Casinos like to say that roughly 2% of players become addicted. What they fail to mention is that approximately half of all their revenue comes from these 2%. A more telling statistic is that approximately 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue [1]. The numbers are quite similar for games with IAP [2].
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
> This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.
You could make this exact same argument for liquor sales.
The top 10% of regular drinkers have 10 drinks a day. If they reduced their consumption to that of the next decile, total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent.[1]
We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
Regarding the 2%, you're assuming that the data from Bwin - an Internet gambling site - is representative of the casino industry as a whole.
And that 10% account for 90% of revenue doesn't mean that those 10% are addicted. There's obviously a long tail of people that only enter a casino once a year or less, which will obviously contribute little to its revenue. That doesn't mean semi-regular players must be addicted.
I don't doubt that there are addicted people, but I don't agree that the data you mention indicates a large problem.
> it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.
It's quite a complex issue. How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom? How do they discern lawful play from illegal play? Treatment, prevention and awareness is the only practical solution.
Your supposition is that the casino industry adheres somewhat to the Pareto principal. This is neither surprising nor dispositive of its dependence on addiction, a term that you neither define nor measure convincingly here.
I agree on the purpose of casinos, but I fail to see how it's evil to give people what they want and what they would seek out and do on the black market anyway if it wasn't legal. Just because they're legal doesn't mean that we can't focus on treatment or prevention. Keeping casinos legal removes a lot of the other problems that illegal gambling brings. Basically, by keeping gambling legal the damage that gambling does can be minimized and generally limited to the gambler. Once you make it illegal and bring in the black market, while gambling itself is a victimless crime, the industry that now supports it illegally is not. Same as any other industry that deals with highly addictive things that people have immense desire for.
You seem to assume that because people spend a hell of a lot of money they are necessarily addicted. This isn't so, a lot of these people just have a lot of money (e.g many of the whales that spend a lot on IAP for free-to-play games are rich saudis).
> 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue.
You're suggesting that this is unusual but it's just the Pareto Principle, which applies to... pretty much every set of data ever, and serves as no evidence for anything.
I'm not against what you are saying, but you need to find a better argument than this.
> "I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer," she explained. "He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center." ... Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots.
The person quoted above is in need of counseling and support. Instead, she's getting a drip-feed of low-cost morphine to mask her loss, like a debtor going from pay-day loan to pay-day loan to stay solvent.
Academically, we seem to have strong evidence linking stress to reduced impulse control. I'm no expert in the matter, but surveys such as this [1] seem convincing. Despite this, the popular conversation seems to stay away from root causes and instead ends at the label 'addict.'
I wonder what percentage slot machine and clash of clans-styled mobile gaming revenue is due to this kind of coping-related addiction. downandout's comment [2] suggests it is probably quite high.
This segment about people coping with loss using slot machines was really eye-opening. And actually, it made me think better about this industry than before. Of course, using slot machines for that is not as healthy as going through counseling, but it seems a lot better than almost all other alternatives. And the players themselves seem to have a pretty good understanding of the mechanic: they're not hoping to win, they're not tricked, they trade their money for the "flow", and are open about it.
First employee, pseudo-founder of Doubledown Casino here (now the highest grossing game on the iPad). The interesting thing is that we were absolute crap at the actual gamification stuff. It was simply the slots machine mechanic which drew people in. I (and another person) kept trying to push the principles of gamification, the psychological tricks, etc which had worked so well for the likes of Zynga (not entirely proud of that, of course), but were for the most part utterly ignored by the other couple of guys who didn't understand their value. So, what I find interesting here is that even without the gamification bells and whistles, the simple mechanic of a poorly skinned, very buggy slots game (which is what we had in the begging) was enough to skyrocket us (along with ridiculously cheap facebook ads back in the wild west days of the platform.)
Given that you are aware that you are basically exploiting the digital equivalent of an highly addictive substance that does lead to ruined lives/families/careers, does this weigh on your mind, and if not, why not? [1]
[1] Casino licenses in most countries are tied to paying for treatment of people with gambling addiction/compulsions - similar to how many countries approach decriminalisation of addictive substances. I assume you do not fund any such programs - is that correct?
