From gambling to the internet: how "addiction" is designed

Li Peishan

Is there a hidden link between the Internet industry, which is committed to "user stickiness", and the gambling industry, which is ruined through addiction?

In her book The Bait of Luck: Gambling Design and Out-of-Control Robots in Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Shure points out the addictive mechanics of machine gambling: gamblers try to stay forever in the "maze" of human-machine unity and forget their troubles, and behind this is the gambling industry's constant update of surveillance technology to make them rats in the "Skinner box", thinking they have control but are designed to be "addicted".

The Internet world is actually building on the "Skinner box". Internet bestsellers try to teach product managers how to design addictive products, use strong negative emotions as "triggers", and let users constantly chase fresh likes and replies through "variable rewards" to maximize their use time. The relationship between users and Internet apps, as Shure said, is often a serious "asymmetric conspiracy", gamblers and users pursue the "puzzle" of forgetting troubles, and the gambling industry and the Internet pursue to maximize money and use time benefits.

We voluntarily use these "addictive" apps, and there is also the freedom to abandon them at any time, just choosing the latter means that our lives will add quite a lot of difficulties, just look at the elderly who can't use mobile phones. Seemingly free, but unable to get out, this is the "dilemma" brought to us by the "slot machine" in our pockets (the language of The Economist magazine).

"Lost": the ultimate addiction device

Which gambling is the most addictive?

In "The Bait of Luck," Shure cites most gambling researchers in ordering the various forms of gambling by low to high intensity of addiction: lottery tickets are the lowest, followed by bin-go, mechanical slots, sporting event gambling, and then, dice, poker.

It seems that the oldest form of gambling is the most addictive. In the plains of Mesopotamia, six-sided dice were used around 3000 BC. The oldest card game, Leaf Play, was born in the Tang Dynasty of China. However, the most powerful forms of gambling – video slots and video poker – are incredibly young. The former was invented in Las Vegas in 1976, less than 50 years after the "casino" was born during the Great Depression, while the latter was born even later in 1979.

To describe this incredible latecomer, psychologist Robert Hunter likens video gambling machines to "thunderbolt cocaine," because in 1995, cocaine's history of addiction goes back a decade, while thunderbolt cocaine, which was just a year old, was more potent and addictive, and more harmful. The Wall Street Journal quoted his analogy that year, making "the thunderbolt cocaine of the gambling world" the loudest name for video gambling machines. Gambling researchers agree on the issue of the greatest harm to gambling addicts from machine gambling, calling it "electronic morphine" and "one of the most toxic types of gambling in human history," as well as "the ultimate addiction-raising device."

The researchers initially saw "fast" as the key to winning the video gambling machines, which did not need to "wait for the horse to finish, wait for the dealer to issue the cards, wait for the roulette wheel to stop", and "complete a round every three or four seconds". This is in line with behavioral psychology's explanation that video gambling provides the highest "event frequency" of all gambling activities. Shure cites psychologists who believe that video gambling machines are as "fast" to the brain as psychostimulants like cocaine, allowing the brain to cycle more quickly.

After Shure interviewed quite a few machine gambling addicts, she found that "fast" is just one of the elements that addiction requires, and the real key to their addiction lies in the existence of "zone".

"Winning money" is the key to the appeal of traditional gambling, and after a period of "high energy, high suspense", people have a great ecstasy at the moment of winning, which is largely due to the social feedback of other players.

For machine gambling addicts, "winning money" is no longer so important. For them, "confusion" has become the ultimate goal of their gambling. It's a state of mind that one of Shure's interviewers described as being "in the eye of a storm," with attention locked on the screen in front of them, as if sucked in by a magnet, while the rest of the world seemed to disappear.

