Natasha Dow Schüll - Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

ADDICTION BY DESIGN

ADDICTION BY DESIGN

Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

Natasha Dow Schll

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schll, Natasha Dow, 1971 Addiction by design : machine gambling in Las Vegas / Natasha Dow Schll.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-12755-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. GamblingNevadaLas Vegas. 2. Compulsive gamblingNevadaLas Vegas. 3. GamblingEquipment and suppliesNevadaLas Vegas. 4. CasinosNevadaLas Vegas. I. Title.

HV6721.L3S38 2012

362.2'5dc23 2012004339

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon LT Std Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN LONG in the making. It began nearly twenty years ago as a thesis on casino design and management in Las Vegas during the meteoric expansion of the gambling industry in the early 1990s. The thesis culminated in an examination of the gambling machines that were then beginning to dominate casino floors, devices in which the industrys design and management strategies came together and reached new levels of ingenuity and precision. As a graduate student I picked up this thread, returning to the city to conduct extended dissertation research among gambling machine addicts. Finally, these two pieces coalescedand evolvedinto the present book, which explores the relationship between the technologies of the gambling industry and the experience of gambling addiction.

My deepest thanks go to the many gamblers and former gamblers in Las Vegas who shared their experiences with me, and who inspired the trajectory of my research and analysis from start to finish. The Trimeridian problem gambling clinic offered a welcoming base during my extended fieldwork in Las Vegas, and dialogues with the pioneering psychologists of gambling addiction, Richard Rosenthal, Robert Hunter, and Julian Taber, helped to guide the course of my inquiry. I thank those in the gambling industryamong them technology designers, casino slot department managers, and marketing strategistswho took the time to explain and reflect upon their design and business practices.

An extensive constellation of mentors, colleagues, and friends sustained and enriched the project through its different iterations. My first debt is to Mike Panasitti, coauthor of the undergraduate thesis, for his collaboration in the original research and analysis; several of his insights live on in this book. Laura Nader and Paul Rabinow in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, provided critical mentorship and encouragement during the thesis phase. The dissertation, also completed at UC Berkeley, was supervised by a wonderful committee of anthropologists including Stefania Pandolfo, Paul Rabinow, and Lawrence Cohen; each lent inspiration, direction, and critical ethnographic and analytic tools to the project. I am especially grateful to my graduate advisor, Stefania Pandolfo, for the intellectual passion, friendship, and ongoing guidance she offered through the pleasures and challenges of fieldwork and writing. Judith Butler and Gene Rochlin have my gratitude for their thoughtful and generous engagements with the completed dissertation.

The ideas in this book took shape, and were sharpened, through exchanges with countless peers and colleagues. In addition to the valuable feedback I gleaned from audiences at the diverse conferences, workshops, and lectures where I presented pieces of the work, I had the good fortune to receive input from Bo Bernhard, Mariah Breeding, David Buuck, Lisa Davis, Jennifer Fishman, Duana Fullweily, Cristiana Giordano, Uri Grezemkovsky, Maimuna Huq, Nicholas King, Eric Klinenberg, Eduardo Kohn, Andrew Lakoff, Kahwee Lee, Joshua Linford-Steinfeld, Rebecca Lemov, Tanya Luhrmann, Thomas Malaby, Lynn Meskell, Aaron Nathan, Anand Pandian, Adriana Petryna, Tamar Posner, Elizabeth Roberts, Stephen Rosenberg, Rashmi Sadana, Sara Shostak, Peter Skafish, Miriam Tiktin, Sue Wilson, and Caitlin Zaloom. Over the years, these colleagues acted as an indispensible panel of interlocutors, readers, and writing partners.

A number of fellowships and grants made my research and writing possible. (I am often asked if the financial support allocated for participant-observation included funds to gamble; the answer is no!) Dissertation fieldwork was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, a Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, and smaller awards including the Robert H. Lowie Graduate Scholarship, the Berkeley Humanities Research Grant, and a Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Scholarship Award. Dissertation writing was supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (the Berkeley Center for Working Families Doctoral Fellowship), the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, and a National Science Foundation Training Grant in Science and Technology Studies. The School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, supplied a lovely residence and generous support for the final completion of the dissertation.

I began to reconfigure the project as a book during my tenure as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University, where program directors Peter Bearman and Bruce Link, along with my fellow scholars, provided an interdisciplinary context in which the material was able to take a new form. Peters enthusiasm, support, and guidance were particularly important. New York Universitys vibrant International Center for Advanced Study, headed by Tim Mitchell and Thomas Bender, was the next intellectual home for the project. Emily Martin and Rayna Rapps Science Studies Workshop, also based at NYU, was a forum for stimulating exchanges with peers during my postdoctoral years in New York.

Mary Murrell at Princeton University Press first took on my manuscript, turning it over to her successor, Fred Appel, when she realized that she should be writing books herself. Reviewers Lucy Suchman, Emily Martin, and Vincent Crapanzano gave invaluable feedback on the first version of the manuscript. Scholars of gambling Henry Lesieur, Charles Livingstone, and Roger Horbay read the book in its draft form and offered excellent advice and suggestions. Rachel Volberg made thorough and incisive editorial comments on significant portions of the text. Mirko Ernkvist, Nigel Turner, and Kevin Harrigan read the chapters on game design and helped to clarify important details on the programming of probability, as did gambling machine specialists Mike Shackleford (a.k.a. Wizard of Odds), Bob Dancer, and Stacy Freidman. The Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, made much of the archival research possible, and its capable staff helped me track down many a wayward citation.

Final revisions to the book were conducted during my first years in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My colleagues Mike Fischer, David Kaiser, David Jones, Vincent Lepinay, and Hanna Shell gave thoughtful feedback on the manuscript, and Sherry Turkle shepherded one portion of the work through the passionate proofreading of her edited volume on The Inner History of Devices . Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson in Anthropology offered a particularly robust and helpful set of comments. I also thank David Mindell, Roz Williams, and Roe Smith for their mentorship and support of my work.