AnthroNow 4-2 AnthroNow - Natasha Dow...A gambler’s hand resting on the console of a video poker terminal, his thumb positioned in the bill acceptor slot and his finger poised to

features

Gambled Away

Video Poker and Self-Suspension

Natasha Dow Schüll

Patsy, a green-eyed brunette in her mid-forties, began gambling soon after shemoved to Las Vegas from California in the1980s with her husband, a military officerwho had been restationed at Nellis AirForce Base. Video poker machines had beenintroduced to the local gambling market inthe late 1970s, and she discovered them onher trips to the grocery store. “My husbandwould give me money for food and milk,but I’d get stuck at the machines on the wayin, and it would be gone in twenty minutes.

. . . I would be gone too, I’d just zone intothe screen and disappear.”

Ten years later, Patsy’s gambling had pro-gressed to a point where she played videopoker before work, at lunchtime, on all herbreaks, after work, and all weekend long.“My life revolved around the machines,even the way I ate,” she recalls as we talkoutside the Gamblers Anonymous meetingwhere we had met. Patsy dined with herhusband and daughter only when the threemet in casinos; she would eat rapidly, thenexcuse herself to the bathroom so that shecould gamble. Most often she gambledalone, then slept in her van in the parkinglot. “I would dream of the machines, Iwould be punching numbers all night.” Eat-ing alone, sleeping alone, Patsy achieved asort of libidinal autonomy. Her time, her so-cial exchanges, her bodily functions, andeven her dreams were oriented aroundgambling. “When I wasn’t playing,” she tells

Natasha Dow Schüll Gambled Away 1

Woman playing video poker at a drugstore in Las Vegas.

ndsTypewritten Text

ndsTypewritten Text

ndsTypewritten TextFROM: Anthropology Now 4: 2 (2012)

ndsTypewritten Text

ndsTypewritten Text

ndsTypewritten Text

me, “my whole being was directed to get-ting back into that zone. It was a machinelife.”

* * *

Since the mid-1980s in the United States,there has been a dramatic turn away fromsocial forms of gambling, played at tables,to asocial forms of gambling, played atvideo terminals. Slot machines, formerlyrelegated to the sidelines of casinos floors,today generate twice as much revenue as all“live games” put together. As gamblers de-scribe it, machine gambling is a solitary, ab-sorptive activity in which they enter a disso-ciative state—a “zone,” as they call it—inwhich a sense of time, space, monetaryvalue, social roles, and sometimes eventheir very sense of existence dissolves. “Youcan erase it all at the machines—you caneven erase yourself,” a middle-aged elec-tronics engineer named Randall tells me.Machine play conjures a cognitive and psy-chological state virtually free of the events,difficulties, and contingencies that life en-tails.

When machine gamblers began to pres-ent themselves in growing numbers for ad-diction treatment, clinicians and researchersproposed the term “escape gambling” (asopposed to “action gambling”) to describetheir experience of withdrawal. “The consis-tency of the experience that’s described bymy patients,” said Robert Hunter, a Las Ve-gas psychologist who has carved out a ther-apeutic niche in the treatment of gamblingaddiction, “is that of numbness or escape.. . . They don’t talk about excitement—theytalk about climbing into the screen and get-ting lost.” By the mid-1990s in Las Vegas,

the vast majority attending GamblersAnonymous meetings played machines ex-clusively, and most preferred the game ofvideo poker. While all contemporary slotmachines offer a choice of how many cred-its to bet on each spin, video poker goes astep further by allowing players to decidewhich cards—of those they are “dealt” bythe machine—they wish to hold or discardin order to make winning hands. As Hunterunderstands it, the game so completely con-centrates the players’ attention on a series ofspecific choices that anything about theirlives that is troubling—physically, emotion-ally, or socially—gets blotted out.