In fact, in contrast to traditional gambling, machine gambling is not only so fast that it is difficult to interrupt, but also isolated from social interaction: people only have to face the screen. The mechanism of addiction it provides is not the ecstasy of social feedback plus, but the opposite, "a stable, absent-minded state" by which people can escape from all problems "inside and outside," including anxiety, depression, and boredom. Shure found that a considerable number of service workers who need to sacrifice considerable social energy at work use machine gambling to balance this imbalance for themselves. Hunter argues that machine gambling accelerates the process of "dissociative" in humans. He told Shure that the addiction experience described by his patients in Las Vegas was "very consistent," with people showing "numbness and avoidance" and not mentioning "competition" or "excitement," instead of wanting to "crawl into the machine and disappear into the screen."

It is true that some players have the hope of winning money when they first start playing video gambling machines, which lures them to keep playing gambling machines, but in the process, they discover that machines can lead them into the "puzzle". Shure describes the "lost world" as a "deadly clamp", and in the eyes of this isolated storm, they are no longer affected by the endless fluctuations and changes in life, but enter a fairly controlled illusion. Shure also found that many of the interviewees who were addicted to the "lost world" were those who were tired of the fiddling of the hand of fate: the masochists in unhealthy love relationships, the former honor students who worked hard all the way but suffered the death of their families and decided to give up everything...

The most important mechanism for bringing the player into the "lost world" is the "fast, accurate and consistent" of the machine. "The time when gamblers are most likely to get lost is when they can't tell the boundary between their actions and the operation of their machines." Shure writes that in her interviewees' narratives, "the maze" is described as a state of "man and machine merging into one," in which they feel completely in control of the machine, with a kind of communication resonance, as if playing music in perfect harmony with their instruments. As Shelly Turkel, a scholar of early video games, points out, the key-button behavior gets an instant, accurate, and consistent response on the screen, "addictive."

This "addictive" addiction mechanism, which Shure traces back to the earliest period of human psychological mechanisms, in infancy, borrowed the technical term "perfect contingency" in child development to describe the pursuit of machine gambling addicts.

Psychoanalyst D.W. Win-Nicott argues that the early stages of infancy are a state of near-fusion between the infant and the mother's body (and further expanding into the wider external environment) that requires a seamless response from the mother to the needs of the baby "immediately, accurately, and consistently." As the baby grows older, the mother's response is no longer perfect, and the baby begins to recognize the uncertain reality of the world from accepting this imperfectity, which is also a "key step" for the child to learn to establish an effective relationship with the outside world.

And the video gambling machine provides a cradle for people to "fall back". Shure cites sherry Turkle's research, which argues that modern gambling machines' "operating logic, capacitive tactile indication, and rhythm of interaction" gives them "computationalspecificity" that allows people to regain perfect contingency. The instantaneous, accurate, and consistent response of the fingers and screens reduces gambling activity to "basic mathematical, cognitive, and sensory elements", so slippery that the player forgets the boundaries between the machine and himself, and the "sense of self-suspension" is freed from uncertainty, just like early babies have "perfect contingency".

Self-made Skinner Box:

Complex systems upgraded by tracking and controlling

"In the past, slot machines were just simple devices pieced together by coin slots, levers and wheels, like a one-armed thief who stole money." Today's typical video slot machine, Shure writes, has become "a complex machine assembled with more than 1,200 individual parts on an electronic platform."

Behind every "complex machine" is a more complex system. The design of a gambling game requires the participation of nearly 300 people, "including script writers, visual designers, marketers, mathematicians, and mechanical, video, and software engineers," and "this does not include auxiliary system components such as touch screens, money detectors, and cabinets." Shure added. Modern slot machines are rarely produced independently by a single company," she said, citing a promotional material from The GlobalGamingExpo, a global event in the gambling industry, "which is a gaming experience created by the combination of different technologies like a symphony orchestra."

The complexity of this "system" is that it is constantly learning and upgrading through tracking and control. In fact, long before people began to panic about internet tech giants monitoring user behavior, the gambling industry has become a "frontier pioneer" in consumer monitoring technology. Many surveillance and marketing techniques were first used in casinos before they spread to the financial and consumer industries and even to national security agencies.

