Casinos like to say that roughly 2% of players become addicted. What they fail to mention is that approximately half of all their revenue comes from these 2%. A more telling statistic is that approximately 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue [1]. The numbers are quite similar for games with IAP [2].
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
> This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.
You could make this exact same argument for liquor sales.
The top 10% of regular drinkers have 10 drinks a day. If they reduced their consumption to that of the next decile, total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent.[1]
We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
>We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
That might be persuasive if it were the only relevant information we had. But most US states maintained a complete ban on gambling for most of their existence, and those bans worked pretty well.
The alcohol ban might have worked prior to automobiles. Maybe the gambling ban only worked prior to the internet, at least until there was federal and not state level action on going after online gambling.
> We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing. You don't see the states advertising vodka like they advertise the lottery.
I'm having a hard time with this. Something doesn't have to be endorsed by the state to be culturally embraced, which seems to be what I'm understanding when I view both sentences in tandem. Apologies if I'm getting that wrong.
But if I view the first sentence in isolation:
> We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.
I'm still baffled, but for different reasons. Alcohol is endorsed, celebrated, and embraced from top to bottom in nearly all corners of contemporary society. It's served nearly everywhere, consuming it is the cultural norm, not consuming it is viewed with suspicion, it's lauded as being crucial to one's enjoyment of an evening, social gathering, sporting event, flight, etc. Entire business models exist that would otherwise be unprofitable if not for alcohol sales. Many establishments are essentially loss leaders but for their alcohol sales (which are supposedly tangential to their primary business offering).
2.5 million deaths are alcohol-related every year. It's a factor in 40% of all violent crimes. 24% of incidents involving police have alcohol as a factor.
And yet, sit around at dinner with a group of guys and order a soft drink, and it's often viewed as abnormal behavior.
Why? Because, for reasons passing understanding, we culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.
According to that article, 4% of Americans drink 10+ drinks per day. I find that very hard to believe, and it's certainly something that requires credible sources.
You're welcome to download the data set from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions if you want to check the math. The NIH makes it publicly available.
In tandem with looking up the data, I also recommend broadening your social circle by meeting a former alcoholic or two. They're not hard to find. Alternatively, you can read their memoirs, which are even easier to find.
I don't recommend the alternative of seeing some of your friends or relatives drink themselves to death, even as their own closest friends fail to see what's going on. But you don't always have a choice. Sometimes the anecdotes find you.
Anecdotes aren't data, but they are what human beings are designed to believe. If you have trouble envisioning evident facts that are backed by piles of data, perhaps you need to collect a wider range of anecdotes.
Regarding the 2%, you're assuming that the data from Bwin - an Internet gambling site - is representative of the casino industry as a whole.
And that 10% account for 90% of revenue doesn't mean that those 10% are addicted. There's obviously a long tail of people that only enter a casino once a year or less, which will obviously contribute little to its revenue. That doesn't mean semi-regular players must be addicted.
I don't doubt that there are addicted people, but I don't agree that the data you mention indicates a large problem.
The numbers in land based casinos won't be identical, but they are close enough. Having looked into this issue, the data (not just from these two sources) is rather conclusive that the vast majority of casino revenue comes from problem gamblers, despite the fact that only a small percentage of their customers fall into this category.
Furthermore, there's a strongly canted wealth distribution curve already built into society. A few uber-wealthy people gambling at high but still "recreational" levels would skew the statistics this way.
More information is necessary to establish this claim.
If you gamble regularly and lose money regularly, it's very likely it's addiction that's bringing you back.
It's hard to be a "healthy" semi-regular losing player, the ones I can think of off the top of my head are people with good jobs who hit the casinos a few times a month as a social event and lose what they would have spent at a bar anyway. They may drop $500 each per month, but the problem gambler may drop $10k in a week. It doesn't take many problem gamblers to get to 90% of the money coming in.
Why do you say it's hard to be a semi-regular losing player? Besides the millions who player in lotteries (which is not the same, granted), my experience is from Spain, where many bars and coffee shops have slot machines (like this[1]) and you see lots of people playing for 5-15 minutes and then leaving.
Wow, that picture is not something that happens in the U.S.!
I think it's hard to be a "healthy" losing player because there aren't many good reasons to keep doing something that's costing you money when the whole point of the activity is to win money. But I suppose if you're always within 5 minutes of a slot-machine that changes things a little.
Here in the U.S. gambling is heavily regulated so unless you live unusually close to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, a Native American reservation, or other small areas where it's legal it takes a lot of effort to get to a casino. I don't really know but I'd guess that most people here are an hour or so from the closest legal gambling, and there are even states with zero legal gambling.
> it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.
It's quite a complex issue. How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom? How do they discern lawful play from illegal play? Treatment, prevention and awareness is the only practical solution.
> How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom?
You don't seem to understand that addicts aren't free.
If, as downandout suggests, the industry can't exist without the addicts, then the choice isn't one of freedom versus tyranny. It's a choice of which infringement on freedom we find worse: a predatory industry ruining people's lives or the state saying, "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money."
> You don't seem to understand that addicts aren't free.
Yes they are. Quit trying to overload the term. Are they slaves? No. Are they in prison? No. Freedom means the freedom from the tyranny of others, not from yourself.
I find myself agreeing. Psychological addictions are a real problem, but not one that I am comfortable involuntarily treating, so long as they do not directly harm other people.