What can the self-dissolving zone of in-tensive video poker play tell us about thediscontents of the self in contemporaryAmerican life? More than a symptom of theextreme tendencies of individual gamblingaddicts, it offers a window onto more gen-eral predicaments and anxieties and insightinto the sort of technological encountersthat individuals are likely to employ in themanagement of these predicaments andanxieties. Computers, video games, mobilephones, iPods, and the like have become ameans through which people can managetheir affective states and create a personalbuffer zone against the uncertainties andworries of their world, and video poker is acase in point. The game allows players tosuspend key elements of contemporarylife—market-based exchange, monetaryvalue, and conventional time—along withthe social expectation for self-maximizing,risk-managing behavior that accompaniesthem. The activity achieves this suspensionnot by transcending or canceling out theseelements and expected modes of conduct,

2 anthropology NOW Volume 4 • Number 2 • September 2012

but by isolating and intensifying them to thepoint where they turn into something else.By following this process, it becomes possi-ble to track how shared social conditionsand normative behavioral ideals contributeto shaping gambling addicts’ seeminglyaberrant “machine lives,” and to discern inthose lives a kind of immanent critique ofbroader discontents.

Suspending Choice

Since the late 1970s, in the context of di-minishing governmental regulation and ris-ing expectations for individual self-regula-tion and responsibility, citizens of capitalistdemocracies have come to regard the self“as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhanceand capitalize on existence itself throughcalculated acts and investments”; lifechoices are expressed and evaluatedthrough a vocabulary of “incomes, alloca-tions, costs, savings, even profits.”1 Contem-porary selfhood is a sort of “privatized actu-arialism” in which individuals reflexivelyapply to their own lives the same tech-niques used to audit and otherwise ensurethe financial health of corporations andgovernment bureaucracies.2

As in the spheres of insurance, finance,and global politics, the application of risk-assessment techniques at the scale of indi-vidual lives is a means for controlling—andeven profiting from—the particular contin-gencies of post-Fordist, finance-based capi-talism. Specifically, the model actuarial selfis expected to indemnify itself against theincreased risks of unemployment that haveaccompanied the emergence of “flexible,”

short-term regimes of service-based laborand the eclipse of social-welfare programs,while simultaneously reaping the economicrewards that come with exercising theirown flexible and sometimes risky responsesto this field of contingency. To fulfill thisdouble expectation, individuals must be ex-tremely autonomous, highly rational, andever-alert masters of themselves and theirdecisions; constant contingency manage-ment is the task.

Practically speaking, this task is framedin terms of choice making. As the psycholo-gist Barry Schwartz points out, the pressureto sift through an “oppressive abundance”of choice can tyrannize and debilitate, in-creasing the potential for disappointment,regret, and guilt, and leaving individuals“feeling barely able to manage” their lives.3

It is not merely the abundance of choicethat burdens, for citizens of contemporarycapitalist societies must, more often thannot, make those choices without the knowl-edge, foresight, or resources that would en-able them to be the maximizing, actuarialvirtuosi of self-enterprise they are exhortedto be. Confronted with multiple choices andrisks, they base their conduct as much onemotion, affect, and reflex as on calculativerationality.

What links can be drawn between the of-ten perplexing circumstances of choicemaking, the cultural imperative for individ-ual contingency management, and the zoneof intensive video poker? While at play, in-dividuals are continually in the position ofmaking consequential choices—choices,that is, between right and wrong decisions,continuing a winning streak or ending a los-ing streak, ramping up or reducing their


magnitude or speed and investment, and soforth. In this sense, machine gambling mul-tiplies occasions for the kinds of risk takingand choice making that are demanded ofsubjects in contemporary capitalist soci-eties. At the same time, it takes the edge offthe task of contingency management by dis-tilling risks and choices into a digitized,programmatic form. In effect, the activitycontracts the scope and stakes of riskychoice; although gambling has very realconsequences in players’ daily lives, withinthe moment-to-moment process of repeatplay inconsequentiality holds sway. In thesmooth zone of video poker, choices be-

come a means for tuning out the worldlydecisions they would ordinarily concern;every choice, that is, becomes a choice tocontinue the zone.

