Natasha Schüll on the Antisocial Lure of Gambling

Published Jan 28, 2025, 10:00 AM

As an anthropologist, Natasha Schüll spent more than a decade doing field work in Vegas casinos, especially among the slot machine addicts. She tells Michael Lewis why many of those who play slots actually hate to win. And she talks about how the digital overhaul of Vegas has made all forms of gambling, including sports gambling, more like slots.

For further reading: Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Schüll.

Push Kim.

Welcome back to Against the Rules everyone.

I'm Michael Lewis.

I'll admit I came into this season of the show with some conventional ideas about why people gamble. Of course, some people think they can make money, but also maybe they just want to impress people or hang out with their friends while at a game or a casino.

And maybe that's true.

For a subset of folks who like to bet, but that overlooks all the gamblers who play the slots.

We often think of gambling as being a way to get something for nothing. And what I learned in my extended research with particularly slot machine gamblers, which are the Golden Geese of the industry revenue wise, that they're really after getting nothing, not something for nothing.

That's Natasha Shole an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She was trained as an anthropologist and she did more than a decade of work in Vegas casinos, especially among the slot machine players.

They're after what they call a kind of machine zone where time and space and daily demands and worries fall away and they go into a kind of rhythmic flow of repetitive action that zones them away from the world.

Natasha's book, Addiction by Design is a fascinating look at everything from casino design to the digital overhaul of Las Vegas, and she makes a very compelling case the slot machines explain not just what's happened in Vegas, but in the world far beyond, including the world inside our smartphones. Natasha had a big effect on the way I think about gambling, and I wanted you to hear our conversation in full. How'd you get interested in this in the first place?

On my way out to Berkeley for college freshman year, I had a layover in Vegas, and greeting me for my two hours I spent there where it was these banks of machines right there at the exit, and I said, what an odd place this is. So when I became an anthropology major, I decided that would be an interesting topic to explore and it kind of went from there.

And at that point it's all in Vegas, all in Vegas.

Vegas I took as a sort of site or case study for looking at this turn in the market, both away from the sort of the Baccarah and the green felt tables toward slot machines, this more sort of childlike arcade, innocent seeming form of gambling as being the revenue lion for the city. But also looking at the disneyification of Las Vegas and the way they were appealing democratizing gambling to the mass market.

What's the history of this? When does gambling take this turn?

Gammin takes this turn right in line with certain developments in computer technology and video screen technology. In the past, slot machines would bring in maybe twenty percent less of revenue, and they pretty quickly, over about a decade a decade and a half, went to bringing in eighty to ninety percent of revenue. And this was all because of the technology changes and how they enabled the operators and the game designers to manipulate odds in far more precise ways, appealing to people who are sitting in front of them. So you could think of it as a sort of algorithmic turn. When is this though, late seventies, some of this technology is coming on the scenes, and it's sort of right in line with the personal computer developments. They start playing around with putting this technology into slot machines, moving away from the analog three reels with twenty two stops on each reel. That's really constraining in terms of what you can do with the machine like that. But once you've got so called virtual reels inside the machine, you can really really manipulate how a particular payout schedule can feel when you're interacting with it. So that really was the turn.

Curious.

If I'd have walked into a casino in Las Vegas in the nineteen sixties, how would it have looked different?

So people would have been dressed a lot more elegantly, and you might find slot machines standing around by the check encounter, maybe in hallways and kind of on the peripheries of the main gaming areas. Really to serve the wives and to serve people who were waiting. They typically didn't have chairs because you weren't really meant to spend a lot.

Of time at them, you said, for the wives.

Yeah, there is a long standing association in this country with women and these what we think of as these little tedious arcade light games. So we associate them not only with women, but with older women, right, the cute little old ladies going to Atlantic City. We associate them with kids and arcades sort of like the equivalent to knitting in jangling, and there is something knitting like about it when you talk about the kind of repetitive flow and zoning away from yourself that you get into. But it turns out that that flow doesn't select by gender if you don't have those stereotypes hanging around. And more and more, it's pretty equal the amount of men that play these machines versus women. And with sports betting and mobile betting, your ears seeing a complet reversal of that stereotype associating women with these little apps that you engage with.

So this is a cultural artfect.

This is we sort of channel women towards slot machines and men towards the real men's games in the middle of the casino.

Yeah. Even in the literature on problem gambling, there's a split between so called escape gambling and so called action gambling, and guess who the action gamblers are. There's also an interesting social history about how men sought out this kind of a character contest, especially in the fifties and sixties when life was relatively boring and you were probably a middle manager or a bureaucrat, and so you had to seek your thrills and your risks and your sort of confrontation with other men on the gambling floor, Whereas what women in those days and in the eighties and beyond articulated in their addiction and relationships with these slot machines was much more of getting away from people. You would often find that those in service positions, waitresses, nurses, accountants, wanted nothing more than a sort of relief or a respite from people. So it was kind of the opposite tendency. Turns out, though, that that's more of a cultural phenomenon than one that we can link to gender and a Really to prove that point, one could go and look at the case in Russia where you had young men in their twenties and they were the ones who played the exact same games with the same mathematical algorithms as the sixty year old women in the US back in the nineties.