On the other hand, I am in favor of regulation sufficient to make the worst-case-scenario equal to the worst-case-scenario of unemployment. The real social problem is only externalized beyond individual and dependents when the stereotypical problem gambler starts seeking lines of credit to further their addiction; This is to be avoided at considerable cost, because not only are their incentives compromised in a manner associated with addiction, but also in a manner associated with fear of whatever private sticks their patrons have to get them to repay the debt, and they have no legal means to do so.
This is a pretty low-empathy position. You're basically saying that exploiting people for profit is ok as long as it only harms those directly exploited plus their dependents.
I don't necessarily think we should ban anything that people could get addicted to. But I'm generally in favor of stopping people making money off of addicts. And I'm thoroughly in favor of banning people from trying to create new addicts. As an example, I think the cigarette advertising bans, mandatory on-pack warnings, and high cigarette taxes are swell.
I'm saying that there are desirable limits on how much a free society constrains voluntary behavior. Cigarettes are physiologically addictive on a separate level from psychologically addictive gambling, or psychologically addictive pornography, or psychologically addictive exercise, or psychologically addictive knitting, or psychologically addictive excessive work ethic. You can find people obsessed with any activity on Earth. It's a very rough ride trying to define a pathological level of each of those activities, and then intervene when that level is reached, with the full power of the state, against participants with no desire for an intervention.
I don't disagree that there are desirable limits. I disagree that physiological addiction to nicotine is societally more harmful than gambling addiction.
I also think there are things to do other than "intervene [...] against participants with no desire for an intervention", so I think that's a bit of a red herring.
Oh hey, I didn't notice you had been elected Grand Poobah of English last week. Sorry.
Your use of "freedom" is one meaning, but it's not the only one, or even the main one. Note, for example, that the phrase "freedom from addiction" has 129,000 hits, and there are dozens of books with titled related to the phrase. Similarly, people talk of slavery to their addiction: E.g.: http://www.thehopeline.com/17-lows-of-addictions-part-2/
If you talk to actual recovering addicts, their experience is one of freedom. And they're not misusing the word; Webster's first definition is "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". That is distinct, in their view, from your definition, which they have next: "liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another".
Considering that the state saying, "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money." will lead to the creation of a black market and a whole lot of actual crime in addition to the victimless crime of gambling, I think it's pretty clear what the only reasonable and sane option is here and history has proven it over and over again.
Could you give some examples of the historical horrors of black market slot machines? I'm not familiar.
Also, I don't know that we have to ban gambling. I don't think people having the occasional poker game is a big problem. It's industrial-scale exploitation of addicts that I take issue with. I think it would be sufficient to ban profiting from gambling.
There isn't examples of black market slot machines but there are a lot of examples of black market gambling which ruins lives worse than legal gambling does.
My experience is with 3rd world countries, specifically Thailand, where gambling is illegal. I know you're not advocating for a ban on gambling but I think it's worth a mention that due to its illegality, there are widespread issues that stem from it: corruption, cops being in on illegal gambling dens, and mafia / gangs that sprung up to run these under ground dens.
Aside from the more organized underground gambling, there are also smaller village style gambling where within a village / town / city, there are bookies that will collect your bet (and people bet on anything: soccer being the main one.) Basically addicts will find a way to gamble whether it's banned, discouraged, organized, or legalized.
In the case where it's illegal, the creditor who the addicts borrow money from are usually loan sharks or gang members that take extreme means to recover any money they can. Many families lose homes, life-savings, or even get killed. So it gets pretty bad, IMO it's worse than a legalized gambling system.
People who wants to gamble prefer to go to the legal means as it pose much lower risk of extreme repercussions... but if it's not legal, some of them would still find a way to gamble. This may mean that the number of people who do gamble reduces... but I'm not sure by how much and whether that ends up tipping the scale in favor of a ban.
I think there's a big difference between moralistic approaches and harm-reduction approaches. Honestly, I couldn't give a shit if people gamble. I just care about the harm of addiction.
So as far as I'm concerned, gambling should be legal, as I don't want addicts to ever worry about coming forward. And if somebody wants to be the office bookie as long as he pays out every dollar he takes in, hey, have fun. But the moment somebody has a profit incentive to hook people and keep them hooked, I think we've created a very dangerous situation.
This part, though, I take issue with: "Basically addicts will find a way to gamble whether it's banned, discouraged, organized, or legalized." That's somewhat true for addicts not in recovery. But I think it ignores people in recovery, those getting started on recovery, and those with addictive potential who aren't yet addicts. For those people, availability all matters a lot.
We've managed to reduce smoking a great deal without black-market tobacco farmers springing up. There's no reason we can't do something similar with other addictive products.
I was actually thinking outside of slots. A lot of gambling practices are still illegal like sports betting in most of America. Such illegal gambling often leads to some sort of organized crime around providing loans and the actual gambling service itself. But I was also thinking of alcohol prohibition in the 1920's and the current drug prohibition. The black markets that these events created are not that dissimilar from the one around gambling and the core cause is the same.
I do think that eliminating the profit incentive is something that could work. The profit from gambling is cited as a redeeming quality, however, as a reason for legalized gambling to exist. The overwhelming idea, at least in the US, is that if people are going to have a vice (or fun, depending on your perspective), their activities should be taxed so that others (corporations and the government mainly) can profit from them. Perhaps if the money actually went to fund schools and other things that benefit society, I could get behind this viewpoint, but regardless of the claims of governments that have legal gambling, it doesn't. This John Oliver segment about it is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=789&v=9PK-netuhHA
I think that the moralistic desire to control citizens (as we see with alcohol and drugs) is a pretty different thing, with pretty different effects, than we see with harm reduction strategies (as with cigarettes).
