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// Video Games //. Addiction and Prediction WEEK 11. Global Gaming Exposition, Las Vegas, 2015.
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// Video Games // Addiction and Prediction WEEK 11
“[Mollie]: ‘…the more I gambled the wiser I got about my chances. …Today, when I win—and I do win, from time to time—I just put it back in the machines. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.’ Why, then, does she play? ‘To keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.’” (2012, p. 2) “Echoing Mollie’s wish to stay in the machine zone, they spoke of gamblers’ desire for ‘time-on-device,’ or TOD. An evolving repertoire of technological capabilities was facilitating this desire. …‘Modern slot machines are rarely the work of one company,’ read the blurb for a 2009 G2E panel; ‘they are symphonies of individual technologies that come together to create a singe experience.’” (2012, p. 3, 4) Global Gaming Exposition, Las Vegas, 2015
“Several factors contributed to the dramatic reversal of slots’ once lowly status in the gambling economy”. (2012, p. 5) 1.) Relatively unburdened by the taint of vice as a result of their association with arcade gaming, women, 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. 2.) 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. Global Gaming Exposition, Las Vegas, 2015
“Several factors contributed to the dramatic reversal of slots’ once lowly status in the gambling economy”. (2012, p. 5). 3.) The growing consumerfamiliarity 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 machinegambling. 4.) Meanwhile, the ongoing incorporation of digital technologyinto gambling machines altered the player experience in subtle but significant ways, broadening their market appeal. Gambling regulationswere revised in lockstep with technological innovation, sanctioning its application to slots. Global Gaming Exposition, Las Vegas, 2015
“Whatever its relationship to the culture at large, it is clear that Las Vegas ‘has become a vast laboratory,’ as urban historians Hal Rothman and Mike Davis wrote in 2002, ‘where giant corporations, themselves changing amalgams of capital from different sectors, are experimenting with every possible combination of entertainment, gaming, mass media, and leisure.’ In the Las Vegas laboratory, machine gambling figures both as a means and an end of experimentation.” (2012, p.7)
AMPM Gas Station, Northern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull. Lucky’s Supermarket, Southwestern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull.
Throughout the 1990s, over a period that was often called the “Disneyification” of Las Vegas, one corporate-financed, corporate-run megaresort after another was constructed along the Strip. Tourist visitation to the city increased fourfold between 1980 and 2008, reaching 40 million. This boom in business drew job seekers in droves, and the local population more than quadrupled over the same period—from 450,000 to 2 million. For its part, the industry not only relies on residents for its workforce but also, increasingly, for revenue. …they typically gamble at neighborhood casinos that offer easy parking, child care facilities, and other amenities. Like Mollie, nearly 82 percent of local gamblers are members of loyalty clubs such as Station Casinos’ “Boarding Pass,” carrying player cards that document the volume of their play and reward them accordingly with free meals, free rooms, and other perks. They also play at gas stations, supermarkets, drugstores, car washes, and other local outlets that have inspired the term ‘convenience gambling’. ‘Our local players are very discriminating,’ observed a slot manager at one venue popular among residents; ‘they know what they want, and they’re there five to seven days a week.’ What local players want is machines, and this preference has closely tracked the evolving appeal of slot machine technology. Lucky’s Supermarket, Southwestern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull. AMPM Gas Station, Northern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull.
“In Sharon’s narrative, the gambling machine is not a conduit of risk that allows for socially meaningful deep play or heroic release from a “safe and momentless” life (to use Goffman’s phrase), but rather, a reliable mechanism for securing a zone of insulation from a “human world” she experiences 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 zone that Mollie described earlier as “the eye of a storm.” “Players hang, it could be said, in a state of suspended animation,” writes one machine gambling researcher.” (2012, p. 13) “In a historical moment when transactions between humans and machines unfold ‘at an ever greater level of intimacy and on an ever greater scale’ (as the sociologist Bruno Latour has written), computers, video games, mobile phones, iPods, and the like have become a means through which individuals can manage their affective states and create a personal buffer zone against the uncertainties and worries of their world.” (2012, p. 13) Lucky’s Supermarket, Southwestern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull. AMPM Gas Station, Northern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull.
“As it happens, Latour has taken issue with the abovementioned NRA slogan— and with its equally one- sided counterpart, the antigun slogan ‘Guns Kill People’— as a way to explain why objects are never ‘simply inanimate’: ‘You are different with the gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you.’ In other words, neither guns nor people kill; killing is an action they can only produce together, each mediating the other. Following this mediational logic, the account of addiction to gambling machines that I present here does not seek to locate the ultimate cause of addiction discretely within gamblers or gambling machines but rather in the dynamic interaction between the two.” Lucky’s Supermarket, Southwestern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull. AMPM Gas Station, Northern Las Vegas, around 2012. Ethnographic document produced by Schull.
