Addiction by Design: "More people are implicated in this problem than we imagine"

A conversation with author and gambling expert Natasha Schull

In 2012, Natasha Schull published Addiction By Design, a deeply reported look at the connection between gambling addition and slot machine design. Her work predicted the tactics used by sports betting apps to addict users.

I called up the cultural anthropologist and NYU professor to to ask what, if anything, can be done to stop the rise of gambling, the ethical obligations of designers, and pathways for harm reduction.

You’ve explored how addiction design targets vulnerable psychological states. What does effective intervention look like when the problem is embedded in the design itself?

Addiction lives in the space between a substance or activity and a person engaging with it. It’s a relationship. If you are going to address a problem in the relationship, which is what addiction is, you have to look at the interaction.

Right now, we address addiction in different ways. There are individual solutions, like a drug intervention, or morally weighed approaches such as cultivation of responsibility.

Then there are policy approaches to addiction, like putting a label on a cigarette pack or putting warnings on different kinds of substances. You could carry that over to slot machines or betting apps. The idea is that you’re making appeals to the individual’s responsibility because you can’t expect someone to behave responsibly if they don’t know what’s going on. The idea is that if someone sees the odds on a slot machine, they will know how to interact with that device responsibly. That’s what the industry likes to talk about when it talks about helping deal with problems.

My emphasis is on that other end of the spectrum, tending to the problematic, dysfunctional aspects of the design. For example, we know that increasing the number of lines you can bet on increases addictive behavior, so let’s reduce the number of lines. The more spins you can do per minute, the more addictive the game becomes, so let’s slow down the game. And so on.

That carries over to online sports betting: We can reduce the number of opportunities to bet during the game. “In game betting” is one of the most problematic aspects of sports betting apps, allowing users to bet continuously as the game unfolds.

How did we get to a place where these apps are so addicting?

It’s not that any of today’s designers, or even the designers of slot machines that I wrote about, are sitting around rubbing their hands together, asking how they could addict people. It’s actually more insidious than that because it’s more endemic to our particular system of capitalism. The idea is how can we increase profits? How can we extract more from these encounters?

In the book, I have this idea of asymmetric collusion, which carries over to apps and sports betting as well. To some degree, people want to be in what I call the “Machine Zone.” They seek it out and collude with the machine or the app that’s addicting them.

The reason that I put “asymmetric” in front of the word “collusion” is that the players are trying to erase themselves or escape whereas the companies are trying to extract profit. You end up with an extractive drive along with an escapist drive. That’s what makes it asymmetric.

Does a link to a Responsible Gaming website or hotline help people who are potentially addicted? Is there a policy solution that the app makers would agree to or does it have to be forced on them?

I’m pretty cynical. I don’t see in the current system that we have any real incentives for companies to do anything other than hand wave at responsibility. Any actual change would have to be written into regulation. It has to be the stick, not the carrot, policywise.

There’s nothing illegal about addicting people to your app. That’s actually the goal.

One of the exciting new frontiers of regulation is what’s called pre-commitment devices and design. You see this in Canada, where the government runs most of the gambling and there’s a bit more due diligence on the part of the government to actually fill its role for taking care of the citizens. These pre-commitment devices might have you sign up ahead of time for the days you want to gamble or the days you don’t want to do so. You have a calendar. You’re making decisions from a position of responsibility and foresight to care for yourself in advance. When it’s your son’s birthday and you have said you don’t want to be gambling, you actually can’t. You can do the same with money. You pre-commit a certain amount of money, and after that, cut yourself off.

There are lots of examples of pre-commitment devices. It’s a way of giving people the responsibility to do what the casino or the app makers are not comfortable doing: cutting people off, locking them out, or being Big Brother. It’s saying, “here are some tools.” You can Big Brother yourself, in a way.

Do you think that is an effective mechanism?

It can be, but the problem is that too often the purveyors of whatever form of gambling are building exit ramps at every stage so that you can override the whole system. Then it doesn’t hold any weight.

Does the “skill” narrative around sports betting change the addiction dynamic?

When you actually watch the way that bets happen on these apps, I really don’t think skill comes into play. It’s moving so fast, and most people have so little knowledge to draw on. It’s not about that for them.

What makes mobile sports gambling potentially more or less harmful than casino gambling?

When I wrote my book, I started with the physical design of the casino. I learned that there’s a very strong logic of curving carpets, for instance. You don’t want to have a right angle. If you have a right angle, you put the person in a decision-making role where they suddenly have responsibility to move left or to move right. You’d rather just curve them where you want them to go. I kept seeing how that logic of curving was carrying over, not just to the carpets, but to the atmospherics, and most importantly, to the game, the math and the algorithms.

And this idea is so salient in the design of apps. Another way of describing the logic of curving is the removal of friction. Friction is something that you’re working against when you’re an app maker. The ongoing flow of in-game betting in online sports betting is one way to remove friction. The fact that there’s no ending to the game is also key; even after a game has ended, you can keep betting on a different game, on the same app interface. It’s seamless. And of course, there’s the use of digital confetti, colors, and engaging graphics… all of these things draw players into loops of play.

Attention is the thing that everyone is trying to get and keep.

My book could have been called Attention by Design. It’s a primer in how you hook and hold attention. It’s useful to distinguish between those two things because things that are really flashy and obvious and might be a big part of the hook are not actually the things that are holding you. These other things that aren’t so obvious are holding you there.

Your work sits at the intersection of anthropology, design and public health. What disciplinary blind spots do you see in how we study and address behavioral addiction?

The biggest one for me still is the actual design and the understanding that the behavior isn’t in a vacuum. Our behavior is being shaped by that which it is interacting with. We still don’t focus enough on the role that design, and by extension, designers, play. If we were to acknowledge that more, we would see that more people are implicated in this problem than we imagine.

Is there a pathway for harm reduction by design given the incentives and structures in play in a capitalist system?

We’re moving more and more towards gambling being everywhere. This means that everyone is potentially a regular gambler. What that means for the industry is that you can’t take all of everyone’s money, and then expect that there will be a market that continues to exist for you. You have to worry more about cultivating your market and not burning it out.

Twenty years ago, the gambling industry learned that if you let people sit longer at a machine and keep giving them back a little bit of what they put in, you will ultimately get more money from them. That was a big surprise to the industry. Before that, the logic was take as much as you can get immediately. You didn’t even give them, literally, a chair to sit in. But then they realized, no this other mode is more profitable: over a lifetime, you extract value from them, but do it under the cloak of caring. That’s actually creepier in the end, in my mind.

I think you’re going to see more of an attention to cultivating a market from which the industry can reliably extract money over time, and not burn them out. It’s equivalent to letting them sit longer.

That’s bleak in a completely different way.

Yep.

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