Feeding the hungry beast

Feeding the hungry beast

There is a growing evidence that our addiction to gambling, particularly on poker machines, is no accident, reports Colin Kruger.

POKER machines have long been portrayed as a social problem; part of an industry preying on the vulnerable and mathematically challenged. And Australia has 200,000-odd such problems.

But recent testimony before the Joint Senate Select committee on Gambling Reform has given credence to a growing body of opinion that the humble pokie really is the "crack cocaine of gambling".

There is increasing recognition that the addiction is real, and it is challenging the understanding of problem gambling worldwide.

Advertisement: Story continues below The fifth revision of the American Psychiatric Association's highly influ- ential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has recommended that pathological gambling be recognised as a behavioural addiction rather than an "impulse control disorder".

It is the first time this category of addiction would be recognised, and there is a push to have it reclassified in Australia as well.

Malcolm Battersby, a professor of psychiatry at Flinders University in Adelaide and an internationally recognised expert in problem gambling,

told the inquiry that traditionally, gamblers were thought to be disadvantaged people who were simply vulnerable to problems such as addiction.

"But what really was not understood was that the machine design specifically facilitates people becoming addicted to the machine – and you can say this about other forms of gambling – in exactly the way that a person becomes addicted to heroin or alcohol," he says.

"There is now a lot of biological evidence from brain scans, PET scans, genetic studies and so forth that show that pathological gamblers have similar profiles to other addictions in their brain chemistry, brain reactivity and so forth."

By some measures, about 15 per cent of people who play poker machines regularly are problem gamblers and account for 40 per cent of the $12 billion Australians lost in the machines in 2009 alone.

A study involving workers at Crown Casino in Melbourne described problem gamblers – those who had been playing for more than 24 hours – in graphic detail.

"Hence, the urination on stools: it is a very common thing in casinos," says the study leader, Associate Professor Linda Hancock.

"Machines are designed around conditioning – simple as that," says Battersby. "They are designed to increase a behaviour – in this case, putting money in a machine."

Decades of research has shown that response to the conditioning will be that much stronger if you don't know when you will be rewarded and by how much.

Battersby describes the feeling of excitement when people first start using poker machines and win.

"The sympathetic nervous system is activated, your heart rate goes up, your breathing gets a little bit faster and maybe there is a little bit of sweat".

But after a while it becomes a very negative experience from which people get only temporary relief by playing further.

"What they do not realise is that it actually reinforces the urge for the next time they might have a gambling trigger. That is the oldest bit of psychology research in the world," Battersby says.

The state of arousal the gambler feels has been described by other experts as the most important reinforcer in frequent gambling behaviour.

For the modern poker machine industry it's pure gold and the industry has well-developed methods for mining this seam.

Seminal research by a Canadian problem gambling expert, Professor Kevin Harrigan, identifies nine different attributes that make poker machines more addictive through conditioning by reinforcement. They include the so-called "near-miss" and "losses disguised as wins".

Losses disguised as wins, or fake wins, refer to a situation where a gambler – playing multiple lines of bets in a single game – wins some of them, but loses money overall.

The parliamentary inquiry was told "fake win" features were severely restricted in Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory but not in NSW and Victoria, which account for the vast majority of Australia's poker machines.

A near miss is where a "play" on the machine comes up just short of a win – usually with one symbol out of place.

Harrigan found players get little arousal from small wins and losses disguised as wins, but get a "huge arousal" from near misses. It even influences their perception of whether they are on a winning or losing streak.

The modern poker machine enhances the arousal with all the multimedia tools in its kit.

"The idea is to create a sense of winning by pulsing all the human senses with sounds and animated symbols and paylines flashing," says a US manufacturer in another influential study on poker machine design.

The impact in Australia is magnified by the potency of the machines available in virtually every corner pub, which feature high bet limits as well as high, and volatile, payouts.

"Australian machines are all high-impact machines in social venues, which is almost unique in the world," says Dr Charles Livingstone of Monash University in Melbourne.

British regulators were so concerned that they limited the entire country to just 1000 "high-impact" machines. NSW has close to 100,000 such machines – half Australia's total.

Speed is cited as another toxic factor. The inquiry heard the modern pokie is capable of 350 bets in half an hour, potentially overwhelming a player's decision-making process.

Once again, it appears this is no accident.

This speed, and potential lack of cognitive engagement, appears to be a key factor in what makes poker machines so dangerous for problem gamblers compared to other forms of electronic gaming.

Another key distinction applying to pokies over other forms of gambling is that it is the only "game" where players do not really understand the rules, as they would with blackjack, for example.

While poker machines are designed to pay out 88 cents in every dollar gambled, the lengths to which this statistic can be manipulated by the machine's coding can make this rule almost meaningless.

"The players have no idea that the 88 cents applies to a thousand machines in over a year. They think it is for that machine for them that day," Battersby says.

Some in the sector argue the abuse of this so-called "leisure pursuit" is no more the fault of the gambling industry than obesity is the fault of the fast food industry.

"The product is safe, but some people have addictions, be they to fast food, drugs or a whole variety of other things," David Curry, an executive with the Woolworths pub and poker machine subsidiary ALH, told the inquiry.

"Are we saying a hamburger is safe? Hamburgers are safe if they are consumed in moderation, but they are not safe if you eat four or five a week and do not have a balanced diet," he said.

The South Australian Labor MP Nick Champion noted one crucial difference.

"A hamburger does not cost you your house, normally."