Suspending Social Exchange

The tuning out of out worldly choices, con-tingencies, and consequences in the zone ofmachine gambling depends on the exclu-sion of other people. “I don’t want to have ahuman interface” says Julie, a psychologystudent at the University of Nevada. “I can’tstand to have anybody within my zone.”


A gambler’s hand resting on the console of a video poker terminal, his thumb positioned in the bill acceptor slot andhis finger poised to press the “Bet Max” button.

Machine gamblers go to great lengths to en-sure their isolation. Some select machinesin corners or at the end of a row, while oth-ers place coin cups upside-down on adja-cent machines to prevent people from sit-ting beside them. “I resent someonebreaking my trance” says Randall, whocashes out and moves to another machine ifsomeone talks to him while he is playing.Sharon has learned to buy a liter of Pepsiand two packs of cigarettes before sitting atthe machines, so that cocktail waitresseswill not interrupt her. “I put my foot up onone side and that’s the final barrier: Leaveme alone. I want to hang a DO NOT DIS-TURB sign on my back.”

Even as the zone ultimately effaces theirsense of self, machine gamblers’ rigorousexclusion of relationality appears, at leastinitially, to be an act of extreme autonomyand even selfishness. In this sense, videopoker would seem to fit the script for themaximizing self—a being who is expectedto pursue its goals without being hinderedby human ties, commitments, and depend-encies. “Other people break the flow and Ican’t stand it,” says Julie of live-card gam-ing. “I have to get up and go to a machine,where nobody holds me back, where there’sno interference to stop me, where I canhave my free rein—go all the way with noobstacles.” Other people figure as a kind of“interference” that acts as a drag on herpropensities.

Yet alongside machine gamblers’ self-in-terested drive to pursue the zone unhin-dered by others runs an equally strong cur-rent of self-protection and distrust of socialrelations. This becomes readily apparent inthe comparison with the interpersonal en-

gagement of traditional card gambling. “Inlive games,” Julie observes, “you have totake other people into account, other mindsmaking decisions. Like when you’re com-peting for a promotion—you’re dealing withother people who decide which one is thebest. You can’t get into their minds, youcan’t push their buttons, you can’t do any-thing about it—just sit back and hope andwait. But when you’re on a machine, youdon’t compete against other people.” Livecard play demands that she “take other peo-ple into account” in order not to be dis-placed or passed over by them, and yet, per-versely, provides no clear feedback onwhich she might base her calculations orhedge her bets. The immersive zone of ma-chine play, by contrast, offers a reprievefrom the nebulous and risky calculative ma-trix of social interaction, shielding her fromthe monitoring gaze of others and relievingher of the need to monitor them in return.

Lola, a buffet waitress and mother of four,describes this reprieve as a kind of vacation:“If you work with people every day, the lastthing you want to do is talk to another per-son when you’re free. You want to take a va-cation from people. With the machinethere’s no person that can talk back, no hu-man contact or involvement or communica-tion, just a little square box, a screen.” Ma-chine gamblers like Lola frequently connecttheir preference for the asocial, robotic pro-cedure of machine play to the hypersocial-ity demanded by their jobs—in real estate,accounting, insurance, sales, and other ser-vice fields. In the 1980s, the sociologist Ar-lie Hochschild proposed the term “emo-tional labor” to characterize the demandsplaced on many workers in the postindus-


trial, service economy.4 While physical ma-chine labor carries the risk of alienationfrom one’s body, emotional labor carries therisk of becoming estranged from one’s feel-ings and affects as they are processed andmanaged in the marketplace of social rela-tions. Josie, an insurance agent, experiencesthis kind of emotional exhaustion: “All daylong I have to help people with their fi-nances and their scholarships, help them beresponsible. I’m selling insurance, sellinginvestments, I’m taking their money—andI’ve got to put myself in a position wherethey will believe what I’m selling is true. Af-ter work, I have to go to the machines.”There, she finds respite from the incessantactuarial practices and interpersonal pres-sures that her vocation entails. “I was safeand away,” Josie elaborates. “Nobody talkedto me, nobody asked me any questions, no-body wanted any bigger decision than if Iwanted to keep the king or the ace.”

