Understanding gambling addiction (2012)
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
But, like the app in the article I linked, what’s a casino that takes in real money but never pays out? It’s hard to see it as anything other than predatory. And while the woman shouldn’t have embezzled funds from her employer we’ve sent her to prison and then allowed the obviously exploitative app to continue operating. And when some other unlucky person who is, for whatever reason, predisposed to problem gambling becomes addicted to this app and it ruins their life and possibly the lives of their friends and family we’ll again focus on the “personal responsibility” of the victim and ignore the system and industry that not only facilitated but targeted and then nurtured the victim’s problem in order to profit.
[1]https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7547225/woman-stole-9...
It's been measured that the dopamine rush for gamblers comes when they place a bet, not when they win.
I always felt sort of bittersweet when the company would announce metrics about how high performing our games were. Since every slot game is essentially the same the only reason a game might perform higher was because the art, sound or minigames were more attention grabbing and addictive. There was also an autospin feature where you could spin at high bet amounts (The largest I remember was $200) over 100 times. Every time metrics would be celebrated I always thought about the potential person playing those game's wasting a whole bunch of money on "Just one more spin" (Although the article suggests that's not the primary motivation behind the addiction).
A coworker told me a story of how some of the slots went down over a long weekend, and they were inundated with angry emails asking for a fix. There were a lot of nice and talented people at that company, but It definitely wore on me the feeling that the work I was doing was making other's lives worse.
EA made $1.6B last year from "Ultimate Game Mode" in their FIFA game, which essentially allows gamers to gamble away their money to access players from across FIFA leagues to build into a custom team. A reddit thread I found showed that many people were spending $1K+ annually just to have access to the same characters year after year in this gambling scheme because the characters are not transferable to next year's game.
It does seem to be kind of similar to the "zone" in programming, it's not uncommon to finish a task you were planning and just to keep in the zone I started doing extra features, many times that would be scrapped later because it was not relevant but just due to the inertia and to not have to switch context.
There's also an interesting question there regarding adhd and gambling, I'd imagine the hyper fixation would definitely make the issue more acute. A quick search got me this[0] meta-study which seems to find some link between adhd symptoms and problem gambling, I'm no medical scholar however so don't take my word for it.
Like when you're really engrossed in a task it certainly is pleasurable, and it like really does make you forget about all the other worries and problems and anxieties of the rest of your life.
This framing does match my own personal experience with video games, I could waste hours grinding queues - it's like just putting everything else on pause.
So like all other addictions.
- you can't go broke from spending too much time on facebook/twitter/instagram
- doing something dumb on social media usually doesn't come with the same feeling of regret that's common in people who try to stop gambling but can't
- social media might be addictive but it's a weakly negative, comfy, it-feels-good-when-my-attention-is-here type of addiction, gambling is a whole other beast
- there is very little shame in talking about how much time you spend on social media, hiding gambling losses on the other hand is much more common
Sure, dopamine is probably something they have in common, that's where the similarities end.
Maybe I'm young and didn't experience it, but in the 90s you would plan a trip to Vegas and lose a few hundred dollars.
Today I see people doing this from their phone on every random sports game. Further there are constant ads on TV, the Internet, and on billboards.
I'm fortunate for a teacher who says "gambling is a tax on people who can't do math". And having tried gambling, it was a labor intensive way to lose money.
Not sure if I want to advance brain science, maybe these companies can be legally held accountable... Or maybe gambling companies will get to the research first and manipulate us.
Sometimes legal and heavily regulated activities can still have devastating results.
Legal != moral
Sure, they said “legally held accountable” and you replied that these organizations are already operating legally.
So then the matter is: should these companies be allowed to continue operating as they currently do because it’s legal? Or should we push for laws/regulations to be changed so they stop exploiting people?
This is not a matter of fact issue. It’s a moral, political, and yes subjective, issue.
So your question, even if you didn’t intend it to, very much has to do with morality.
It probably is worse than ever I do agree, the internet age gives far too much visibility and access to it, to the point where the most popular sports games have progression pretty much tied to some form of lootboxes, and that's before even getting into the rabbit hole of gacha.
The acceptance of loot boxes because "it was just cosmetic" was a tragic slippery slope, all the problems with having cosmetics on said loot boxes aside, that turned into "you can also buy it with in-game currency", which then started offering in-game currency for purchase and making the prices to buy said things extraordinary, which generated a lot of money and allowed for a free release that would then feed the circle over again.
I know another guy who only ever talks about his wins, which has me guessing he must be badly in debt just based on the long odds. Both of these colleagues are Asian-American, and for them it seems just culturally OK to do these things.
Thank God because I see my parents wasting time. At least when I was a kid I had no money and was bored. They have money and education.
Everything from kids arcades to sports has turned into a grand casino. The sports thing is a particular bummer as it will change sports in what imo a bad thing.
I don't consider myself as having an addictive personality (only got a smartphone about the same time, etc) but it has been an education in how much effort one has to put into not making it take over your life. If I didn't have a strict "only money you spend on this is the flat 5$ monthly subscription fee, no more" rule, I can easily see a bad night wrecking havoc on a pocketbook. The thought with the subscription for me, is that the gameplay's fun enough for me to spend a starbucks-a-month on it.
The wildest thing is, this specific gacha (Fire Emblem Heroes) is considered very tame compared to most gachas, when it's all said and done.