The origin of surveillance technology in the gambling industry came from the "Player Behavior Tracking System" of harrah's casino in Atlantic City in 1985. Inspired by the mileage and credit card points system that was emerging at the time, the system was originally a small paper card that staff would punch holes in whenever a member claimed the jackpot to accumulate credentials for other rewards, including catering. The gambling industry has found that these loyalty cards not only bring them a wealth of user data, but also increase user loyalty. They then chose to make the entire system electronic, and when the player played, he only needed to insert the magnetic stripe membership card into the slot machine, and the central data system could record the size of the bet, the win or loss, the frequency of keystrokes, when to rest and even what meals were purchased.

The system then expanded from a single casino to casinos scattered across convenience stores and pharmacies, centralizing player data across time and space in a single central database via networking.

By tracking player data, the gambling industry obtains "key information" from consumers, and through code, data, and personalized algorithms, it can "systematically compare with the corresponding collections of others" and conduct user portraits to help casinos promote precision marketing. The system is still evolving, trying to track players' real-time trajectories for more nuanced and deeper insight into how players behave in casinos. Shure cites Mark Andrejevic, a scholar of commercial surveillance and data acquisition systems, as "As the algorithms used to classify, target, and exclude consumers become more complex and difficult to understand, they become more invisible to marketers."

Through tracking technology, the gambling industry continues to provide gamblers with more intimate design of casino environments, machines and services. Gamblers have become "rat people" living in Skinner's box, and the gambling industry is still trying to further promote the development of more stealthy "control" techniques, through players taking the initiative to set up their own games - the logic behind it, as Shure said, is that instead of risking the "rat people" discovering Skinner's box, it is better to let them design the Skinner box themselves. Now, whether it's for those who like to win big and lose big, or those who like to cut meat with a blunt knife, they can choose their preferred way of playing on the machine.

Gambling game developers openly give gamblers the right to "control" the game themselves, but in fact, what they need is to gain insight into the most real "user needs" of gamblers, which is the key to maintaining the "lost world" that keeps gamblers tireless - the reward level helps players maintain a near-victorious potential feeling, at the same time, when the player is about to reach the "pain point" of losing to the machine and leaving the machine unhappy, the machine will always accurately anticipate through the algorithm and send them the reward of the "lucky ambassador" in time. Give out some free food and beverage coupons or show tickets, and suddenly, the "pain point" will not hurt, and the player will continue to play.

In this way, the feedback loop designed by gambling continues to approach the closed loop. Through tracking technology and control technology, with the help of algorithms, the gambling industry tries to make players "part of the formula", in the "continuous refinement of the recursive cycle", the players themselves in helping gambling machines, environments, service design to continue to learn and upgrade, making this complex system extremely refined and personalized, while having a "user first" experience, but also putting themselves in the self-tailored Skinner box.

Asymmetrical collusion: designing an "addictive" internet

In this design loop, the gambling industry and the gambler have become collaborators in a sense, but the relationship is strongly asymmetrical: the gambling industry tries to extract every cent of the value of the gambler, and the gambler only vainly pursues a fleeting "puzzle". Shure calls this "asymmetric collusion." The "puzzle" that drives gamblers is led by the gambling industry to the ultimate destination of nothing through various technical means, including tracking and control. And when they run out of money, machines will coldly stop providing them with "perfect contingency."

After the publication of The Bait of Luck, Shure was surprised to find that while the book was intended to expose the dark side of machine gambling, it also gained interest from Internet companies. She was invited to speak at an online education company that was interested in the "Lucky Ambassador" setting and thought it could be used to motivate students when "pain points" arrived. Internet people who invited her, including the famous Internet best-selling author, wrote "Addiction" by Nir Eyal.

"The whole world is becoming a giant Skinner box." In an interview with The Economist magazine, Shure noted that all the apps in people's phones, including banking and health care, are designed to lock users down in a cycle of incentives and rewards. "We carry slot machines in our pockets every day." The Economist sums it up so poignantly.

