Addiction by Design

Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

Natasha Dow Schüll

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400834655
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An anthropologist looks at the new "crack cocaine" of high-tech gambling 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. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. 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.Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll 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. 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. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management, " player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.

PART ONE

Design

When we put 50 slot machines in, I always consider them 50 more mousetraps. You have to do something to catch a mouse. It’s our duty to extract as much money as we can from customers.

—Bob Stupak, CEO of Las Vegas Stratosphere, 1995

THE DEFIBRILLATOR EXPERIMENT

2000. In the parking lot of a hospital complex in northwest Las Vegas, not far from a cluster of dilapidated casinos off downtown’s “old Strip,” a small group of paramedics stands around an ambulance drinking coffee and smoking. More often than not, they tell me, a call from a casino means that a patron has experienced a heart attack while playing a gambling machine. Given the notorious difficulty of getting in and out of casinos, such calls are met with collective dread. The head paramedic, on a break from training a new group, enumerates the obstacles surrounding entry: “The easiest access by far is the valet at the main entrance, but casinos won’t let you pull in there, especially on the Strip—they think it’s bad for business, they want you to feel safe.” Instead, paramedics must park around the back or enter from side doors.

Once inside, they face the challenge of navigating through a confusing layout. “It all looks the same—you go up and down elevators, there are no direct routes, the carpets lead you around and around, you lose your sense of direction.” When paramedics reach a victim, the challenge is no longer casino floor design but other players’ reluctance to leave their machines. “The gamblers just wouldn’t move to let us out,” remembers a paramedic who was once forced to start an intravenous line in a narrow aisle between two rows of machines.

To reduce the time it took to reach victims, some casinos trained their surveillance personnel to watch banks of machines for heart attacks on security monitors. In 1997 they went a step further and began to train their security guards to use automatic external defibrillators, or AEDs. The paramedics suggest that I speak with Richard Hardman, the coordinator of emergency medical services in Clark County who developed the casino AED program. Hardman, a slender man in his forties, meets me at the county’s Fire Department headquarters, not far from the south end of the Strip. We speak in his office, a small room with a busy desk and a television set suspended from the ceiling, hospital style.

As part of a quality assurance program in 1995, his department had noticed nearly three times as many deaths by heart attack occurring in Clark County as in other counties. A closer look revealed that two-thirds of the cardiac arrests took place in casinos, and Hardman realized that the high rate of death had to do with the delays encountered by paramedic teams negotiating their complicated interiors. Although they arrived at casino properties within four and a half to five minutes of a call, it took them an average of eleven minutes to reach victims inside. Hardman points out the life-and-death stakes: “Every minute following a cardiac arrest, your chances of survival decrease by 10 percent.”

Hardman contacted a public health researcher who agreed that casinos would make an ideal laboratory for testing defibrillator use by nonphysicians, and the two designed an experimental study. Next he lobbied casino management groups to purchase AED devices and train personnel to use them—not an easy sell given their worry over legal liabilities in the event of inappropriate applications of the device. He eventually convinced casinos that AEDs only deliver shocks in the absence of breathing and pulse, when intervention cannot make things worse. “There are no judgment calls to be made,” Hardman emphasized. “The AED is automatic, foolproof, it analyzes everything on its own.” Casinos decided to train security officers to use the devices since they were the staff members most familiar with property layouts. As it turned out, the officers had a very short response time—only two to three minutes. “At first they resisted, but now they embrace the technology,” says Hardman.

AEDs have since been used thousands of times in Las Vegas casinos, with an impressive survival rate of 55 percent (even better than that of hospitals—and far surpassing the national average rate of less than 10 percent).¹ Hardman has testified before Congress as part of the Cardiac Survival Act, and has lectured internationally. What makes his presentations so compelling are a set of real-time video recordings of AEDs in action. “Casinos,” Hardman tells me, “made videos for me, unknowingly, on their surveillance cameras.” Apologizing for the lack of audio in the footage, he invites me to sit behind his desk and watch the overhead TV monitor while he stands below and performs a live voice-over, a role at which he is clearly well practiced. As he indicates in advance which slight movements to look for, I sit riveted to the screen. The same drama is repeated three times—three casinos, three near deaths, and three life-saving automatic defibrillations.

The first video is black and white. A card dealer who had asked for water collapses as he leans to take a sip, falling between two tables. The cameras adjust their angles as soon as surveillance is alerted and record the defibrillations that follow. The second video is in color and begins with an overhead shot of a man in his early sixties, seated at a machine. Casino personnel had brought him oxygen when he complained of chest pains, and after the oxygen he feels better. He puts his cowboy hat on, says he doesn’t need any help, and begins his long journey out of the casino. Seven different cameras track his movement as he exits the property: down the escalator, through an elevated walkway, across the casino floor, and out the door. “The cameras followed him to make sure he was okay, but there were probably some legal reasons too,” comments Hardman. As he narrates, he seems to revere the casino surveillance infrastructure as much as the AEDs; it is not always clear which technologies take the starring role in the videos. A camera on the casino roof tracks the man’s progress through the outside parking lot, zooming in on him as he walks between rows of cars. He collapses in the parking lot. Bystanders approach, and casino security guards quickly arrive with the defibrillator. They prep the device, apply it, and shock the man back to consciousness. Paramedics show up seven and a half minutes later. “He would have had a 75 percent chance of dying,” Hardman says, “and that’s the parking lot—it would have taken longer to get inside.”