Although the part of Katrina that is “sharp and aware” does not succeed at extracting her from the zone of addiction, she makes a case for its potential analytical value: “I would ask that a chance be given for the possibility that, despite close involvement, it is quite possible for someone to step outside of their situation and be ‘objective’ and have real ‘insight’ into aspects and perspectives that may be overlooked by others.” This book attempts to give that chance to the gamblers I spoke with. Instead of castingthem as aberrant or maladapted consumers, I include them in thefollowing pages as experts on the very “zone” in which they are caught— a zone that resonates to some degree, I suggest, with the everyday experience of many in contemporary capitalist societies. (2012, p. 24)
“Intensive machine gambling, we will see, manages to suspend key elements of contemporary life—market-based exchange, monetary value, and conventional time—along with the social expectation for self-maximizing, risk-managing behavior that accompanies them. The activity achieves this suspension not by transcending or canceling out these elements and expected modes of conduct, but by isolating and intensifying them…to the point where they turn into something else. (2012, p. 191) “…machines gambling multiplies occasions for the kinds of reflexive risk taking and choice making that are demanded of [‘actuarial’] subjects in contemporary capitalist societies.” (2012, p. 192)
“Intensive machine gambling, we will see, manages to suspend key elements of contemporary life—market-based exchange, monetary value, and conventional time—along with the social expectation for self-maximizing, risk-managing behavior that accompanies them. The activity achieves this suspension not by transcending or canceling out these elements and expected modes of conduct, but by isolating and intensifying them…to the point where they turn into something else. (2012, p. 191) “…machines gambling multiplies occasions for the kinds of reflexive risk taking and choice making that are demanded of [‘actuarial’] subjects in contemporary capitalist societies.” (2012, p. 192)
“[Randall] ‘I’d conserve gas so I’d have the money to gamble, and instead of going to the grocery store regularly, I’d wait to go to Walmart and do it all at one time—that way I wouldn’t have to waste the gas to go more than once. I economized.’ In ‘machine life,’ acts of everyday economizing—the responsible accounting behavior of the risk-managing self—are harnessed to the nonmaximizing, self-liquidating ends of the zone.” (2012, p. 201)
“…Walter Benjamin’s mid-twentieth-century analysis of manufacturing technologies...drew a comparison between the temporalities of assembly line labor and that of gambling. ...’Each operation at the machine,’ he wrote of factory work, ‘is just as screened off from the preceeding as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceeded it.... Starting all over again is the regulative idea of the game, as it is of work for wages.’“ ...Machine gamblers experience a time that has been technologically infused with a surplus of moments, allowing them to feel they can alter its course depending on how or how fast they play. ...it is not the case that gambling addicts are beyond choice but that choice itself, as formatted by machines, becomes the medium of their compulsion.(2012, p. 205, 206, 208)
Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, multitabling using performance tracking software, around 2013.
“Gamblers who use poker-tracking software, I argue, are experimenting with modes of decision making and self-governance oriented toward the open-ended indeterminacy of uncertainty [i.e. ‘gaming chance’] rather than the limiting, definitional project of risk calculation [i.e. ‘taming chance’]. As we will see, [gamblers who practice] these modes [of behavior] value performance over outcome, multiple data points over single events, virtual over real time, and potentialization over actualization of the self” (2015, p. 3) Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, multitabling using performance tracking software, around 2013.
“To ensure the highest possible ‘return on investment’ (or hourly wage), multitablers must determine the maximum number of tables at which they can play well enough. ‘When you’re playing in real life, you’re playing every hand the best you can… Oline, you’re weighing optimal play per hand against the optimal number of hands you can play in time. ...Monetary stakes, like time and attention, are spread across multiple games, thinning a sense of investment in the unfolding action narrative of an one table.” (2015, p. 3, 4) NiklasLuhmann defines riskas the problem of making decisionsat the limit of knowledge, on the border between the present and future. …Poker-traking software and its evolving array of features and functions alleviate this burden by enabling players to act confidently yet without pretending to know what will happen next. In this sense, the technology equips them to abide—and, potentially, to profit from—uncertainty.” (2015, p. 5) Bertrand “Elky” Grospellier, multitabling using performance tracking software, around 2013.