Just double checked because I didn't believe what you said about the highest grossing game. The top grossing games on iPad varies by market but is one of Clash of Clans, Game of War: Fire Age, or Candy Crush Saga, except in Japan where it's Puzzles & Dragons. Doubledown Casino is high up there but it isn't the highest grossing game on the iPad. Clash of Clans and GoW:FA are making a multiplicative factor more than Doubledown Casino. I believe you about the slot machine mechanic though.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying; do you mean that people were literally looking for an iPad version of a slot machine, and you just filled that void?
There's no way I'm the only one wary of the moral implications of trying to addict your users without their knowledge and for a profit. It just seems like the most self-centered possible way of using your skills when you don't care at all whether it's going to destroy lives as long as it brings their cash to your (and/or your investors') bank account.
I have no problem with helping people understand how to use their brain chemistry to help themselves do things they want to do. This, however, just feels so bad for the human race as a whole.
I guess what I'm saying is that it makes me sad that this happens and that people are okay with doing it.
>Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!” [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/]
Moral qualms will be crushed by competitive dynamics. I'm pretty afraid of this addiction arms race, especially with the coming rise of VR.
The moral problem may be when the value provided does not match the cost (in this case to the slot user). Just because a slot machine is able to rewire some neural circuitry in the user so that he thinks the value matched the cost...doesn't mean it actually does.
It's as immoral as selling a car for 10x an appropriate price, by not voluntarily revealing a critical flaw. Both involve "cheating" someone based off a sort of information/computation asymmetry.
Addicting someone's brain in way that creates value (e.g. getting them to exercise) is obviously worth a significant cost - and I'm totally ok with someone making a profit on that!
It's not that it's bad for the human race. Betting has been going on since "I bet I can throw this rock further than you". It's probably older than prostitution. Much like alcohol, there's this "yeah we can ban it, but people will still do it, so we might as well collect money and regulate them, and try to treat the addicted"
It's the same argument when it comes to legalizing cannabis -- people are just going to smoke it, no matter your personal opinion on whether or not it's a good idea. The state is better off regulating for safety, legitimizing the business, and collecting taxes to offset the perceived social harm.
This is my field of study. Sometimes It's difficult to draw the line between well-designed and addictive. My personal deal breaker is when play becomes a sinkhole for money.
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."
If you're interested, I highly recommend N. Schüll's Addiction by Design.
There is danger in creating artificial scarcity by cutting off gamblers after a threshold. It will likely result in an increase in desire and addiction. Consider Candy Crush, a game where players are cut off access to the game after a certain amount of plays. This has the result of increasing desire, habit formation, and decreasing burnout.
If there is a solution, I think it lies in educating the population and making access as inconvenient as possible.
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."
I wonder why mobile app stores haven't implemented such a mechanism.
The idea that purposefully creating a psychological dependence on something as unproductive as gambling is a good thing boggles the mind. I'm glad that my response is that of disgust rather than "admiration" or "envy" for these businesses.
I'm really just replying to this so that I can see my karma score go up and I can get a little endorphin hit, really.
But in all seriousness, it seems that the things that are most destructive are those things that have brains have been trained to drip feel-good chemicals - we distill the essence of that thing and make it easy and cheap to reproduce. Your brain likes it when you eat food because it keeps you alive? Well, it looks like a lot of that is coming from sugar/carbs. How about we put an absurd amount of sugar in water and call it "soda," adding a little caffeine for good measure, and sell it for $1/bottle? Your body reacts pleasantly (in the short-term) to fats? Here's a hamburger. Your body will eventually regret it, and overall the outcome will be negative, but the initial spike will be enough that you either never put the two together, or can't resist it.
Evolution has trained you to enjoy reproducing? Well really you just enjoy the act of sex. And actually not even sex per se, it looks like we can stimulate you with a few visuals and something touching you... porn becomes one of the biggest industries that exist.