I definitely agree with you that the society-benefit line is mostly a sham. With cigarette and alcohol taxes, the general goal is to discourage consumption. But many US states actively promote gambling, so I think it's a very different thing.
I empathize with your frustration toward the gambling industry.
However, It's not only about the slot machines. You can find the underlying model in many other products, like freemium apps. There's much more subtlety than closing down casinos. Illegal businesses – which don't employ workers nor pay taxes – would likely exploit the new prohibition and its victims.
> "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money."
Addiction-prone individuals will still be unable to function normally in day-to-day life. That's why I believe that treatment, prevention and awareness trumps other obvious proposals.
> Addiction-prone individuals will still be unable to function normally in day-to-day life.
[citation needed]
> That's why I believe that treatment, prevention and awareness trumps other obvious proposals.
That's a couple of different kinds of false dichotomy. Nobody is saying one can't have treatment, prevention, and awareness while also, say, placing such heavy regulation on gambling that the amount of addiction is minimized. As a comparable model, look at cigarettes.
I enjoy playing summoners war, but recognize it as basically a slot machine. There are people on there who clearly have spent a LOT of money. I've chatted with a few of them (the largest that someone admitted to was $5,000), and most of them claimed to be well-off enough that it wasn't an issue. One claimed to be the son of a successful investment banker. One was from China and said he doesn't even know how much money they have, but they always have plenty. Nobody I talked with has been all like, "yeah, i am hurting myself and racking up debt, but I just can't stop"
Of course, if you assume even half of those people are lying, that's where the addiction is. You'll tell yourself stories and tell others stories, so they don't see you as a weak person.
Your supposition is that the casino industry adheres somewhat to the Pareto principal. This is neither surprising nor dispositive of its dependence on addiction, a term that you neither define nor measure convincingly here.
I agree on the purpose of casinos, but I fail to see how it's evil to give people what they want and what they would seek out and do on the black market anyway if it wasn't legal. Just because they're legal doesn't mean that we can't focus on treatment or prevention. Keeping casinos legal removes a lot of the other problems that illegal gambling brings. Basically, by keeping gambling legal the damage that gambling does can be minimized and generally limited to the gambler. Once you make it illegal and bring in the black market, while gambling itself is a victimless crime, the industry that now supports it illegally is not. Same as any other industry that deals with highly addictive things that people have immense desire for.
You seem to assume that because people spend a hell of a lot of money they are necessarily addicted. This isn't so, a lot of these people just have a lot of money (e.g many of the whales that spend a lot on IAP for free-to-play games are rich saudis).
> 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue.
You're suggesting that this is unusual but it's just the Pareto Principle, which applies to... pretty much every set of data ever, and serves as no evidence for anything.
I'm not against what you are saying, but you need to find a better argument than this.
> "I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer," she explained. "He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center." ... Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots.
The person quoted above is in need of counseling and support. Instead, she's getting a drip-feed of low-cost morphine to mask her loss, like a debtor going from pay-day loan to pay-day loan to stay solvent.
Academically, we seem to have strong evidence linking stress to reduced impulse control. I'm no expert in the matter, but surveys such as this [1] seem convincing. Despite this, the popular conversation seems to stay away from root causes and instead ends at the label 'addict.'
I wonder what percentage slot machine and clash of clans-styled mobile gaming revenue is due to this kind of coping-related addiction. downandout's comment [2] suggests it is probably quite high.
This segment about people coping with loss using slot machines was really eye-opening. And actually, it made me think better about this industry than before. Of course, using slot machines for that is not as healthy as going through counseling, but it seems a lot better than almost all other alternatives. And the players themselves seem to have a pretty good understanding of the mechanic: they're not hoping to win, they're not tricked, they trade their money for the "flow", and are open about it.
First employee, pseudo-founder of Doubledown Casino here (now the highest grossing game on the iPad). The interesting thing is that we were absolute crap at the actual gamification stuff. It was simply the slots machine mechanic which drew people in. I (and another person) kept trying to push the principles of gamification, the psychological tricks, etc which had worked so well for the likes of Zynga (not entirely proud of that, of course), but were for the most part utterly ignored by the other couple of guys who didn't understand their value. So, what I find interesting here is that even without the gamification bells and whistles, the simple mechanic of a poorly skinned, very buggy slots game (which is what we had in the begging) was enough to skyrocket us (along with ridiculously cheap facebook ads back in the wild west days of the platform.)
Given that you are aware that you are basically exploiting the digital equivalent of an highly addictive substance that does lead to ruined lives/families/careers, does this weigh on your mind, and if not, why not? [1]
[1] Casino licenses in most countries are tied to paying for treatment of people with gambling addiction/compulsions - similar to how many countries approach decriminalisation of addictive substances. I assume you do not fund any such programs - is that correct?
I'm not sure why I'd discuss this with some random person on the internet. If you'd like to tell me that you think I did something morally wrong, feel free to do so, but have the courtesy of not disingenuously cloaking it as a question.
(FWIW, I haven't been with the company since 2012.)
I wouldn't work for gaming company in the same way I wouldn't work for a weapons company. Poker machines cause a lot of problems to not only individuals but to families; time and again I read about someone massively in debt in the local paper or internet news, someone who often has been driven to theft or fraud to support their habit. Where I live (Adelaide, South Australia) one local politician has 'made' his career on a no-pokies stance.
In addition to the gambling issues, the presence of poker machines in my city has help kill off the live music scene. Pub owners now prefer to make their money from zombies-slot players, and the community and friendly atmosphere created by humans playing music has been practically destroyed as a result.
IMO poker machines, especially, are a blight on the gaming world. I only feel lucky the dumbed-down 'game play' is nothing that would appeal to me or people I know, and personally speaking I would never want to use my software skills to help separate some of society's most vulnerable and naive from their money.
Thank you for being straight forward with your criticism. I can't say I disagree all that much. There is a legitimate other side which would argue that your stance is too paternalistic. E.g. where do we draw the line as a society to protect ourselves from ourselves? Alcoholism is a terrible and wide spread disease. Should we outlaw pubs? I'm not arguing for one side or the other, but merely that it's a rather complicated issue and the arguments on both sides should recognize that.
I do accept that it is a complicated issue, and realise also my own attitude towards poker machines is that of a reasonably-sophisticated gamer who could never see the point in playing such 'games'. I also, perhaps fortunately, have a friend who works for a company that tests poker machine motherboards to make sure the results are 'as expected' and that they payout as per local legislation. His explanation of the statistics and 'under the hood' mechanics of how the machines work were quite eye-opening to me, and meant that the chance of me playing these machines dropped from 'maybe one day' to 'never'.
I would reason that, same as for alcohol and other drugs, there should be more money directed from profits towards support for addicts. I realise it's not a good idea, in general, to be overly paternalistic in general; my statement was made more from a personal point of view in terms of what work I would or would not be involved in.
The thing is, I'd say there's a difference between seeing the arguments of both sides, and actively 'promoting' a side (by creating a game). And I think your answer doesn't really address that original question: how do you feel about being actively involved in this, especially in light of 'not disagreeing all that much'?
I understand if you don't feel comfortable answering in public though.
(and to be clear: while I have strong personal feelings about whether I would or should create gambling apps, I'm truly not writing this as an excuse to judge you. Doing so would be hypocritical, as there's plenty behavior in my life currently that doesn't fit my convictions.)
EDIT: just noticed you've already gone into this further down in the conversation.
Well, I for one would be genuinely interested in how someone working in a field that I personally (and many with me) do find morally reprehensive (whether it be gambling, drugs, weapons, fossile fuels...) think about their role in the big picture. Do they have good arguments that I fail to see, do they not care/think too much about it, does the salary/benefits trumph any moral qualm, do they not have any other choice, etc. If you don't want to discuss it, that is fine, just pointing out that the original poster's question might not be fully rhetorical.
Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, but the tone seemed a bit over the top. E.g. I could have been something like "Given that you worked in a morally questionable field, does this weigh on your mind, and if not, why not?"
Some very random thoughts and (sorry to yell but I know someone is going to tell me how one of these doesn't justify things but...) NONE OF THESE ARE MEANT TO JUSTIFY ANYTHING:
1. I am just a dev and had never been to a casino in my life prior to developing the game. I just took the job since I wanted to go the high risk/hard reward route. I am fully cognizant of the "I was just the accountant at Auschwitz" counter argument. I just developed the thing and had fun, frustration, and huge amounts of stress learning about things like high concurrency and such.
2. I am guilty of compartmentalizing and avoid thinking about the effects.
3. I was under the understanding that for a a while at least we were cutting people off when they spent over a certain amount. I assume at some point we stopped doing this, but avoided asking when.
4. Due to political reasons, I was sidelined and didn't have any decision making clout. I was just a dev once we grew to a certain point.
5. I'm fairly far to the left politically, but found some of the more libertarian arguments persuasive in terms of adults are adults and should be able to smoke weed, drink beer, and play slots if they want to.
6. I tell myself that with the money earned, I can now do good things for the world and any projects I do from now on will be non-profitish. I have yet to do anything of the sort.
7. It was all very gradual. If an existing casino company had tried to hire me, I would likely have not worked for them. We started off with multiplayer games like Blackjack and Roulette and the focus was on social really more than casino. It's the kind of lobster boiling problem: Since it was so gradual, it was tough to see if/when a line was crossed.
8. Casino has a particularly bad reputation. Is working for J.P. Morgan any better? What about Starbucks, which has basically built their empire on a caffeine addiction?
You don't have anything to feel guilty about. Every company is out there to make money. None of us, individually, are as cruel as a group of people making a consensus decision.
My first job was writing code for a company that took advantage of poor and desperate people. I didn't see that for a few years. But, it was a good veneer -- help people who wanted to go to school to improve their lot in life. I genuinely thought I was doing something good.
But these for-profit schools ended up abusing government regulations and guarantees around student loans, which has largely led to the student loan crisis. However, I thought that I was buying stuff in my community, it bought my family a house and a reliable car, and we were paying a lot of taxes.
Every company has some variation on this. Starbucks has been great for coffee growers around the world and has exposed many people to boutique/single-origin coffee, but like you said, it's built on addiction. But any restaurant is doing the same -- they're doing whatever they can to bring you in and have you pay money for food. I mean, you have to eat, right? And restaurants are all about flavor and presentation and unique ingredients -- they're triggering your dopamine, which they hope will entice the diner to spend more money. Car salesmen are the same way -- everybody kinda needs a car, but they try to take advantage of our lack of information, and try to cover it with dopamine-based ideas: smooth leather, new car smell, perfect paintjob, fast car, get a bunch of chicks, people will really know you've done well in life, etc.
Everything in live is built on dopamine though -- it's why we do anything. To reduce it to dopamine trigger = bad for humanity is not fair.
I didn't really expect an answer, so thank you for giving one anyway. From what you write, I get the impression that could be described as a "slippery slope" kind of situation, which I can understand. I don't know how I'd behave myself given those circumstances, although I'd of course like to think I'd resist somehow - but perhaps I'm fooling myself. And you are right that there are a lot of industries of questionable/negative moral worth out there (I listed a few of my picking in my previous comment, but you could add certain parts of banking/finance industry, tobacco industry and many others..)
I guess what amazes me is the number of people willing to sacrifice their limited time on this planet to actively work on stuff that is (if one is being honest with oneself) providing net negative value to society as a whole, making this world a shittier place for everyone. (Saying this as a relatively non-religious person).
This is a great answer, thanks! Of course I knew I was going to push some buttons and don't pretend to be a saint myself, but I thought many here would be interested in hearing what you had to say because as digital hackers we have the ability to operate in a somewhat unregulated space and face many moral and ethical dilemmas. BTW, I don't feel I was over-exaggerating the risks of untreated addictions - I encourage you to research it if you still feel that way. It is almost certain if the app was as popular as you say, and people used real money, that at least one person killed themselves or ruined their lives/families/careers by now.
Re: #8. I don't see casinos and drugs (including alcohol) going away any time soon, and attempting to stop them is misdirected in my opinion. The problem is that for a small proportion of the public (typically people with mental health issues) they end up being used as self-medication, often unknowingly, and can make bad situations worse - leading to financial ruin, families torn apart, suicide or overdose in the case of drugs. (JP Morgan & Starbucks don't have these properties.)
For that reason, in the meatspace, casinos are highly regulated and need to identify and protect vulnerable people. So yes - while your app is a substitute for a physical activity, in the physical world that person would have gone through many more hoops that would have allowed people to help them or notice their problem. In digital space, there is no such visibility and there are no regulations, which is why it becomes interesting to see what people do and say about what they do.
>Casino has a particularly bad reputation. Is working for J.P. Morgan any better? What about Starbucks, which has basically built their empire on a caffeine addiction?
Well, casinos make their money by financially immiserating their customers, while J.P. Morgan is almost directly the opposite - they want to make all their clients wealthier. And (some extreme individual cases perhaps excepted), nobody ever ruined their life because of "caffeine addiction" (a somewhat dubious concept).
That said, I do subscribe to the "live and let live" position on the matter, and I don't think people should be criticized for working for a gambling business (or tobacco, alcohol, freemium mobile games, or other businesses in the same realm).
I work for a company that makes online and runs online slots. It is likely true that some people discover that they have an addiction and blow a fortune, probably on slots that I made.
Thing is I know that a lot of our customers really, really love it, because we spend a lot of time making the games really great and fun to play. They know that at the end of the day they lose money, but the same is the case for going to the movies (cost of tickets + drinks), a theme park, etc.
After reading some reviews of your game; you are morally irresponsible. Free advertising via 2015.
"What a scam Double down Casino is. It's designed for the player to fail with low odds of winning. I've bought probably close to $100 in chips the past few months. Just bought $8.00 today to play the American Idol Slot machine and money was gone within 15 minutes. This is ridiculous. It's not like I'm winning real money back but rather looking for some entertainment. I could have paid that and enjoyed a movie for 2 hours. Will never buy another chip again and warn everyone against doing it. They get you hooked before long. I would rather go out and buy a computer casino program for $20 bucks and have endless entertainment. This company is raking in a fortune and giving nothing in return !!!!"
Do I think you are a bad person--no. Do I feel too many people take advantage of the poor, depressed, and uniformed--yes. Do I feel people rationalize their behavior in the sake of money--yes.
I don't think anyone working in this industry is morally responsible for the actions of others resulting from others' free will. The review you posted is sad in that it points out the reviewer's stupidity, not industry employees' immorality. The reviewer should have gotten a free game instead of wasting money on one that requires money. But that wouldn't be gambling and money is the difference between regular video games and slot machines--that's obvious.
This is how our economy and capitalism in general work. There is no room for morality in such a system (though that's not to say there shouldn't be). By your same logic, employees of health insurance companies should be held responsible for their companies actions leading to the preventable death of their customers. Employees working for aircraft companies should be held responsible for the deaths their armed fighters cause. And the guy making minimum wage at the gas station should further be held responsible for the actions of his parent company and the thousands of death they caused. These are all ridiculous things, as is expecting someone who has worked on gambling games to feel morally irresponsible for doing nothing wrong.
"stupidity". how narrow minded and shallow of you. did you know gambling addiction is the hardest addiction to break? our monkey brains are programmed to not understand probability and get addicted to it. some people are more vulnerable to this genetically than others.
Where in any of this have I rationalized my behavior? I have made no mention anywhere of what I actually think about the morality of the game or of the morality of developing it. You have no idea whether I'm ashamed of my involvement or not since I haven't revealed such.