“The HUD continuously queries a player’s database to provide up-to-date information on opponents’ behavioral patterns…they [the HUD users] draw on a database of continuously accruing histroical events to indicate emergent behavioral tendencies; ...HUD windows showing [too] many numerical values would be cognitivelyl draining if to unassimiable, and would potentially overwhelm the aesthetic experience of play itself—especially with multiple tables open on the screen. ...[And yet] developers are constantly expanding the orbit of potentially significant data that can be automatically tracked and legibly displayed.” (2015 p. 5-8) Poker Tracker 4, Heads Up Display (HUD), 2015. “Tendency, writes Brain Massumi, can be understood as ‘pastness opening directly onto a future’; it pertains to ‘the intermediate space between what has occurred and what is about to occur’, as Samimian-Darash has defined the field of ‘potential uncertainty. The HUD provides players with a compass to navigate this field [of potentiality]... Yet the HUD’s statistical scores, color-coded ranges, note definitions, and flash alerts add up to more than a detection apparatus, for they do not merely register events as they emerge but actively shape them... [it] affects the actualization of events before they take place... While the HUD could be said to serve as a tool of uncertaintly reduction when used to gauge the potential behavior of others, when used reflexively it serves as a tool of uncertainty cultivation. The key is to methodically extinguish all signs of passion—desire, weakness, or intention—from one’s data stream, so as to seem as truly random and unpredictable as possible.
“While the HUD helps players dial down their human passions in the heat of the game, a different set of poker software tools helps them prepare for dispassionate play through retrospective exercises.” (2015, p. 9) “While losing players in a live game of poker might take small confort in the knowledge that they ‘played correctly’ (that is, according to statistical laws), in the context of online multitabling where they play tens of thousands of hands every month, such knowledge grants a sense of ontological security. The ontology at stake is not that of a self whose value accretes through many, tiny action over time. In order to optimize his value potential, such a self must respect the law of large numbers at every decision point. ...[the tools] help online poker players act in linear, worldly time yet from the vantage of an infinite temporal field in whcih probabilistic values can be trusted to bear out. ” (2015, p. 9) Poker Tracker 4, Luck Bell Curve, 2015. Poker Tracker 4, Database View, 2015.
Poker Tracker 4, Replay Mode, 2015. “A player can revisit the game scenarios he suspects he played suboptimally—perhaps all hands in which he held an Ace or in which he was the first to act—and “replay” them in the form of simulations showing “how they could have gone differently,” as Winslow puts it. … In effect, simulations convert actual events back into a virtual field of potential actualities, training players to more easily “see through” the singularity of any given decision moment and recognize the multiple futures it carries. … Such (p.57) a vantage does not reduce uncertainty but accustoms players to it, diminishing the consequential load of individual game decisions and facilitating the decisive, speedy flow of multitabling. The subjective stance sought is one of equanimity in the face of uncertainty and outcome variance.” (2015, p. 9)
“Justin’s warm-up checklist”, ethnographic document collected by Schull, 2015.
“Justin’s cool-down checklist”, ethnographic document collected by Schull, 2015.
“Justin’s warm-up checklist”, ethnographic document collected by Schull, 2015. To keep themselves from tilting in the first place and to mitigate tilt when it does occur, players not only make use of software tools but also create custom routines of self discipline. In one online discussion a gambler describes how he writes down every “automatic negative thought” that crosses his mind during a play session and afterward writes out a “rational response” to each of these in an effort to banish them from future sessions. His method recalls the early Christian practice of writing down thoughts and actions as a safeguard against sinning; he depicts himself as if at a similar moral crossroads, yet instead of being pulled between God and Lucifer, he is pulled between rationality and tilt. (2015, p. 12)
“The use of poker “bots” (or robots) that pose as players online is shunned by those committed to the game. Bots are shunned not because they can beat humans; indeed, while the more aggressive of the bots can beat most amateurs fairly quickly, they are not a threat to skilledplayers. Instead, they are shunned because they can be set to multitable around the clock, collecting vast quantities of data on real players; other players can then purchase this data and pull up detailed informational profiles on opponents they are encountering for the first time. This is considered “cheating” in no uncertain terms—a shameful violation of the rules of the game that compromises the potential for players to “create their own justice.”” (2015, p. 16)
Alongside the denouncement of poker bots’ infiltration into the game, there is a creeping concern among players that their own use of tracking tools, now a universally accepted aspect of online poker, might become so advanced and so rampant that the very existence of the game will be endangered. The worry is that as more players adopt a statistically “winning” strategy, a point will be reached where no uncertainty remains—or rather, where uncertainty will no longer serve as a resource for gaming chance. “If everyone uses these stats and uses them correctly,” says Emil, “then there will be no room left to have an edge—because everyone will have the same information, like we’re all bots playing each other, and the game will be ruined for everyone.” “If everybody uses the technology,” echoes Winslow, “it’ll be a tragedy of the commons.” (2009, p. 16)
