Natasha Schull

Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design:

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas among game developers and machine gamblers, I correlate a set of digitally enhanced game features with phenomenological aspects of gamblers’ experience, demonstrating the intimate connection between extreme states of subjective absorption in play and design elements that manipulate space and time to accelerate the extraction of money from players. The case of the digital gambling interface exemplifies the tendency of modern capitalism to bring space, time, and money into intensified relation and sheds light on the question of what might or might not be distinctive about the rationalities and libidinal investments of the “digital age.”

The shortsighted brain: Neuroeconomics and the governance of choice in time

The young field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. In a historical moment characterized by economic, health, and environmental crises, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about a particular deviation for which neuroeconomics offers a biological explanation: Why do humans value the present at the expense of the future? There is contentious debate within the field over how to model this tendency at the neural level. Should the brain be conceptualized as a unified decision-making apparatus, or as the site of conflict between an impetuous limbic system at perpetual odds with its deliberate and provident overseer in the prefrontal cortex? Scientific debates over choice-making in the brain, we argue, are also debates over how to define the constraints on human reason with which regulative strategies must contend. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how the brain and its treatment of the future become the contested terrain for distinct visions of governmental intervention into problems of human choice-making.

On gambling research, social science, and the consequences of commercial gambling

Abstract Social, political, economic, geographic and cultural processes related to the significant growth of the gambling industries have, in recent years, been the subject of a growing body of research. This body of research has highlighted relationships between social class and gambling expenditure, as well as the design, marketing and location of gambling products and businesses. It has also demonstrated the regressive nature of much gambling revenue, illuminating the influence that large gambling businesses have had on government policy and on researchers, including research priorities, agendas and outcomes. Recently, critics have contended that although such scholarship has produced important insights about the operations and effects of gambling businesses, it is ideologically motivated and lacks scientific rigour. This response explains some basic theoretical and disciplinary concepts that such critique misunderstands, and argues for the value of social, political, economic, geographic and cultural perspectives to the broader, interdisciplinary field of gambling research.

Gambled Away: Video Poker and Self-Suspension

Patsy, a green-eyed brunette in her midforties, began gambling soon after she moved to Las Vegas from California in the 1980s with her husband, a military officer who had been restationed at Nellis Air Force Base. Video poker machines had been introduced to the local gambling market in the late 1970s, and she discovered them on her trips to the grocery store. “My husband would give me money for food and milk, but I’d get stuck at the machines on the way in, and it would be gone in twenty minutes. . . . I would be gone too, I’d just zone into the screen and disappear.” Ten years later, Patsy’s gambling had progressed to a point where she played video poker before work, at lunchtime, on all her breaks, after work, and all weekend long. “My life revolved around the machines, even the way I ate,” she recalls as we talk outside the Gamblers Anonymous meeting where we had met. Patsy dined with her husband and daughter only when the three met in casinos; she would eat rapidly, then excuse herself to the bathroom so that she could gamble. Most often she gambled alone, then slept in her van in the parking lot. “I would dream of the machines, I would be punching numbers all night.” Eating alone, sleeping alone, Patsy achieved a sort of libidinal autonomy. Her time, her social exchanges, her bodily functions, and even her dreams were oriented around gambling. “When I wasn’t playing,” she tells

Abiding Chance: Online Poker and the Software of Self-Discipline

Online poker gamblers employ software to track and algorithmically analyze play-by-play game information in real time, parsing opponents’ behavioral patterns and tendencies into color-coded numerical values that hover over their respective positions at the virtual table. These continuously updated statistical dashboards, along with retrospective game analysis and methodical routines of self-adjustment, help gamblers abide swings of chance and avoid falling into the emotionally clouded, fiscally dangerous state of “tilt.” Drawing on interviews with gamblers, observations of online poker play, and discussion threads from poker forum archives, the article explores how the game and its data-intensive software teach gamblers to act from the vantage of an infinite temporal field in which probabilistic values can be trusted to bear out. Although digital media is often associated with choice paralysis and the disappearance of the subject, here it serves as a technology of the self. The composure toward chance events that gamblers cultivate online carries over to their lives off-line, lending them a subjective “readiness” for living with uncertainty. The case of online poker offers a window onto broader predicaments of choice making under conditions of heightened economic volatility.