Patsy recalls her work as a welfare officerat the State of Nevada’s food stamp office:“All day long I’d hear sad stories of no food,unwanted pregnancy, violence. But it allslid right off me because I was so wrappedup in those machines. I was like a robot:Next. Snap. What’s your zip code? I wasn’thuman.” In the simplified, mechanical ex-change with gambling machines, she re-moves herself from the complicated and of-ten insurmountable needs and worries ofothers, to a point where she herself be-comes robotlike, impervious to human dis-tress and her inability to assuage it. “Themachines were like heaven,” Patsy remem-bers, “because I didn’t have to talk to them,I just had to feed them money.” The digi-tized process of “feeding” and response is a

form of exchange emptied of the in-scrutabilities of social relations. “The inter-action was clean cut, the parameters clearlydefined,” Sharon notes. “I decided whichcards to keep, which to discard, caseclosed. All I had to do was pick YES or NO.”Video poker gamblers enter a kind of safetyzone in which choices do not implicatethem in webs of uncertainty and conse-quence; choices are made without refer-ence to others and seemingly impact noone.

Suspending Money Value

At the same time that machine gambling al-ters the nature of exchange to a point whereit becomes disconnected from relationships,it alters the nature of money’s role in the so-cial world. Money typically serves to facili-tate exchanges with others and establish asocial identity, yet in the asocial, insulatedencounter with the gambling machinemoney becomes a currency of disconnec-tion from others and even oneself. “You puta twenty dollar bill in the machine and it’sno longer a twenty dollar bill, it has novalue in that sense,” Julie tells me. “It’s like atoken, it excludes money value completely.”“Money has no value, no significance,” saysanother, “it’s just this thing—just get me inthe zone, that’s all.” “In the zone state,”echoes a gambler named Katrina, “there isno real money—there are only credits to bemaintained.”

Attesting to the conversion of moneyvalue into zone value, Sharon admits thatshe would rather “play off” a jackpot thancash it out, as this would mean halting her


play to wait for the machine to drop herwinnings, or, in the event that its hopper islow, for attendants to come pay her off. “It’sstrange,” says Lola, “but winning can disap-point me, especially if I win right away.”Winning too much, too soon, or too oftencan interrupt the tempo of play and disturbthe harmonious regular-ity of the zone. Julie ex-plains: “If it’s a moderateday—win, lose, win,lose—you keep the samepace. But if you win big,it can prevent you fromstaying in the zone.” If in the everydayeconomy time is spent to earn money,within the economy of the zone money isspent to buy time. “You’re not playing formoney,” says Julie, “you’re playing forcredit—credit so you can sit there longer,which is the goal. It’s not about winning, it’sabout continuing to play.”

Paradoxically, in order for money to loseits value as a means of acquisition, thatvalue must be at stake in the gambling ex-change. “The transaction must involvemoney,” the gambling scholar Charles Liv-ingstone elaborates, “because money is thecentral signification of our age, the material-ization of social relations and thus thebridge to everyone and everything that is tobe had in modernity.”5 It is possible for asense of monetary value to become sus-pended in machine gambling not becausemoney is absent, but because the activitymobilizes it in such a way that it no longerworks as it typically does. Money becomesthe bridge away from everyone and every-thing, leading to a zone beyond value, withno social or economic significance.

When credits get too low, money’s every-day value moves to the fore and begins tomatter once again. “I get really tense if Ionly have twenty credits left,” says Lola,“the tension, the anxiousness, starts build-ing in me; all I really want at that point isenough credits to just keep playing.” “When

you start losing,” Julietells us, “the pace picksup—you’re running outof player credit, you’rerunning out of money. . ..” As the worldly value-charge of money intrudes

upon the zone, it introduces tension wheretensionlessness is sought and relationalitywhere dissociation is sought. “In the back ofmy head I know it’s going to end, I know thetransition is going to come—no longer theworld according to the zone, but the realworld. The things I escaped from startcrowding back into my brain.” In the mo-ment of its total loss, money returns to thescene as a tangible limit and a medium ofdependency. “Money disappears in thezone,” writes Livingstone, “yet in the mo-ment when the money’s gone, so too is ‘thezone.’”6 The value of money reasserts itselfprecisely because money in its conven-tional, real-world state remains the underly-ing means of access to the zone.

