April 16, 2013
Getting into the ‘zone,’ and why slot machines are a magnet for problem gamblers
Gaming Expo Last October in Las Vegas.
Related:
Human beings, like rats in lab, are programmed to seek rewards, which means we react when a slot machine tells us we’ve won—we sweat, the heart rate briefly slows.
“It goes back to fundamental psychology, the same as rewarding pigeons or dogs in a lab, it really works,” said Kevin Harrigan, who runs the Gambling Research Lab at the University of Waterloo.
“When you do something, in this case push the button, and you frequently get some kind of reward, it makes you want to do that activity.”
The research lab is investigating why slot machine gambling causes more harm than other forms of gambling. According to the lab, problem gamblers account for 60 per cent of slot machine revenue in Ontario, about $1.8 billion annually.
One of the major factors is the speed of slot machine gambling and the frequency of “wins,” said Harrigan. Players will do 600 spins an hour, with many of them registering as a “win” even as the player loses money.
“Usually when you win it’s actually as loss,” he said, explaining that many machines will signal with lights and sound that a partial payout of, for example, 20 cents on a dollar bet is a win, even though the person lost money.
“Even if mentally they know it was a loss, their body still reacts to it as win,” he said.
Then there are the “near wins,” where the result is almost a jackpot but not quite—for example two of three “7s” and a third just off the line. In Ontario, slot manufacturers are allowed to create machines where near-wins occur more than is statistically probable, he said.
“Players are reacting to these stronger than regular wins, because regular wins are quite small and these near wins are always almost the big win, or the jackpot,” said Harrigan.
Despite the allure of the “big win,” when MIT professor Natasha Dow Schüll interviewed problem gamblers at slot machines in Las Vegas she heard over and over that instead of being overjoyed when they win big, they’re annoyed.
“It really surprised me because people always assume that if people are gambling persistently that it must be that they think they can win,” said Schüll. “But over and over, people suggested to me that they were gambling, not because they had hopes of winning, but to get into ‘the zone’ and stay there.”
Schüll’s research, published in her book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, turns conventional thinking about gambling addition on its head.
“‘The zone’ is a place where time falls away, space falls away, you forget about your everyday worries, you forget the sense of your body, in extreme cases,” she said.
Winning big—when the sirens blare, the lights flash and the play stops—irritated the gamblers because it broke the flow of their game, bringing them back to reality.
“Really what they were after was that state of the repetitive, numbing, trance-like zone, not the excitement, the thrill and the hope of winning,” she said.
Schüll argues that seeking “the zone” isn’t unique to problem gamblers, just more extreme in those with gambling addictions. She said there is a gambling industry-wide shift away from a corporate model based on “play to win” gambling to a model based on the zone.
Like Harrigan, she points to the way digital slot machines are built for the speed and continuity of play and encourage players to spend a lot of time at the machine, piling up small “wins” while losing a steady flow of money.
“Nothing too different is happening and you’re getting the same rewarding signals of winning, even through you’re steadily losing,” she said.
As for the decision about casinos and slot machines facing Toronto city councillors, Schüll warned about the impact of convenience gambling on the host community.
“It has been shown that convenience gambling—the big slot barn that’s not a very diversified destination-resort but basically just more machines—you’re not creating jobs, you’re just creating a gambling market that appeals to local players,” she said. “The research has continued to show that that model has the worst outcomes in terms of social ills like problem gambling.”
Harrigan said slot machines that come with casinos are his biggest concern when it comes to the expansion of gambling, but the addition of slot-like electronic gaming machines being added to new bingo halls are also concerning.
http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/634752/getting-into-the-zone-and-why-slot-machines-are-a-magnet-for-problem-gamblers/
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment