Addiction by Design

Winner of the 2013 Sharon Stephens First Book Prize, American Ethnological Society Honorable Mention for the 2013 Gregory Bateson Prize, The Society for Cultural Anthropology “Natasha Dow Schull, an anthropologist at MIT, has written a timely book. Ms Schull has spent two decades studying the boom in casino gambling: the layout of its properties, the addicts and problem gamblers who account for roughly half its revenue in some places, and the engineering that goes into its most sophisticated products. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas reads like a combination of Scientific American’s number puzzles and the ‘blue Book’ of Alcoholics Anonymous.”–Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times “Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed to entrance them.”–Laura Noren, PublicBooks “Schull adds greatly to the scholarly literature on problem gambling with this well-written book… Applying an anthropological perspective, the author focuses especially on the Las Vegas gambling industry, seeing many of today’s avid machine gamblers as less preoccupied with winning than with maintaining themselves in the game, playing for as long as possible, and entering into a trance-like state of being, totally enmeshed psychologically into gaming and totally removed from the ordinary obligations of everyday life… The book offers a most compelling and vivid picture of this world.”–Choice

Natasha Dow Schüll is associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.