Drugs are a much more literal version of that, distilling what makes your brain act certain ways in a literal sense. But in my mind whether or not something is a "drug" isn't binary; it's a continuum. I'd like to see someone try to take Diet Coke away from my cousin and then convince me it's not a drug.
So is candy crush an addiction? For some people, absolutely. They've moved themselves along that continuum.
The scary thing is if you have a consumer product, trying to make someone become addicted is pretty much the definition of what you do. Cigarettes are good business; would you start a cigarette company? Soda is good business, would you start a soda company? Brownies are good business, would you start a brownie company?
It seems to me that our minds haven't yet adapted to the reality that now the entire world of information is in our pockets, not to mention buzzing and sending us notifications. It's certainly no mystery why people are always so buried in their phones. It really concerns me personally, enough that I turn off all notifications and don't even allow myself to download certain apps, because I know I'd use them. My hosts file is full of sites that are addictive.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's something I think about a lot as the founder of a consumer product. I would love people to feel like they have to come back and use my site every day. I'm trying to create that feeling. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know.
Perhaps this is simplistic, but one question you might ask yourself is whether you're offering something of value or exploiting a psychological weaknesses inherent to humans.
>Evolution has trained you to enjoy reproducing? Well really you just enjoy the act of sex. And actually not even sex per se, it looks like we can stimulate you with a few visuals and something touching you... porn becomes one of the biggest industries that exist.
And then get flattened because it turns out that you can get the same stuff for free.
But I digress. Porn isn't a replacement for sex, it is just easier.
Condoms do allow you to have sex "pointlessly", ie. with no resulting children, does that make condom manufactures "wrong" somehow? They distilled sex down to a better version (sex without chance of kids or STDs), but it is unnatural, right?
However if condoms are okay, what puts the limit on porn? How is porn materially different from sex without kids? Aren't they just really points on a continuum?
I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point might be made clearer.
If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service.
I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.
When you look at the bad bits of wikipedia you see people who are hooked into sub-optimal feedback mechanisms.
There used to be a problem with "Vandal Patrol" - people would use tools to auto-revert edits and apply templates. Some of those people saw more reverts as being better, and would very rapidly revert and template, often catching good faith edits and users. (As far as I know that got mostly sorted out.)
When people ran for admin there was sometimes a tendency to just count number of edits, rather than look at the quality of edits.
But still, Wikipedia didn't want that, and they didn't deliberately set out to addict people in order to extract as much money as possible from them.
If you're concerned about the way the tech industry engineers addiction by exploiting bugs in our brains, check out Time Well Spent - http://TimeWellSpent.io
It's an (early-on) movement exploring ways to build products that respect our time and focus. (Watch the video for a good overview).
It absolutely should be. Also, it would be quite easy to help people self-regulate by creating a blacklist of credit card numbers which one could sign oneself up on and which all online casinos would have to use.
If you haven't seen the Southpark episode "Freemium isn't Free" you really should...hits the nail on the head on the addictive nature of free to play mobile games.
The casinos are not raking in the money from slots and table games like they were in decades prior. What used to be free or loss leaders for the casinos (rooms, buffets, shows, nightclubs, even the pools) are now massive revenue generators for the resorts.
Aside from that, casinos are also experimenting with games of skill (aside from poker) as possible ways to attract players now.
I hope Ellen Degeneres & Duck Dynasty sleep tight with their images being used to brand these things. Seems one of the more dubious licensing agreements you could make.
A lot of people in this thread have moral qualms with slot machines. I know I did. However, I have since been heavily involved in the industry (not of my choosing), and have been able to better understand it. The slot industry is not the epitome of evil.
1) Slots can be fun- Most people think slots are bad because they are "addicting". They conclude that these machines are addicting in large part because they themselves can't wrap their heads why ANYONE would spend so much money on a game without some serious mental disorder. But that completely ignores the actual voices of the users (who slot designers actually talk to). Players actually enjoy the thrills of winning AND losing. We have to come to grips that what others consider fun is sometimes beyond our realm of imagination. And just because we don't understand the thrill of their experience, doesn't mean the machine is tricking them. I don't see most people confused when their 75 year old grandmother doesn't like Call of Duty.