Given the popularity (an order of magnitude larger than FEH) of other gachas like Genshin Impact among Gen Z ... and the horror stories I've been hearing of former friends backstabbing each other and sabotaging fandom projects to steal money for gacha addictions ... this worries me.
I keep blocking them on twitter and sharing not interested on reddit but it doesn't seem to change much.
Many of the laws around gambling are still quasi-religious morality rules from the Prohibition era, focusing on Games of Chance. Regulation has not caught up to the current understanding of gambling as an addiction.
Online sports betting is just not fun for me. I want to get a betting slip and walk away with dollars. Doing it on the phone feels very lame to me for some reason. Probably for the best. I also just don't have time to actually learn stuff about what could affect the game, so I mostly just make fun bets.
Gambling isn't fun. The slot machines are just bright lights, and the vast majority of their exterior is spent on explaining the rules so they can have extremely complicated games so they can legally boost payouts, without violating the law. The very first machine I touched was something involving ducks. I put in a twenty, pressed a button, and lost ten dollars a second later. I literally sat there wondering if I had missed something, or didn't understand how to play.
Okay, whatever that's a higher stakes game than I should be playing. So I moved onto the "penny" slots, which are contrived bullshit machines. They "run" fifty "bets" simultaneously so that one actual play is 50 cents but can claim that each "game" is only a penny. So I got to actually playing, pressing the bet button, getting the reels spinning, and winning and losing.
There's nothing there. There are beeps and boops and things moving, but like, so what? It isn't the 50s anymore, we shouldn't really be entertained by the most basic beeps and boops that were possible before transistors were invented. We are well past pong in this day an age, shouldn't there be something more? It's also VERY obvious from right the first second that you WILL lose more than you win. After just ten plays you will have a pretty good idea of the downward trend you face, even if you somehow get big wins here and there.
So I move from machine to machine. I eventually find a machine made by konami, you know, the guys behind huge popular video game franchises, like castlevania and metal gear and DDR. Turns out they make a lot of gambling machines nowadays, and pretty much only those. This machine had a large high resolution display, and bright lights and loud sounds. But, it was exactly the same. It's just a few digital reels that pretend to spin and lock into whatever set up the RNG already decided you will get.
Okay, fine, I've always wanted to play blackjack and I have $100 here I've decided to play until gone. So I go look at the card tables. Turns out, every game has bespoke rules on how you are allowed to bet, how you can play, and the game runs at an absurd pace. Not only can you not use simple and classic blackjack strategy because of the limited betting system, but it nakedly shows how stupid gambling is at all, because the rules unilaterally limit any possible upside for the player, while leaving their downside wide open. A simple house edge was not enough for this rule set, instead you are required to set a personal max bet before each round, and it doesn't matter how good you do that round you can't bet more than that ante. The quick pace also makes it impossible to actually think on your cards, decided how good you think that is, and bet accordingly. Meanwhile, all the other players at the table have obviously been here every day this month, are losing hundreds every few hands, and keep telling you about their "system" that totally works and definitely beats the super stacked rules in this game.
That was it. That's when I realized that gambling isn't fun. Gambling games simply are not designed to be fun, because nobody plays them for fun. A more fun game does not bring in more money for the casino. Instead, they make more money by simply running more "games" per second, because most regulation is around the odds you are allowed to set up "per game" essentially. Look back at that konami slot. They make ACTUAL games, for ACTUAL fun, at least at one point. Compare the konami slot machine to an arcade cabinet of Gradius; It's literally designed to kill you and take your coin once every minute or so. And that is still less greedy, over-engineered, optimized, and hollowed out than even the simplest slot machine I could find. Castlevania is fun. Metal gear is fun, even though I think the story is dumb. DDR is incredible fun. Slot machines and gambling are not fun unless you get that magic hit of dopamine every time you press that button, and if you do, you are directly susceptible to being physically addicted to gambling, and every single light, sound, smell, touch in that building has been expressly optimized to give you that hit of dopamine and get you addicted.
I don't understand why anyone defends it.
Slots: are a waste of time imo. I don't know why people like these.
Blackjack: is kinda fun but you really gotta print out a card that tells you how to play with which hands. You can kinda try to guess when you'll get a run of luck but I am also not super into this game. Feels very formulaic.
Poker: Ah yes, poker is FUN, texas hold em with friends is a great way to spend an evening. But I think it would be a lot less fun at a casino tournament because enough of those people are very serious about it and they will roll me.
Roulette: Good for a quick bet or two, but lingering at the table too long is a road to despair.
What does that leave me with? Craps!
Yes, craps. it is very easy to understand the basic bets and it is a communal game. Generally speaking, the people playing at a craps table are winning or losing together. As long as you avoid any of the exotic bets on the board, the payouts are actually fairly even for a casino game. I usually enjoy craps, but there's a catch of course. You can win a lot or lose a lot very quickly. It's important to stop when you lose your limit, and it's important to walk away once you've been playing a certain amount of time imo.
That's my take on casino games anyway. I go maybe every few years.
Maybe Miami isn't a great example, but you had every form available, cock fighting, dog fighting, grey hound racing, horse racing, dice, cards, illegal street racing...
Any event that brought people together had its gambling, it just wasn't available in an app.
My guess is the apps have actually reduced the amount of gambling in these other areas (both illegal and legal).
It's probably the case that the majority of the smartest people in the most recent generations are involved in rent-seeking, Ponzi schemes, advertising, and/or skinner box creation in the form of FAANGs or other tech/fintech/crypto companies.