![]() "I see Las Vegas as a kind of laboratory where experiments are going on between people and machines," says Schull, a cultural anthropologist whose book on gambling, "Machine Zone: Technology Design and Gambling Addiction in Las Vegas," is scheduled to be published by the Princeton University Press in 2010. gambling industry - reported as $92.3 billion in 2007 by the American Gaming Association - come from such machines. Indeed, estimates indicate that a large majority of the revenue from the U.S. Now an assistant professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Schull believes her research underscores just how addictive today's sophisticated gambling machines have become, something to consider when states are increasingly looking to legalized gambling as a revenue source, often by allowing video poker or slot machines at bars, horse tracks or other locations. What, she wondered, kept them glued to machines until they lost all they had to lose?Īfter more than a decade of research that included lengthy observations and interviews focused on gambling machines, Schull is publishing her conclusions on how closely guarded, proprietary mathematical algorithms and immersive, interactive technology are used to keep people gambling until they - in the industry jargon - "play to extinction." Natasha Schull recalls how in the late 1990s she began observing people in Las Vegas transfixed for hours at video poker and slot machines.
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