The third video is the most unsettling. By chance, the surveillance camera had been trained directly on the victim, who is playing at the tables. He rubs his temples, leans back, and tries to clear his head—then collapses suddenly onto the person next to him, who doesn’t react at all. The man slips to the floor in the throes of a seizure and two passersby stretch him out, one of them an off-duty ER nurse. Few gamblers in the immediate vicinity move from their seats. The camera shifts down to the floor and zooms in. In less than one minute, a security officer appears on the scene bearing a defibrillator; he applies the pads, clears, and shocks the man twice. When at nine minutes the paramedics arrive, the man is conscious, then confused, then alert and talking. Cameras track him leaving the casino.

Hardman pauses from his voice-over to note that the most interesting thing about this video sequence is the reaction, or nonreaction, of the public. I had been focusing on the man himself, and until Hardman pointed out the surrounding context, I had not identified what exactly was so disturbing about the footage. More disconcerting than the fact of the attack itself is the disjuncture between the stopping of the man’s heart and the play that continues unabated all around him; it is almost as if two different videos are superimposed. Despite the unconscious man lying quite literally at their feet, touching the bottoms of their chairs, the other gamblers keep playing.

1

INTERIOR DESIGN FOR INTERIOR STATES

Architecture, Ambience, and Affect

IT WAS NOT UNCOMMON, in my interviews with casino slot floor managers, to hear of machine gamblers so absorbed in play that they were oblivious to rising flood waters at their feet or smoke and fire alarms that blared at deafening levels. As the casino surveillance tapes showed, the activity can keep a group of gamblers unaware of their immediate surroundings, each other, and even a dying man at their feet. Mollie witnessed this extreme of unawareness one night as she searched the aisles of a casino for a machine to play and came upon a small crowd gathered around a man lying on the floor between a row of machines. “He’d had a heart attack and the paramedics were getting him with those shocker things,” she recalled. “Everyone walking by was looking at him, but I was watching the woman on the dollar slot machine. She was staring right at the screen and never missed a beat. She played right through it, she never stopped.” As the medical technicians applied the defibrillator to start a stopped heart beating, the gambler played the slot machine to keep a different kind of beat going, one that held her in a zone removed from the sights, sounds, and events transpiring around her. “You aren’t really there,” Mollie told us earlier of the zone, “you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”

Daniel, a retired telecommunications engineer, drew a direct link between the removal he feels from his environment while in the zone and design features of that very environment:

It starts while I’m on my way to the casino. I’m in the car driving, but in my mind I’m already inside, walking around to find my machine. In the parking lot, the feeling gets even stronger. By the time I get inside, I’m halfway into that zone. It has everything to do with the sounds, the lights, the atmosphere, walking through the aisles. Then when I’m finally sitting in front of the machine playing, it’s like I’m not even really there anymore—everything fades away.

In Daniel’s experience, the zone he enters is in some way a function of the same architectural and ambient world that “fades away” within it. Taking his insight as a point of departure, this chapter explores the relationship between the interior design of the casino and the interior state of the zone.

RELEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS

In their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour made a case for the cultural significance of Las Vegas and its built environment, arguing that the city was a laboratory for experimentation with refreshingly populist architectural forms.¹ Rejecting the elitist notion that architecture’s role was to instill social values and behavioral ideals, the authors embraced the city’s roadside structures as spontaneous monuments to popular vernacular and frontier automobile freedom. These structures, they proposed in their landmark work, departed from the utopian, totalizing pretensions of modernist architecture and expressed a democratically inclusive response to “common values” and “existing conditions.”

While modernist buildings sought to facilitate communitas through high ceilings, wide open space, bountiful lighting and windows, and a minimalist, uncluttered aesthetic, casinos’ low, immersive interiors, blurry spatial boundaries, and mazes of alcoves accommodated “crowds of anonymous individuals without explicit connection with each other.”² Like other popular communal spaces, casinos catered to the desires of everyday Americans to be “together and yet separate.” Venturi and his colleagues elaborated: “The combination of darkness and enclosure of the gambling room and its subspaces makes for privacy, protection, concentration and control. The intricate maze under the low ceiling never connects with the outside light or outside space. This disorients the occupant in space and time. One loses track of where one is and when it is.”³ Such spaces did not pretend to remedy the social ills of the “lonely crowd,” as sociologist David Riesman had despairingly designated the public at large, but instead responded to the escapist sensibilities of the American populace by satisfying them, without judgment.⁴

The publication of Learning from Las Vegas coincided with Nevada’s passage of the Corporate Gaming Act and the new wave of casino development that it ushered in. This wave gathered...