In fact, the internet, like video gambling machines, was designed to be the "Skinner box." The most successful Internet applications, Instagram and Facebook, are based on the theories of B.F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist and father of the Skinner box.

In 1997, B.J. Fogg founded the "Persuasion Technology Lab" at Stanford and taught courses for Stanford students. Based on Skinner, Fogg believed that psychology would contribute greatly to computer interaction techniques, so he tried to build a new field called "captology" (computers as a persuasive technique). This persuasive technique is similar to "nudge", according to Fogg's theory, when the task is easy (to meet the needs of "ability" ability) and the user has "motivation", people only need a well-set "trigger" to be directly affected by an Internet service. The most typical example we can use today is the ability of a video website to automatically play the next video.

Perhaps he did not expect that "Internet millionaire maker" has become his loudest name. Mike Krrieger took his course in 2006 and founded Instagram on the prototype of the program. In his 2007 class, he asked students to create a variety of apps for Face-book as assignments, and some of them became millionaires directly.

"The economic value of companies increasingly depends on the strength of the habits they create among users." Eyal, who was a student of his, tried to go one step further and directly make users "addicted.". Eyal argues that in order to achieve "addiction," it is necessary to use human negative emotions to design stronger "triggers" and use feedback loops to transform use into compulsive, addictive behaviors.

The "feedback loop" is the key to the addictive design of the gambling industry. Eyal also pointed out that the feedback loop must be set up with VariableRewards, which is similar to the "Lucky Ambassador" setup. In fact, he also cites research on gambling "maze" to illustrate the criticality of "variable rewards", "by introducing variability, we increase this effect, thus creating a state of concentration that puts brain regions associated with judgment and reason into a state of sleep, while activating areas associated with desire." The "pull-refresh" mechanism is a masterpiece of this variable reward, and people never know what they will get after a pull-down refresh, more interesting content, a few new likes or retweets, and former Google "design ethicist" Tristan Harris directly compared it to the slot machine's lever.

When powerful emotions trigger and use behaviors to unite and precipitate, such as refreshing microblogs once bored, a deep-rooted, subconscious habit is formed. This is why we always instinctively react to the corresponding Internet products when we have corresponding needs: when we are confused, we will open the search engine; when we are lonely and bored, we always open short video applications... As Evan Clark Williams, one of Twitter's founders, put it: "The internet is a huge machine designed to give people what they want. We often think that the internet allows people to do new things, but people just want to continue to do what they've been doing. ”

Obviously, the "collusion" between the Internet industry and users is also "asymmetrical", and users only want to enter the "puzzle" like gamblers, but what the Internet industry wants is to maximize the user's use time. Fogg is concerned about this, and his desire is to make the world a better place through behavioral design, but he suspects that some of his former students only want to make money, without considering the harm to the masses of this designed "addiction".

Perhaps the best example of this "asymmetry" and harm is the Internet gig economy.

Uber and Lyft algorithmically tailored a fair number of "variable rewards" for drivers, not only material but also non-material, not only providing quite a few "achievement badges" related to ratings, but also unlocking material rewards, including fuel discounts and free roadside assistance, when the driver's number of trips accumulates to a certain extent. This also creates a "puzzle" for drivers. In an article in the Financial Times, Uber drivers likened driving to a "hypnotic experience" in which they drove tirelessly for hours without knowing where they had gone, leaving only the sound of app instructions in their ears. However, these rewards have not changed, or tried to make drivers forget the fact that in most major U.S. cities, drivers are paid less than the local minimum wage.

Theoretically, this "addictive" design that is widespread on the internet does not violate the law or even morality, because we all use it voluntarily and can be discarded at any time to quit. But the problem is that we have actually lost the alternative option, and if we don't rely on the app in the phone, our daily life will not be interrupted, but it will become very difficult. This can only become a "dilemma".