Just double checked because I didn't believe what you said about the highest grossing game. The top grossing games on iPad varies by market but is one of Clash of Clans, Game of War: Fire Age, or Candy Crush Saga, except in Japan where it's Puzzles & Dragons. Doubledown Casino is high up there but it isn't the highest grossing game on the iPad. Clash of Clans and GoW:FA are making a multiplicative factor more than Doubledown Casino. I believe you about the slot machine mechanic though.
I absolutely agree. It's gamification distilled to its essence in a sense. I was only making that point that we didn't even do research on color or sound or anything like that. We just had a very, very simple version of a buggy slots game and even that was enough.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying; do you mean that people were literally looking for an iPad version of a slot machine, and you just filled that void?
No, we were originally just a flash app on FB and did mobile later. My point is that even without all the gamification bells and whistles we were very successful. It was the very simple mechanics of a slots game which drew people in — we didn't need leader boards, badges, levels, and all that other gamification stuff.
There's no way I'm the only one wary of the moral implications of trying to addict your users without their knowledge and for a profit. It just seems like the most self-centered possible way of using your skills when you don't care at all whether it's going to destroy lives as long as it brings their cash to your (and/or your investors') bank account.
I have no problem with helping people understand how to use their brain chemistry to help themselves do things they want to do. This, however, just feels so bad for the human race as a whole.
I guess what I'm saying is that it makes me sad that this happens and that people are okay with doing it.
>Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!” [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/]
Moral qualms will be crushed by competitive dynamics. I'm pretty afraid of this addiction arms race, especially with the coming rise of VR.
>“Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”
One could argue that the value added here is the environment. Otherwise most peoples' dopaminergic reward circuits will not erroneously evaluate slot machines in an empty desert positively.
What exactly is the difference between vegas and any other kinds of entertainment that could possibly be addictive then? (WoW or other MMORPGs, tetris, board games...)
The biggest difference with Vegas is the direct relationship between time and energy spent gaming and money spent. The Skinner Box phenomenon is directly harnessed to empty peoples' wallets in a way that you don't see as completely with other forms of addictive games and entertainment.
For example, I spend the same on an MMO subscription no matter how often I play.
This is obviously a moral gray area. Anything can be addictive. How much is too much? But I do feel that things like scientifically designed gambling are certainly on the dark side of the divide.
A) We already educate people about addictive behaviors, and it's not that effective, and
B) If you're going to allow potentially-addictive gambling at all, you probably want to do it in a way such that people must overcome a major barrier to engage in it, like a plane flight or a long drive, which is already accomplished by the centralization of gambling in Las Vegas.
So, the gaudy money-hungry casinos in the middle of nowhere are a lot closer to the ideal gods-eye-view casino than Scott Alexander suggests.
(Not to mention the ecosystem around entertainment there that has produced positive-sum results like magic shows and boxing matches.)
The moral problem may be when the value provided does not match the cost (in this case to the slot user). Just because a slot machine is able to rewire some neural circuitry in the user so that he thinks the value matched the cost...doesn't mean it actually does.
It's as immoral as selling a car for 10x an appropriate price, by not voluntarily revealing a critical flaw. Both involve "cheating" someone based off a sort of information/computation asymmetry.
Addicting someone's brain in way that creates value (e.g. getting them to exercise) is obviously worth a significant cost - and I'm totally ok with someone making a profit on that!
To expand a bit - in the car selling example, it's an information asymmetry, known and ignored by the seller.
In the slot example, it's an "information-computation asymmetry" - the slot machine literally knows how you think and is pushing your psychological buttons in order to cheat you. It's even rewiring your brain (your dopamine response AKA your computation) so that it can push your buttons more effectively.
In both cases, the "cheater" is enabling and taking advantage of asymmetry. They are explicitly harming the other party in a way that benefits them.
(If you have a better term than information-computation asymmetry I'd love to know what it is!)
My family has several addicts in it. Some recovered, some not. Whenever you ask them "why?," it's usually "because it makes me feel normal." This is the re-wiring. Your body just becomes used to the dopamine party, and you feel kinda crummy when the dopamine is gone. The only way to get back to feeling normal is to do the addictive behavior. Left untreated for a long enough time, this can be a big factor in clinical depression.
It's not that it's bad for the human race. Betting has been going on since "I bet I can throw this rock further than you". It's probably older than prostitution. Much like alcohol, there's this "yeah we can ban it, but people will still do it, so we might as well collect money and regulate them, and try to treat the addicted"
It's the same argument when it comes to legalizing cannabis -- people are just going to smoke it, no matter your personal opinion on whether or not it's a good idea. The state is better off regulating for safety, legitimizing the business, and collecting taxes to offset the perceived social harm.
I'd counter that the definition of a consumer product is to trade a product with the consumer -- you provide something of value to them (the product), they provide something of value to you (the money).
I suppose the implication with addiction (and its analogies here) are that they provide a way to get something of value from the consumer (money) without providing them any value in return -- only the illusion of value. Its not to say that all addictive products are inherently value-less -- but that their perceived value is far greater than their actual value -- by design (with the perception being driven by addiction).
Your specific point -- that endorphin hit you get is a social reinforcement for a positive contribution to the community of Hacker News. Its not an addiction by design -- its using our internal wiring as it was intended (social contribution makes us feel happy)
I would add a caveat though that in some cases the addiction itself is a form of value.
