“Until the mid-1980s, green-felt table games such as blackjack and craps dominated casino floors while slot machines huddled on the sidelines, serving to occupy the female companions of ‘real’ gamblers,” writes Natasha Dow Schull in her 2014 Addiction By Design. Slot machines were “often placed along hallways or near elevators and reservation desks, rarely with stools or chairs in front of them and thus “occupied transitional spaces rather than gambling destinations.”

Since the late 1990s, that has changed: Slot machines have “moved into key positions on the casino floor and were generating twice as much revenue as all ‘live games’ put together.” They are the “cash cows” and the “work horses” of the “gaming” industry. Schull writes, “In 1996 there were 500,000 devices in the United States; in 2008 the count had reached nearly 870,000—not including an underground market of unauthorized machines in bars and taverns, truck stops, bowling alleys, and restaurants across the country, nor devices engineered to circumvent restrictions by fitting state definitions for bingo, amusement machines, or sweepstakes games.” In 2003, over 85% of the gambling industry’s revenues came from slot machines.

Schull highlights several factors that contributed to the triumph of the one-armed bandit: “Relatively unburdened by the taint of vice as a result of their association with arcade gaming, and the elderly, they played a key role in the spread of commercialized gambling in the 1980s and ’90s, as recession-stricken states (whose federal funding had been cut by the Reagan-Bush administration) sought new ways to garner revenue without imposing taxes. The low-stakes devices fit comfortably with the redefinition of gambling as ‘gaming’ by industry spokespeople and state officials who hoped to sway public endorsement of the activity as a form of mainstream consumer entertainment rather than a form of moral failing or predatory entrapment. The growing consumer familiarity with screen-based interaction that accompanied the rise of the personal computer and electronically mediated entertainment such as video games further facilitated the cultural normalization of machine gambling. Meanwhile, the ongoing incorporation of digital technology into gambling machines altered the player experience in subtle but significant ways, broadening their market appeal. Gambling regulations were revised in lockstep with technological innovation, sanctioning its application to slots.”

Schull is interested in the rise of machine gambling itself, but also in what this shift in gambling reveals about Americans’ relation to machines in general. Her book is partly based on the insight that Las Vegas is perfect reflection of America, and as such, it has become, in the words of historians Hal Rothman and Mike Davis, “a vast laboratory where giant corporations, themselves changing amalgams of capital from different sectors, are experimenting with every possible combination of entertainment, gaming, mass media, and leisure.”

It’s also based on an understanding of how games reveal the character of a culture. She summarizes the work of various social scientists on the character of slot machines: “For [Roger] Caillois, [the slot machine] was pure alea—an absurd, compulsive game in which one could only lose. For [Ernst] Goffman, it was a way for a person lacking social connections ‘to demonstrate to the other machines that he has socially approved qualities of character’; machines stood in for people when there were none to engage with. ‘These naked little spasms of the self occur at the end of the world,’ he wrote of machine gambling in the very last line of his analysis, ‘but there at the end is action and character.’ [Clifford] Geertz described slot machines as ‘stupid mechanical cranks’ operated by concessionaries at the outer circumference of the cockfight circle, offering ‘mindless, sheer-chance-type gambling’ that could be of interest only to ‘women, children, adolescents . . . the extremely poor, the socially despised, and the personally idiosyncratic.’ ‘Cockfighting men,’ he continued, ‘will be ashamed to go anywhere near [the machines].’ In other words, the devices were not a medium through which to become ‘a man among men,’ as Dostoyevsky had written of roulette; unlike the ‘exquisitely absorbing’ affaire d’honneur of deep play, slot play was shallow, without depth of meaning, investment, or consequence. Incapable of illuminating the fundamental ‘sociological entity,’ Geertz wrote.”

From her interviews with machine players, Schull discovered that they were not after a quick buck, control, or change: “their aim is not to win but simply to continue.” And they want to continue in “a zone in which time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process.” The suspension of time, space, and identity is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the point of the game. One of her interviewees said, “You can erase it all at the machines – you can even erase yourself. Schull sees this not as a desire to get something for nothing but as a desire for “nothingness itself.” Another interviewee spoke of the machine as a zone of bliss “where nothing else matters.” The machine provides “a reliable mechanism for securing a zone of insulation from a ‘human world’” that is experienced “as capricious, discontinuous, and insecure. The continuity of machine gambling holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance, granting her an otherwise elusive zone of certainty.” A psychologist who has studied gambling addictions notes that players speak of “numbness or escape. They don’t talk about competition or excitement—they talk about climbing into the screen and getting lost.”

This is where Schull finds our addition to other machines worrisome: ““Although interactive consumer devices are typically associated with new choices, connections, and forms of self-expression, they can also function to narrow choices, disconnect, and gain exit from the self.” She asks whether the addictive power of machines is due to the tendencies of the addict, the design of the machine, or the interaction of the two, and concludes that “Just as certain individuals are more vulnerable to addiction than others, it is also the case that some objects, by virtue of their unique pharmacologic or structural characteristics, are more likely than others to trigger or accelerate an addiction. Their distinctive potency lies in their capacity to engender the sort of compelling subjective shift on which some individuals come to depend.” One researcher concludes “The most reliable, fast-acting and robust ‘shifters’ hold the greatest potential to stimulate the development of addictive disorders,” and gaming machines are nothing if not robust, fast-action, reliable “shifters,” providing “games” that can be completed in a few seconds.

And these effects aren’t accidental, but are built into the design of the machines. A team led by Bruno Latour “have conceptualized design as a process of ‘inscription’ whereby designers inscribe certain modes of use into the products that consumers will interact with; the resulting products carry ‘scripts’ that inhibit or preclude certain actions while inviting or demanding others. ‘By setting the parameters for the users’ actions,’ a given product – and by implication, its design team – plays a role in guiding their behavior.’”