This is not to say that money’s real-worldvalue remains unaffected by zone value.“Gambling changed my relationship tomoney,” remembers Randall. “I’d conservegas so I’d have the money to gamble, andinstead of going to the grocery store regu-larly, I’d wait to go to Wal-Mart and do it allat one time—that way I wouldn’t have towaste the gas to go more than once. I econ-


It’s not about winning,

it’s about continuing to play.

omized.” Caught between the zone and theordinary world, gamblers “economize” in aregister of value that has no clear referencepoint.

“In a society such as ours,” asks the cul-tural historian Jackson Lears in his book ongambling in America, “where responsibilityand choice are exalted, where capital accu-mulation is a duty and cash a sacred cow,what could be more subversive than thereadiness to reduce money to mere countersin a game?”7 Because gamblers play withmoney rather than for it, he concludes thatthey pose a challenge to the maximizingethos of American culture. Yet as their “ma-chine lives” show us, despite their seemingrenunciation of money they continue to act,however perversely, within the mainstreammonetary value system. This becomes read-ily apparent when one considers gamblers’extensive know-how and use of everyday fi-nance and banking practices.

“I always had income coming in,” Patsytells me, “every week it was something—a$600 paycheck, $500 child support, myhusband’s retirement checks. We alwayshad like three credit cards so if I had a badspell I’d just put it on the cards.” The resources of a conventional financiallifestyle—mortgages, credit cards, bankloans, and alimony payments—supportPatsy’s compulsive gambling, and occasion-ally vice versa: “One time I had maxed outthe three cards, but then I hit a jackpot andpaid them all off.” This sort of fiscal triagedoes not exactly subvert the logic of the ac-tuarial self; if anything, it intensifies or“maxes out” that logic. Although it mayseem contrary to calculative rationality, itshares something with the quotidian shuf-

fling of debt among credit sources that hasbecome typical among Americans.

Although gambling addicts’ treatment ofmoney neither neatly renounces nor neatlyrehearses the workings of the everyday valuesystem, it alters this system in a way thatbrings its discontents and contradictions tothe fore. As Josie told us earlier, by day sheadvises others on how they might best insureagainst future losses: “I have to help peoplebe responsible. . . . I’ve got to put myself in aposition where they will believe what I’mselling is true.” One gets the sense that sheherself does not quite believe in what she isselling; it is as if her awareness that the levelsof risk assigned to lives and investments bythe insurance industry are always more arbi-trary than stated leads her to take greater per-sonal financial risks. “After work, I have togo to the machines.” Her gambling both em-ploys and rejects the actuarial logic of insur-ance and the monetary value that undergirdsit. “In my life before gambling,” she tells me,“money was almost like a God, I had to haveit. But with the gambling, money had novalue, no significance, it was just thisthing—just get me in the zone, that’s all. . . .You lose value, until there’s no value at all.Except the zone—the zone is your God.”

Suspending Clock Time

The element of time is another resource ofcalculative selfhood that gambling addictsmanage to convert into a means of escapethrough their machine play—again, by dis-tilling its real-world value to a point where itassumes another value altogether. Whilegambling addicts may remain for seventeen



Top: Video poker alcove at Lucky’s Supermarket in southwest Las Vegas. Bottom: AMPM gas station innorth Las Vegas.

hours or even whole weekends at ma-chines, the “clock time” (as they call it) bywhich those long stretches are measured“stops mattering,” “sits still,” is “gone” or“lost.” Like money, time in the zone be-comes a kind of credit whose value shifts inline with the rhythms of machine play; gam-blers speak of spending time, salvaging it,squandering it. Randall, noting a phenome-nological kinship between his video pokerplay and his race car driving, comments thatboth activities make him feel he is “bend-ing” time: “I go into a different time frame,like in slow motion . . . it’s a whole othertime zone.”