Huh, So, explain to me how what the casino does to shape the experience and shape people's behavior around the slot machines.

I begin with the very bricks and mortar strategies of architecture and interior design. There are giant casino design manuals, and you know, if you go to Vegas yourself. I encourage you to look for this look down as you're walking, and you will be hard pressed to find a lot of right angles because right angles are a no no. Right angles put you up against a stocking point, into a position of a decision maker where you've suddenly got oh, now I must make a decision. It sort of forces you to decide, am I going left or right. You don't really want to put people in the stance of a decision maker, you know, engaging their prefrontal cortex, engaging their rationality and responsibility. You want to just curve them where you want them to go. And so there's you know, pages and pages in these casino manuals about how you have to gently curve people over into the gaming areas. And then once they're in the gaming areas, you don't want to have a lot of overhead space, as you might in a church or some big modernist arena. You really want to bring the ceilings down and make people feel that they're going into cozy little sanctuaries or caves. And this is the language that is in these manuals. It's very lyrical, almost about creating a physical surround and environment that makes you feel safe and alone, so that you can zone out into your own little world, because that is very lucrative for the establishment. They also do it with so called casino atmospherics, paying close attention to the acoustics, the way the sound bounces, not having too many bright lights or flashes that draws your attention away from the machine. You just want to keep it at the machine. One company designed all four hundred of the sounds on its slot machines to be in the thought to be soothing key of c to keep people. It's almost an ergonom if you think about it, it's an ergonomics of sensation that extends from the body to what's whole being. This is kind of counterintuitive to the way that we think about gambling, which is much more of a volatile, suspenseful risk operation. You know, that's what you see in all of the ads for casinos. But as I'm sure you know if you've walked into any casino, really the attitude is more one of a sort of expressionless face, a reclining posture, and maybe a slight tapping of the finger is about all the movement that you would see.

No, it's advertised and kind of thought of as a social experience. But when you walk through a casino, you're not seeing people interacting.

With each other.

No, it's really about being away from other people. And what really drove this home for me was when gamblers kept talking about how oddly disappointed and anxious they would become when they want a jackpot. And I really tried to understand, to talk me through this, and they said, well, suddenly the game stops playing, right, you can't keep going. Your flow is interrupted, loud music plays, people look over at you, And that really drug home for me, like it's anti social what they were doing. They were precisely trying to get away from themselves and away from the social world. So those things we see in the ads with groups of people crowding excitedly around a machine is really not the way that it plays out for a slot machine gambling.

So I don't want to interrupt the flow too much, but we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Natasha and I talk about how casino design translates onto that little slot machine in our pockets the smartphone, and back with Natasha Shull, author of Addiction by Design. As more gambling moves out of the casino and just into the phone. Is there anything about from any of this design that can be applied by the bookies, by the gambling companies to affect the behavior of someone who's gambling digitally.

Absolutely, all of the strategies that I just talked to you about, without even touching on math yet show up there. And these are strategies of removing friction the same way that you remove friction from a carpet. By removing a decision point, you're removing friction from the flow of the app. You're making it stickier. You're not increasing what they call in the gambling industry, time on device, but you're certainly increasing time on site. You know, these terms and these strategies so neatly carry over from the bricks and mortar casinos to anything on the website or online. So if you look closely at some of these apps that I've just mentioned, you will find all manner of slot machine strategy. You'll even find bars lining up, you'll find confetti, so so many things all geared to keep you in that zone.

So I sit down at the slot machine, We're going to see analogies too. When we look at just our.

Phone that keeps me going and gets me addicted.

Yeah. One of the big challenges that they were facing was that they were basically saying, ough, our market is dying out. What are we going to do, Like, we're basically going to go extinct because our gamblers are fifty to sixty year old women. How do we bring in the youth? Then they said, oh, it looks like, you know, young men are liking playing this online poker, so let's try to import demension of online poker into the casino. So you would see poker tables that, instead of having actual dealers, would have avatars, and while you were waiting to take your turn, because you know, if you're online playing twenty tables at once, which is often what online poker players do, you're not going to want to wait sitting there to take your turn. So they would give you a screen on which you could play other games, usually more profitable to the house than poker while you were waiting for your turn. So they were throwing all sorts of technology and schemes at the casino floor trying to draw in young men. Nothing really was working. They were also at the time fighting very much against mobile gambling. So if you just look back at the history of how the industry has positioned itself. They were absolutely lobbying, throwing all they had against the the coming tides of mobile or online gambling. Then around twenty seventeen they just capitulate it. They said, you know, we have to accept this is the direction that things are going in. So we're just going to get on the train. Let's get on the train. And now with so many states offering legal sports betting, you see with DraftKings, with Caesars, in so many cases, this embrace of mobile online gambling, and the truth is the young men like it, not just the young men, but you know it's also getting women over it to sports betting, which has never been the case.

