For this weeks’ critical play, I will be doing a deep-dive into gambling games such as Poker. For the purposes of this play, I will not be engaging with such games due to their addictive nature but I will weave in my practical experiences playing them in the past alongside the theoretical ideas presented in the book Addition By Design: Machine Gambling. Developed in the United States (and evolved from old-school French card games), Poker was more so a cultural phenomenon that came about in the 19th century. Although it has traveled across several cultures, it is credited to originate in the states by French settlers in New Orleans. Poker is played with 52 French-suited cards where players are dealt cards and make bets into a communal pot based on the value of their hand. The value of one’s hand is determined by the games’ rules, as shown below. At each turn, players can choose to continue betting or “fold”effectively forfeiting their money to that point in the round. Players can discard and draw new cards, and the player with the highest-ranking hand at the end wins the pot. Values of hands are shown below.
In particular, poker can put people at risk of addiction as it capitalizes on peoples’ weaknesses to peer pressure or influence, distorted views of risk/reward, and the illusion of control and skill over what is truly a game of chance. While playing poker in the past, I saw firsthand how fun and exciting the social deduction element of the game was. For example, the ability to call out one’s bluff or poker face was filled with adrenaline. Alternatively, many players would tempt others not to fold their hand as a show of power; intense eye contact coupled with phrases such as “Don’t be a loser” or “Don’t quit now” constructed an inherent power dynamic that blurred the boundaries of the game and real-world relationships. As players can use peer pressure to their advantage to continue building up the pot, it creates a gameplay environment where emotional influences and social dynamics supersede rational assessment of the true odds and risks involved. Thus, players make decisions based more on fear of looking weak or desire to assert dominance rather than optimal strategic play, perpetuating addictive cycles of making moves to simply save face or gain psychological supremacy over others. Another game where such tendencies shine is Texas Hold’em, where one is engaged in bluffing, reading tells, and maintaining a poker face. Unlike Poker, however, Texas Hold’em offer a single standardized version of gameplay where opportunities to engage in addictive behaviors are relatively static, whereas the ones in Poker are ever-changing and dynamic due to the number of variations that can be played (namely, Texas Hold’em is one variant of Poker). While the versatile design of Poker allows for several variations to be played, it has great potential for addictive and compulsive behavior if not enjoyed in moderation. Instead of reshaping this game (which is an impossible effort due to its cultural significance), understanding specific guardrails game designers can embed in their design process to mitigate addictive tendencies in future games is critical.
Further, when playing games such as poker, there is also a false assessment of the risk one takes as it relates to its respective reward. In other words, games such as poker (and virtual slot machines) provide illusions of skill or control to the player that give them a sense of skill despite outcomes that may be truly up to chance, randomness, or the game system. For example, in poker this could be the ability to bluff or read other players, which creates an illusion of control over the outcome even though the cards themselves are randomly dealt. The skills of reading opponents and making bets accordingly can distort a player’s perception of the true underlying odds and risks involved. Compared to games such as virtual slot machines where virtual reel mapping allows the game to mask true odds with an illusory, smaller number of symbols, gambling relies on the masking of actual odds to create an illusion that the player has more control over the outcome than they think. Such illusions are reinforced when players experience near-misses: while in a poker game, a player may be a single card suite away from a royal flush, in a lever-based gambling game, where they need to get the same three symbols in a row, they could be off-by-one. The near-miss effect dictates that experiences like these, where players narrowly miss a potentially lucrative outcome, increase motivation to continue playing despite the objective unlikelihood of winning.