Just as gamblers must maintain sufficientmonetary credit to keep the zone state go-ing, they must maintain sufficient temporalcredit; too little time, and the real world willimpinge upon the zone—work shifts to be-gin, doctors appointments to be kept, chil-dren to be picked up from school. Whentime begins to “run out,” players thus seekto extract more and more plays from it. AsJulie describes in the following passage, sheextends zone time by constantly resettingthe endpoint of her play:

When the time comes to leave and the

things I escaped from start crowding back

into my brain, I find myself rationalizing,

Well, I don’t really have to go today . . .

and I ask an attendant to hold my machine

while I run to the payphone to call and

buy myself more time, and then back to

continue, and now there’s three more

hours. And when those three hours are up,

I think, I’ll have to save money for the

phone calls I’ll have to make to cancel all

the appointments I am going to miss. . . .

I’m thinking of how to arrange things so

that I can stay there, how to economize.

In the intervals of tension that threatenthe continuation of her play, Julie calculatesin two registers of time at once—clock timeand zone time. How can she parlay the for-mer into the latter? Or, as she asks above,how to economize? At the edges of thezone, Julie must remain mindful of the coinsshe needs to “save” to cover the cost ofphone calls that might free up clock timeand thus buy her more zone time. (Again,we see that the zone never entirely loses itseconomic market metric, for real-worldmoney is what buys the clock time that buyszone time.)

When she can buy herself no more timeand real-world demands press upon her,Julie resorts to speed, as she does when herplay credits are running dangerously low.“When I absolutely have to be somewhere,then I have to play as much as I can possiblyplay before leaving. I start chasing, I playfaster and faster—Oh God, I only have fif-teen more minutes, ten more minutes. . . .”In the zone, she experiences time as eventdriven rather than clock driven, elasticrather than rigid.

If real-world temporal tendencies expressthemselves in the zone and in gamblers’ ad-diction to it, it is also the case that the tech-


When I absolutely have to be

somewhere, . . . I play faster and

faster—Oh God, I only have fifteen

more minutes, ten more minutes.

nologically accelerated temporality of themachine zone enters into and saturatesgamblers’ experience of real-world time.“Time in general, not just when I’m play-ing,” Sharon notes, “becomes very dis-torted. I feel like I can manipulate it veryeasily, salvage much more than I can from asmall unit of it: go grocery shopping on theway to the casino, and while I’m there makea doctor’s appointment on the cellularphone, and then on the way home get theshoelaces I need. . . . Everything I do is rela-tive to gambling time.”

“I’d be later and later and later to work,”Patsy recalls. “At break time, I’d ask my su-pervisor, Do you mind if I go to the bank?—and I’d already be out the door. My sense oftime was totally out the door. I was justwound. I’d win a Royal [Flush] and I’d beticked off because I’d have to wait for themto come pay me off. The other workerswould look at the clock when I came backand I would think, What are you looking atthe clock for? Mind your own business.” Atevery chance, Patsy attempts to escapeclock time, such that she becomes almostlike a clock herself: she is “wound”; she is“ticked off” as time ticks by during her waitfor a jackpot payoff; when she returns towork, resentful co-workers look pointedly atthe clock. “When I wasn’t playing,” she toldus earlier, “my whole being was directed togetting back into that zone. It was a ma-chine life.”

Machine Life

“I was like the walking dead,” Patsy remem-bers. “I went through all the motions, but I

wasn’t really living, because I was alwayschanneled, super-tunnel vision, to get backto that machine.” “Awake, my whole daywas structured around getting out of thehouse to go gamble,” echoes Sharon. “Atnight, I would dream about the machine—I’d see it, the cards flipping, the wholescreen. I’d be playing, making decisionsabout which cards to keep and which tothrow away.” In Sharon’s account, the gameinterface structures her waking life anddream life with its unending flow of minute“decisions.”