2) Spending lots of money on slots isn't necessarily a symptom of addiction- I have met so many people (Completely normal, wealthy people) who have a limit of spending $30/day on slots in their spare time. That is, they spend around 10k/year on slots. Anyone seeing 10k/year would think that this person was addicted, but they don't measure his/her background. Slot players tend to be older, they tend to spend on little else (they don't go out to bars!), tend to have a good amount of free time, and tend to have a good bit of savings. They - of all people- should be allowed to play slots if they so choose to. Obviously the money society spends on slots would be better used to feed some starving child or build some fancy new lifesaving technology. But that's more of a critique of capitalism, not just slots.
3) Casinos don't target gambling addicts- Of course slot makers do basic A/B testing of their games. But it's not like casinos put ads outside of Gambling Addicts Anonymous meetings. They target people in general, and gambling addicts will always find a way too them. When do we start placing the responsibility on the end user?
4) Is the rate of problem gamblers (gamblers who spend a lot of money and can't) who use slot machines higher than the rate of alcoholics? Shopping addicts? Drug addicts? Do you suggest banning alcohol because some people can't handle it?
5) Casinos and slots are heavily regulated by what they can and cannot do. Moreover, taxes on casinos do go to fund problem gambling help, schools, and a lot of great other things.
In the end, unless you actually take an effort to learn how to enjoy slots, you won't understand why people like it. And because of that, you will just vilify the industry. Eerily similar to the war on drugs.
Thanks for the perspective. I read Addiction by Design a year ago or so and had formed quite a negative opinion of all slot machines. You make some good points though, and caused me to lean back towards neutral on the question of whether the world would be better off with or without slots. If I ever visit Vegas some time I'll have the opportunity to form a stronger judgement I think, but I'll hold off until then.
[+] [-] downandout|11 years ago|reply
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046261045791233...
[2] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-12-monetizing-...
[+] [-] wdr1|11 years ago|reply
You could make this exact same argument for liquor sales.
The top 10% of regular drinkers have 10 drinks a day. If they reduced their consumption to that of the next decile, total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent.[1]
We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
[1] http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/10/05/the-alcohol-...
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
And that 10% account for 90% of revenue doesn't mean that those 10% are addicted. There's obviously a long tail of people that only enter a casino once a year or less, which will obviously contribute little to its revenue. That doesn't mean semi-regular players must be addicted.
I don't doubt that there are addicted people, but I don't agree that the data you mention indicates a large problem.
[+] [-] Red_Tarsius|11 years ago|reply
It's quite a complex issue. How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom? How do they discern lawful play from illegal play? Treatment, prevention and awareness is the only practical solution.
[+] [-] throwaway43|11 years ago|reply
They even use casino terminology , bucketing their users into minnows , whales and what not.
For free to play games most users spend almost nothing. But there are these users that spends thousands of dollars on the game as if it were nothing.
[+] [-] CPLX|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] civilian|11 years ago|reply
If gambling was outlawed, gamblers & casino owners would find other ways. A fool and his money.
(Also if gambling was outlawed, where the fuck would we get VC money from?)
[+] [-] tomjen3|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learnstats2|11 years ago|reply
You're suggesting that this is unusual but it's just the Pareto Principle, which applies to... pretty much every set of data ever, and serves as no evidence for anything.
I'm not against what you are saying, but you need to find a better argument than this.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] woah|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jscottmiller|11 years ago|reply
> "I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer," she explained. "He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center." ... Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots.
The person quoted above is in need of counseling and support. Instead, she's getting a drip-feed of low-cost morphine to mask her loss, like a debtor going from pay-day loan to pay-day loan to stay solvent.
Academically, we seem to have strong evidence linking stress to reduced impulse control. I'm no expert in the matter, but surveys such as this [1] seem convincing. Despite this, the popular conversation seems to stay away from root causes and instead ends at the label 'addict.'