Is that true?

Yeah, absolutely know that. I mean, just it's the same exact rhetoric as you saw with Robin hood app and others that so called democratized day trading by making in part by making it friendlier, you didn't have that experience of being a woman who had no cultural background. And in sports betting, you're very unlikely to want to walk into a sports book with the old guys in there and figure out what a prop bet is. But you can do that online it's very friendly. No one is watching your friends or maybe doing it. So yeah, we've seen not only has the gambling industry found a way to really entice men in and sort of bring them over into other areas of gambling, it's been a way to bring women into sports betting.

If I put you in charge of a sports betting app, knowing what you know about slots and women, what would you encourage them to do to encourage more women to become addicted to sports gambling.

Some of the things that a company might think it should do, which are just sort of laughable and absurd but might work a little bit, would be, you know, changing the tones, making a sort of I remember, I remember there was one case on the casino floor where they figured out that men exiting a sort of dirty review show were bothering young women who were playing and you know, giving a lot of their money to the casino. And the casino didn't like this, so they advertised directly to all those women in their thirties saying, we have created a women's only slot shelter for you. We have decorated it in lavender, we have special little drink cups for you. Come be pampered like you're in a spa. It was sort of like a spa slash slot shelter, which was just so interesting gender wise, and it did actually increase their revenue. So the aesthetics do count. And if you make it less like all black with white and these sort of macho truck like symbols and sort of, you know, do a little aby testing, throw in some lavender, see what comes up.

So don't you all run out to that lavender slot shelter just yet.

We'll be right back.

I'm back with NYU's Natasha shol Back. When we recorded this interview, I was still planning the previous episode in this feed, the one where my son Walker is set up with a sports betting account as a kind of experiment.

I wanted to get Natasha's advice on all this.

So his neuroscience teacher is going to try to explain to him what's going on in his brain as he gets into this. Do you think it's a bad idea to introduce my seventeen year old to sports gambling?

So I don't know how that it's that bad of an idea, because that suggests that there's something super unique about this that this is sort of like some intense heroin like thing that could turn you for life, when in fact, and this is a point I always like to make, and those who would like to use my voice to sort of speak against the gambling industry don't always like it when I do this. And this is to observe that these gambling apps are part of a wider ecology that extend not only to candy crush, but also to apps for regulating your diabetes management or even your banking. It is so around us, and the idea that your seventeen year old boy would not have already encountered in spades this kind of stuff floating around in social media is just not realistic, right, So this is just going to be a sort of focused case for him of something that I think he's already very familiar with. What I would recommend is trying to have the neuroscientist riding alongside in his mind as a kind of layer of awareness. So he's almost doing like anthropology of himself auto ethnography, right, And I think that that kind of awareness isn't entirely protective, but in general it's a great way of going through the world, sort of watching how am I reacting to certain things. How are they manipulating me? That's a good attitude to have. I think anything that came in front of you, as it's going to come in front of your son. You can sort of have a rubric for performing an audit of how odious or dangerous it is. And so my rubric has four things on it, and one of them is the easy and constant access. So we know, we know for a while in the bricks and mortar landscape that if you live fifty miles or closer to a casino, you are probably that's fifty percent more likely to develop a problem. So I like to think about the mobile phone and sports betting that is five inches right, So it's just constantly there. The portal is open, it's inviting you, it's there. So you've got this easy and constant access, no friction. Right. There's also a removal of the social component. It's very solitary. That seems to be something which is fertile ground for these kind of machine zones that one could get caught in and continue to seek out in a kind of addictive way. And you might be thinking, but really does it really remove the social component? And we're talking about sports betting, there's so many other people. There's this whole culture to it, and there is like athletes on the field. The truth is, when you were doing this betting, it is you and your phone, just like when you're doing online dating. There's an odd way in which removes the other people and turns them into a game. And you know, there's a lawsuit going on right now against Hinge that says this is going on right So instead of going out and having a date, you end up in your bedroom swiping left and right, and so this is kind of the equivalent. You're not going on an outing with the buddies to this race track. You are with your phone constantly clicking away. It's very solitary and you can go your own speed. Another saying is that there is no natural end to the things that seem to grip us most tightly in this click economy. You might say, oh, but in sports there is. It's built in because the game ends, the race ends, right. That used to be the case. Addiction researchers in gambling used to talk about, oh, well, sports isn't so bad because the event frequency is one, whereas the event frequency for a slot machine could be twelve hundred hands an hour. You can only run one horse race an hour. This is no longer the case when you're bringing in apps and technology, because if you've still got that energy for doing this kind of betting, it seamlessly transfers over to you know, you could find your people, say they find themselves betting on basketball and Belgium or ping pong and China. You know, time zones don't even matter anymore. You're not even constricted by space or time, so you can just keep flowing and think about it. There is no natural end, so it's the cont it's the availability of continuity, another sort of removal of friction. And then you know, the final thing is just to go back to our friend B. F. Skinner, and perhaps your son has already had that high school class about behaviorist science. A Skinner box is a setup usually with levers or little lights and whatever ammal is in there is going to be like pecking to see what comes next. And he found, after experimenting with a vast array of different sort of output schemes, different algorithms, you could say that the one that's going to keep you pecking, ignoring your water and ignoring your friends is the one where you never know how much is coming out, and you never know when. If you know that you peck ten times and you get your pellet, you'll peck ten times, you'll get your pellet, you'll go playing with your friends. Not so if you don't know. There's something about that uncertainty. And what the slot machine and what so many of these apps that we've been talking about do is they're constantly sort of opening that interval of uncertainty, and then you can reveal it and then you can open it again. So it's open closed, open closed, and it's very very fast, so it sort of exceeds the capacity of the brain. Maybe the neuroscientist will talk about this to your son to compute and process what is going on, and you really just get caught in this flow.