Broccoli that is as addictive as chocolate might be more inherently valuable than normal broccoli - since consumers of it are more likely to keep eating it and stay healthier, and so it could be sold for a premium to those who value that.
Though if it later sold for as much as cocaine because of withdrawal symptoms...I would consider that a problem!
Not sure that was a counter as much as agreement, based on parent's comment after the quote :-)
EDIT: now I'm confused. The comment I thought you were replying to appears to be a different comment now and the original deleted. Maybe I'm going crazy.
This is my field of study. Sometimes It's difficult to draw the line between well-designed and addictive. My personal deal breaker is when play becomes a sinkhole for money.
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."
If you're interested, I highly recommend N. Schüll's Addiction by Design.
There is danger in creating artificial scarcity by cutting off gamblers after a threshold. It will likely result in an increase in desire and addiction. Consider Candy Crush, a game where players are cut off access to the game after a certain amount of plays. This has the result of increasing desire, habit formation, and decreasing burnout.
If there is a solution, I think it lies in educating the population and making access as inconvenient as possible.
A more moral strategy would be to foster user awareness with threshold mechanisms: "You spent more than [threshold]$ today. We won't accept any more purchases until tomorrow."
I wonder why mobile app stores haven't implemented such a mechanism.
2) The popup might "break the spell" and frustrate players. They would likely move to more compelling activities.
People who are severely addicted to slot machines don't care about winning or losing. They just want to keep the flow. Every distraction is detrimental to the experience.
The idea that purposefully creating a psychological dependence on something as unproductive as gambling is a good thing boggles the mind. I'm glad that my response is that of disgust rather than "admiration" or "envy" for these businesses.
I'm really just replying to this so that I can see my karma score go up and I can get a little endorphin hit, really.
But in all seriousness, it seems that the things that are most destructive are those things that have brains have been trained to drip feel-good chemicals - we distill the essence of that thing and make it easy and cheap to reproduce. Your brain likes it when you eat food because it keeps you alive? Well, it looks like a lot of that is coming from sugar/carbs. How about we put an absurd amount of sugar in water and call it "soda," adding a little caffeine for good measure, and sell it for $1/bottle? Your body reacts pleasantly (in the short-term) to fats? Here's a hamburger. Your body will eventually regret it, and overall the outcome will be negative, but the initial spike will be enough that you either never put the two together, or can't resist it.
Evolution has trained you to enjoy reproducing? Well really you just enjoy the act of sex. And actually not even sex per se, it looks like we can stimulate you with a few visuals and something touching you... porn becomes one of the biggest industries that exist.
Drugs are a much more literal version of that, distilling what makes your brain act certain ways in a literal sense. But in my mind whether or not something is a "drug" isn't binary; it's a continuum. I'd like to see someone try to take Diet Coke away from my cousin and then convince me it's not a drug.
So is candy crush an addiction? For some people, absolutely. They've moved themselves along that continuum.
The scary thing is if you have a consumer product, trying to make someone become addicted is pretty much the definition of what you do. Cigarettes are good business; would you start a cigarette company? Soda is good business, would you start a soda company? Brownies are good business, would you start a brownie company?
It seems to me that our minds haven't yet adapted to the reality that now the entire world of information is in our pockets, not to mention buzzing and sending us notifications. It's certainly no mystery why people are always so buried in their phones. It really concerns me personally, enough that I turn off all notifications and don't even allow myself to download certain apps, because I know I'd use them. My hosts file is full of sites that are addictive.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's something I think about a lot as the founder of a consumer product. I would love people to feel like they have to come back and use my site every day. I'm trying to create that feeling. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know.
Perhaps this is simplistic, but one question you might ask yourself is whether you're offering something of value or exploiting a psychological weaknesses inherent to humans.
>Evolution has trained you to enjoy reproducing? Well really you just enjoy the act of sex. And actually not even sex per se, it looks like we can stimulate you with a few visuals and something touching you... porn becomes one of the biggest industries that exist.
And then get flattened because it turns out that you can get the same stuff for free.
But I digress. Porn isn't a replacement for sex, it is just easier.
Condoms do allow you to have sex "pointlessly", ie. with no resulting children, does that make condom manufactures "wrong" somehow? They distilled sex down to a better version (sex without chance of kids or STDs), but it is unnatural, right?
However if condoms are okay, what puts the limit on porn? How is porn materially different from sex without kids? Aren't they just really points on a continuum?
I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point might be made clearer.
If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service.
I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.
When you look at the bad bits of wikipedia you see people who are hooked into sub-optimal feedback mechanisms.
There used to be a problem with "Vandal Patrol" - people would use tools to auto-revert edits and apply templates. Some of those people saw more reverts as being better, and would very rapidly revert and template, often catching good faith edits and users. (As far as I know that got mostly sorted out.)
When people ran for admin there was sometimes a tendency to just count number of edits, rather than look at the quality of edits.
But still, Wikipedia didn't want that, and they didn't deliberately set out to addict people in order to extract as much money as possible from them.
You have a very long row to hoe to establish that incidental advertising revenue is the same as literally taking money out of the pockets of the fixed-income elderly. Feel free to start, but 'till then I'm going to have a powerfully hard time taking your argument seriously.
And Wikipedia doesn't have advertising at all, so don't throw out your back lugging them goalposts.