As we have seen, a complicated relation-ship exists between the technologically me-diated mini-decisions that compose videopoker and the ever-proliferating choices, de-cisions, and risks that actuarial selves facein free-market society. The activity narrowsthe bandwidth of choice, shrinking it downto a limited universe of rules, a formula. Al-though choices are multiplied, they are dig-itally reformatted as a self-dissolving flow ofrepetitious action that unfolds in the ab-sence of “choosing” as such. In this sense, itis not the case that gambling addicts are be-yond choice but that choice itself, as for-matted by machines, becomes the mediumof their compulsion. “I was addicted tomaking decisions in an unmessy way,”Sharon remarks, “to engaging in somethingwhere I knew what the outcome would be.”

“Most people define gambling as purechance, where you don’t know the out-come,” she goes on. “But I do know: eitherI’m going to win, or I’m going to lose. . . . Soit isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s oneof the few places I’m certain about any-thing.” Counterintuitively, what gamblersseek through their engagements with gam-


bling machines is a zone of reliability,safety, and affective calm that removes themfrom the volatility they experience in theirsocial, financial, and personal lives. Al-though the activity deals in chance, its holdsworldly contingencies in a kind of abeyanceby immediately resolving bets with thequick press of a button, admitting gamblersinto an otherwise elusive zone of certainty.In this zone, aspects of life central to con-temporary capitalism and the service econ-omy—competitive exchange between indi-viduals, money as the chief symbol or formof this exchange, and the market-based tem-poral framework within which it is con-ducted and by which its value is meas-ured—are significantly altered. Video pokerdistills these aspects of life into their ele-mentary forms (namely, risk-based interac-tion, actuarial economic thinking, and com-pressed, elastic time) and applies them to acourse of action formatted in such a waythat they cease to serve as tools for self-en-terprise and instead serve as the means tocontinue play.

Yet the suspension of the self and its actu-arial imperative is never entirely complete.This incompleteness is reflected in the am-bivalence that gamblers express toward the“choices” they face while gambling, de-scribing them as at once emancipatory andentrapping, annihilatory and capacitating,reassuring and demonic. Lola, the buffetwaitress, speaks of “resting in the machine,”then later in her narrative describes videopoker’s relentless stream of card choosing as commanding—the activity “hooks,”“holds,” and “captures” her attention. “Youhave no choice but to concentrate on the

screen,” remarks Julie, “you simply cannotthink about anything except which cardsyou are going to choose to keep and whichyou are going to choose to discard.” Even asgambling addicts in the zone strive for re-lease from the procession of choices theyface in their daily lives, they remain caughtin the predicaments of the enterprising self.

Notes

This article is drawn from Natasha Dow Schüll’sbook, Addiction by Design: Machine Gamblingin Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012).Used with permission.

All photos are by the author.

1. Rose 1999, 164.2. O’Malley 1996, 198. 3. Schwartz 2005. 4. Hochschild 1983.5. Livingstone 2005, 533.6. Livingstone 2005, 533.7. Lears 2003.

References

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart.Berkeley: University of California.

Lears, Jackson. 2003. Something for Nothing:Luck in America. New York: Viking Press.

Livingstone, Charles. 2005. “Desire and the Con-sumption of Danger: Electronic Gaming Ma-chines and the Commodification of Interiority.”Addiction Research and Theory 13 (6): 523–34.

O’Malley, Pat. 1996. “Risk and Responsibility.”In A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose, eds. Fou-


cault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liber-alism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 189–208.

Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Re-framing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Schwartz, Barry. 2005. The Paradox of Choice:Why More Is Less. New York: ECCO.

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist

and associate professor in the Program in Sci-

ence, Technology, and Society at the Massachu-

setts Institute of Technology. Her book, Addiction

by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

(Princeton University Press, 2012), explores the

feedback between the technological configura-

tion of gambling activities and the experience of

addiction.


Documents

AnthroNow 4-2 AnthroNow - Natasha Dow...A gambler’s hand resting on the console of a video poker terminal, his thumb positioned in the bill acceptor slot and his finger poised to