I wonder what percentage slot machine and clash of clans-styled mobile gaming revenue is due to this kind of coping-related addiction. downandout's comment [2] suggests it is probably quite high.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732004/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557208
[+] [-] golergka|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n72|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanjshaw|11 years ago|reply
[1] Casino licenses in most countries are tied to paying for treatment of people with gambling addiction/compulsions - similar to how many countries approach decriminalisation of addictive substances. I assume you do not fund any such programs - is that correct?
[+] [-] jrpt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macrael|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austenallred|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying; do you mean that people were literally looking for an iPad version of a slot machine, and you just filled that void?
[+] [-] andrewstuart2|11 years ago|reply
I have no problem with helping people understand how to use their brain chemistry to help themselves do things they want to do. This, however, just feels so bad for the human race as a whole.
I guess what I'm saying is that it makes me sad that this happens and that people are okay with doing it.
[+] [-] Moshe_Silnorin|11 years ago|reply
>Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!” [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/]
Moral qualms will be crushed by competitive dynamics. I'm pretty afraid of this addiction arms race, especially with the coming rise of VR.
[+] [-] avivo|11 years ago|reply
It's as immoral as selling a car for 10x an appropriate price, by not voluntarily revealing a critical flaw. Both involve "cheating" someone based off a sort of information/computation asymmetry.
Addicting someone's brain in way that creates value (e.g. getting them to exercise) is obviously worth a significant cost - and I'm totally ok with someone making a profit on that!
[+] [-] killface|11 years ago|reply
It's the same argument when it comes to legalizing cannabis -- people are just going to smoke it, no matter your personal opinion on whether or not it's a good idea. The state is better off regulating for safety, legitimizing the business, and collecting taxes to offset the perceived social harm.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Red_Tarsius|11 years ago|reply
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."
If you're interested, I highly recommend N. Schüll's Addiction by Design.
[+] [-] amsilprotag|11 years ago|reply
If there is a solution, I think it lies in educating the population and making access as inconvenient as possible.
[+] [-] panic|11 years ago|reply
I wonder why mobile app stores haven't implemented such a mechanism.
[+] [-] ksk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austenallred|11 years ago|reply
But in all seriousness, it seems that the things that are most destructive are those things that have brains have been trained to drip feel-good chemicals - we distill the essence of that thing and make it easy and cheap to reproduce. Your brain likes it when you eat food because it keeps you alive? Well, it looks like a lot of that is coming from sugar/carbs. How about we put an absurd amount of sugar in water and call it "soda," adding a little caffeine for good measure, and sell it for $1/bottle? Your body reacts pleasantly (in the short-term) to fats? Here's a hamburger. Your body will eventually regret it, and overall the outcome will be negative, but the initial spike will be enough that you either never put the two together, or can't resist it.
Evolution has trained you to enjoy reproducing? Well really you just enjoy the act of sex. And actually not even sex per se, it looks like we can stimulate you with a few visuals and something touching you... porn becomes one of the biggest industries that exist.
Drugs are a much more literal version of that, distilling what makes your brain act certain ways in a literal sense. But in my mind whether or not something is a "drug" isn't binary; it's a continuum. I'd like to see someone try to take Diet Coke away from my cousin and then convince me it's not a drug.
So is candy crush an addiction? For some people, absolutely. They've moved themselves along that continuum.
The scary thing is if you have a consumer product, trying to make someone become addicted is pretty much the definition of what you do. Cigarettes are good business; would you start a cigarette company? Soda is good business, would you start a soda company? Brownies are good business, would you start a brownie company?
It seems to me that our minds haven't yet adapted to the reality that now the entire world of information is in our pockets, not to mention buzzing and sending us notifications. It's certainly no mystery why people are always so buried in their phones. It really concerns me personally, enough that I turn off all notifications and don't even allow myself to download certain apps, because I know I'd use them. My hosts file is full of sites that are addictive.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's something I think about a lot as the founder of a consumer product. I would love people to feel like they have to come back and use my site every day. I'm trying to create that feeling. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know.
[+] [-] n72|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|11 years ago|reply
And then get flattened because it turns out that you can get the same stuff for free.