You know what's interesting about that is I'm just thinking, maybe this is a stupid thought. But with slot machines, the user is experiencing it as uncertainty, but the casino is totally certain that if you sit there long enough, you're going to lose all your money. It's calibrated that way, and you just can't perceive the deep certainty that's there.

This is sort of the argument that I'm making about why it is predatory is because you've got this giant, well financed corporate apparatus that can use numbers in a way both algorithmically and in terms of its overall revenue. They know absolutely, certainly, down to decimal points, what they're going to get, and they are preying on the gambler's total uncertainty about what they're going to get. So I call it asymmetric collusion. You know, they both want the playing to be happening, but for utterly different reasons. The gambler wants to zone out and the corporation wants its revenue.

The sports book, I suppose, might be designed in a way that's similar to the slot machine that if you play enough with it, you're going to lose m hm, although I don't think they actually are. I mean, a sharp player can come in and beat the book, then in a way, a sharp player can't come in and beat the slot, but the sports themselves are genuinely uncertain. Yes, So this thing that you said that makes it so naturally addictive is hardwired into the product in a way it's not in most casino games.

Well. Interestingly, the slot machines that are most high erring today. And this is maybe since the two thousands are called multi line slot machine. And when I say multiline, I mean like five hundred lines. And so instead of betting on one row of symbols across and then you win or you lose, then they fold it in three, they added to diagonals to make five. And then when you're talking about physical reels, they maxed out. Once video technology came along and virtual reels and computers, they're able to allow you on a computer screen to bet sideways diagonal scattershots, so you don't even know where the things are lining up. It's just dots and you can't really even tell what's going on. And then, if you think about it, each each bet is a moment of learning and reinforcement in the behaviorist sense. So if you're betting hundreds of times instead of just once on the outcome of the game, each one of those bets is yet another moment of sort of reinforcing the behavior or sort of pulling them into it. So I think it's pretty clear why it would be more addictive in the online interface. There have been calls to ban multi line slot machines, because it seems that the higher the number of lines you can bet on, it's almost like diversifying your portfolio. You put one hundred pennies on the machine, and you win forty back, then you put fifty in and maybe you win sixty. Then you put the sixty in, then you win twenty, and you're just going along so fast, and most of the time you're not actually winning. You're losing, but you're taking more time to lose, and along the way you feel like you're sort of winning all along. And this has been the real formula of giving people more time on device so's to take more of their money during that time. That's the formula of the gambling industry. And you can see it a little bit. You can draw that parallel to the in game betting. You're keeping someone continually engaged and hooked in to the flow of the game, so it makes a lot of sense that when the game comes to an end, they're going to want to keep playing it.

Thanks so much to Natasha Schul for a fascinating conversation, and check out our book Addiction by Design. Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. By the way, I'm not done with you guys yet. Next week, I speak with doctor Lorie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab here at Pushkin, about how the sports betting apps take advantage of the teenage male brain.

But I think adolescent brains in general are prone to risk taking and prone to really seeking out belonging in whatever form it's sort of presented, and so I feel like these cues to belonging are especially salient to young boys too.

Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia gene Kott, Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariela Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguier. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, And if you'd like to listen to ad free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin, dot fm, slash plus, or on our Apple show page.

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