttons, the machine will respond with what I want and need." Machine gambling addicts all emphasize their desire for "clear and simple" interaction, which the machine can satisfy, while interactions with other humans are filled with 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 (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, escape from distressing problems, and release from excessive social interactions. Leshiell later no longer emphasized the gender assumption in the division of "action" and "escape" because he also encountered male gambling addicts seeking escape, especially truck drivers who play video poker at rest stops along the way. If there is pressure, the pressure these people face does not come from excessive social interactions but from 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 slot 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 not only a consolidation of the algorithmic self but also a dissolution of the self because the behavior at this time no longer seeks self-maximization, risk-taking, or competition but self-dissolution, buffering risks, and disconnection from society.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes that any flow activity has "potential addictive qualities." 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 engage 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 prefer to escape from society tend to engage in negative flow ("backward escape"), constantly repeating certain behaviors to numb themselves from experiencing reality, and these repetitive behaviors rarely lead them to empowering emotional states or new possibilities.

2. Casino Design#

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

The casino's low and immersive interior design, blurred spatial boundaries, and complex maze-like texture create 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 uncontrollable flow is the characteristic of machine gambling addiction, and it cannot be simply explained as a product of individual player motivation because it is closely related to the machine's settings. The interactive parameters of the machine program do not leave much room for player strategies and actions. It is like running on a neatly arranged treadmill in a gym instead of running in a varied outdoor environment. The interaction of slot machines does not leave much room for players to "play." Instead, 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 down.

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 appears unpredictable, in reality, the casino always wins in the end, and the gambler loses all their money. The design of the casino is aimed at leaving the gambler with nothing and burdened with debts (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 to provide higher jackpot amounts. There is a gambling addiction therapist who started designing software to teach gamblers about the knowledge of slot machines and explain the internal mechanisms of the machines. Very few people understand it. They especially don't understand how the slot machine manipulates 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 technology itself. Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "Even chess players in a match may not notice their full bladder or splitting headache for several hours, and their awareness of their physical condition only returns when the match is over." "But whether it is playing chess, engaging in 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 exhausted. Some gambling industry executives call this endpoint the 'burnout point,' and the logic of the machine's operation is designed to ensure that players keep playing until the burnout point."

Max Weber asked whether rationalization meant that our understanding of our own living conditions surpassed that of Native Americans in America. He believed that it was quite the opposite. With the process of rationalization, we have become more ignorant of the design and operation of technology. He pointed out that unless one is a physicist, a person sitting on a tram has no idea how the battery moves, and they don'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 book mentions a casino designer named Linda Adams who knows 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 pressed by the rat has a certain probability of obtaining food, and the food is given randomly. Sometimes the rat gets nothing, sometimes it gets zero to a few pieces, and sometimes it gets a lot. The rat never knows when it will get food. Therefore, it keeps pressing the lever, even if it doesn't get anything. For gamblers, they want to escape the uncertain risks of the real world and enter the carefully 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. Instead, it is about the continuous repetition of automatic actions to escape from the unpredictability of reality. Just like Skinner's rats.

The modern capitalist mode of production has four characteristics: the efficiency of production behavior, the internalization of competition, the uncertainty of its own future, and the majority of labor results not belonging to oneself.

First, from Taylor's scientific management to Toyota's lean production, modern assembly lines require human actions to be standardized and speeded up as much as possible. Each action is precisely measured in terms of range and time, and there should be no deformation. The imagination of Chaplin's Modern Times is a daily reality in modern factories. Benjamin compared the time characteristics of factory labor with gambling. Both involve a series of continuous repetitive events, each of which is "isolated from the previous operation precisely because it is repeated." He wrote about factory labor, "Each operation on the machine, like a brilliant move in a game of chance, is isolated from the previous one... 'Starting over' is the guiding principle of gambling and the guiding principle of piece-rate wages." This "starting over," the continuous beginning that is isolated from all previous beginnings, means that every labor or gambling action can be perceived as a non-temporal event, "detached from time." Although industrial work relies on clock-precise measurement and segmentation of time, it is precisely this pattern of measurement and segmentation that "isolates" each moment from each other, erasing time. Similarly, Benjamin also believed that in gambling, each "moment" is isolated from other moments, making time a "white ball rolling into the next grid, the next card on the deck," allowing gamblers to escape from normal time flow.

Second, for non-assembly line workers, they face intense competition and uncertainty. Digital technology packs more moments into work, media, entertainment, and even private life based on service and finance, compressing time. In this situation, the algorithmic self must be a self that maximizes time value, maintaining high speed and constant internalization.

Third, modern society does not provide a safety net for the lower class. Family, marriage, economic crises, diseases, and various disasters can disrupt their daily lives and make them become unqualified products of industrial society, unable to return to the normal track.

Fourth, the labor results are separate from their labor, and labor compensation only maintains their survival. Most of the results constitute the lights and greens of skyscrapers that they can only see but cannot enter. E.P. Thompson wrote that with the advent of industrial society, the relationship between people and time has changed. In the new society, work habits are reconstructed, and time is no longer flowing on its own but is spent like currency.

High-intensity machine gamblers embody the social demands for continuous high-speed operation. Our society widely praises speed, and the wisdom and existential crisis behind this attitude are reflected in machine gamblers. In short, in modern society, people are treated as machines, and machines need to be responsible for maintaining and maintaining themselves, otherwise they will be eliminated.

Urban historian Mike Davis called Las Vegas the "Detroit of the post-industrial economy." The slot machines in this city are no longer production tools that alienate users but a means to escape from the alienation brought by social labor. Gambling addicts are social misfits, losers in capitalist society. They try to regain control of their lives. Machine gambling shrinks their world into a regulated and limited world, seeking certainty in an uncertain world, an illusion that they can choose and control the world. In a 1902 article titled "The Impulse of Gambling," psychologist Clements Franks also believed that the "conviction of certainty" craving 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 viewpoints. First, people can avoid addiction through rational control. In reality, people have different innate and acquired conditions, and some may become addicted to gambling while others may not. However, there will inevitably be a susceptible group of addicts, and these addicts contribute to the vast majority of casino revenue. Without these addicts, the casino would go bankrupt. Second, it is believed 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 in modern homologous ways. They do not address the root causes of addiction. Addiction itself can be seen as a manifestation of compulsive personality, and the treatment methods are constructing another compulsive personality.

The dilemma for humans 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 existence is subject to the conditions of existence, and for such people, everything, whether natural or artificial, will immediately become part of their continuing existence. If so, then 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 who cannot adapt to modern 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 the book. Finally, I will briefly mention the methods I believe can break free from this psychological behavioral 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, accept risks and uncertainties.