In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible-even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.ĭrawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the 'machine zone,' in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals.