The elderly have limited lifespans in addition to limited income, taking their time could be more costly than taking money in some cases. Money isn't the only thing of value in this world. I don't come down on the side of Google being responsible for YouTube addictions, nor of F2P game makers being resposible for IAP addictions in a general universal sense.
incidental, adj.: accompanying but not a major part of something. Which is why I picked the phrasing I did; advertising is completely and inarguably incidental to the consumption of the content that somebody is on YouTube to actually see. Is it Google's main revenue stream? Sure. Is it significantly impactful to the consumer? No, not really.
But let's take a step back. Do you actually intend to defend your assertion that advertising is the same in kind as literally taking money out of somebody's pocket? Or is this just the tacit admission that, no, you can't, so let's play definitional games?
There's no question whatsoever that Google/Youtube would not exist if they didn't have advertising revenue. This is not in any way a debatable point. It's not even a little bit "incidental".
My point, no matter how you attempt to recast it, is that Google/Youtube depend on an addictive dynamic. They do. You keep coming back. You keep watching the next video. they make money when you do that. You can try to recast that all you want, but if people didn't keep clicking on the next result or next video, Google/YouTube wouldn't make money.
Why do you think there's a related videos sidebar on YouTube? Why do YouTube videos end with more links to other videos?
Google et al. make money from advertisers, not from "addicted" people clicking on cat videos on Youtube. If you can't see the difference from the slot machines business model, I don't know what to tell you.
If you're concerned about the way the tech industry engineers addiction by exploiting bugs in our brains, check out Time Well Spent - http://TimeWellSpent.io
It's an (early-on) movement exploring ways to build products that respect our time and focus. (Watch the video for a good overview).
It absolutely should be. Also, it would be quite easy to help people self-regulate by creating a blacklist of credit card numbers which one could sign oneself up on and which all online casinos would have to use.
If you haven't seen the Southpark episode "Freemium isn't Free" you really should...hits the nail on the head on the addictive nature of free to play mobile games.
The casinos are not raking in the money from slots and table games like they were in decades prior. What used to be free or loss leaders for the casinos (rooms, buffets, shows, nightclubs, even the pools) are now massive revenue generators for the resorts.
Aside from that, casinos are also experimenting with games of skill (aside from poker) as possible ways to attract players now.
> The casinos are not raking in the money from slots and table games like they were in decades prior.
You're pretty far off base here. Just looking at the Las Vegas Sands Corp's 10K, their annual revenue by source:
Casino - $12.0B
Rooms - $1.54B
Food/Bev - $0.78B
Mall - $0.55B
Convention, retail, other - $0.55B
So well over 80% of their revenue still comes from gaming -- and this is all extremely high margin revenue. The Casino PR industry is making a lot of noise about how diverse their income streams are but it doesn't follow in reality.
I hope Ellen Degeneres & Duck Dynasty sleep tight with their images being used to brand these things. Seems one of the more dubious licensing agreements you could make.
A lot of people in this thread have moral qualms with slot machines. I know I did. However, I have since been heavily involved in the industry (not of my choosing), and have been able to better understand it. The slot industry is not the epitome of evil.
1) Slots can be fun- Most people think slots are bad because they are "addicting". They conclude that these machines are addicting in large part because they themselves can't wrap their heads why ANYONE would spend so much money on a game without some serious mental disorder. But that completely ignores the actual voices of the users (who slot designers actually talk to). Players actually enjoy the thrills of winning AND losing. We have to come to grips that what others consider fun is sometimes beyond our realm of imagination. And just because we don't understand the thrill of their experience, doesn't mean the machine is tricking them. I don't see most people confused when their 75 year old grandmother doesn't like Call of Duty.
2) Spending lots of money on slots isn't necessarily a symptom of addiction- I have met so many people (Completely normal, wealthy people) who have a limit of spending $30/day on slots in their spare time. That is, they spend around 10k/year on slots. Anyone seeing 10k/year would think that this person was addicted, but they don't measure his/her background. Slot players tend to be older, they tend to spend on little else (they don't go out to bars!), tend to have a good amount of free time, and tend to have a good bit of savings. They - of all people- should be allowed to play slots if they so choose to. Obviously the money society spends on slots would be better used to feed some starving child or build some fancy new lifesaving technology. But that's more of a critique of capitalism, not just slots.
3) Casinos don't target gambling addicts- Of course slot makers do basic A/B testing of their games. But it's not like casinos put ads outside of Gambling Addicts Anonymous meetings. They target people in general, and gambling addicts will always find a way too them. When do we start placing the responsibility on the end user?
4) Is the rate of problem gamblers (gamblers who spend a lot of money and can't) who use slot machines higher than the rate of alcoholics? Shopping addicts? Drug addicts? Do you suggest banning alcohol because some people can't handle it?
5) Casinos and slots are heavily regulated by what they can and cannot do. Moreover, taxes on casinos do go to fund problem gambling help, schools, and a lot of great other things.
In the end, unless you actually take an effort to learn how to enjoy slots, you won't understand why people like it. And because of that, you will just vilify the industry. Eerily similar to the war on drugs.
Thanks for the perspective. I read Addiction by Design a year ago or so and had formed quite a negative opinion of all slot machines. You make some good points though, and caused me to lean back towards neutral on the question of whether the world would be better off with or without slots. If I ever visit Vegas some time I'll have the opportunity to form a stronger judgement I think, but I'll hold off until then.
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046261045791233...
[2] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-12-monetizing-...