But I digress. Porn isn't a replacement for sex, it is just easier. Condoms do allow you to have sex "pointlessly", ie. with no resulting children, does that make condom manufactures "wrong" somehow? They distilled sex down to a better version (sex without chance of kids or STDs), but it is unnatural, right?
However if condoms are okay, what puts the limit on porn? How is porn materially different from sex without kids? Aren't they just really points on a continuum?
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
"The "zone" is flow through a lens darkly: hyperfocused, neurotransmitters abuzz, but directed toward a numbness with no goal in particular."
"I don’t have to think. And I know I can’t win."
"You know how you get people younger to gamble? Hand them a fucking telephone."
"A more exact replica of a slot may be Tinder. The mechanics of the dating app mirror the experience of playing slots."
"It’s okay to addict people as long as your business model doesn’t depend on it."
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|11 years ago|reply
Different manifestations of the same sort of thing, if you shift your perspective just a bit and look at how people use them.
[+] [-] rawnlq|11 years ago|reply
If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service.
I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
There used to be a problem with "Vandal Patrol" - people would use tools to auto-revert edits and apply templates. Some of those people saw more reverts as being better, and would very rapidly revert and template, often catching good faith edits and users. (As far as I know that got mostly sorted out.)
When people ran for admin there was sometimes a tendency to just count number of edits, rather than look at the quality of edits.
But still, Wikipedia didn't want that, and they didn't deliberately set out to addict people in order to extract as much money as possible from them.
[+] [-] eropple|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkincaid|11 years ago|reply
It's an (early-on) movement exploring ways to build products that respect our time and focus. (Watch the video for a good overview).
[+] [-] modeless|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n72|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewhizkid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carsongross|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|11 years ago|reply
The casinos are not raking in the money from slots and table games like they were in decades prior. What used to be free or loss leaders for the casinos (rooms, buffets, shows, nightclubs, even the pools) are now massive revenue generators for the resorts.
Aside from that, casinos are also experimenting with games of skill (aside from poker) as possible ways to attract players now.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/04/24/402010841/the-f...
[+] [-] rhizome|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lips|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interesting_att|11 years ago|reply
1) Slots can be fun- Most people think slots are bad because they are "addicting". They conclude that these machines are addicting in large part because they themselves can't wrap their heads why ANYONE would spend so much money on a game without some serious mental disorder. But that completely ignores the actual voices of the users (who slot designers actually talk to). Players actually enjoy the thrills of winning AND losing. We have to come to grips that what others consider fun is sometimes beyond our realm of imagination. And just because we don't understand the thrill of their experience, doesn't mean the machine is tricking them. I don't see most people confused when their 75 year old grandmother doesn't like Call of Duty.
2) Spending lots of money on slots isn't necessarily a symptom of addiction- I have met so many people (Completely normal, wealthy people) who have a limit of spending $30/day on slots in their spare time. That is, they spend around 10k/year on slots. Anyone seeing 10k/year would think that this person was addicted, but they don't measure his/her background. Slot players tend to be older, they tend to spend on little else (they don't go out to bars!), tend to have a good amount of free time, and tend to have a good bit of savings. They - of all people- should be allowed to play slots if they so choose to. Obviously the money society spends on slots would be better used to feed some starving child or build some fancy new lifesaving technology. But that's more of a critique of capitalism, not just slots.
3) Casinos don't target gambling addicts- Of course slot makers do basic A/B testing of their games. But it's not like casinos put ads outside of Gambling Addicts Anonymous meetings. They target people in general, and gambling addicts will always find a way too them. When do we start placing the responsibility on the end user?
4) Is the rate of problem gamblers (gamblers who spend a lot of money and can't) who use slot machines higher than the rate of alcoholics? Shopping addicts? Drug addicts? Do you suggest banning alcohol because some people can't handle it?
5) Casinos and slots are heavily regulated by what they can and cannot do. Moreover, taxes on casinos do go to fund problem gambling help, schools, and a lot of great other things.
In the end, unless you actually take an effort to learn how to enjoy slots, you won't understand why people like it. And because of that, you will just vilify the industry. Eerily similar to the war on drugs.
[+] [-] savanaly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Plough_Jogger|11 years ago|reply