For better or worse, this week’s critical play lined up with a trip I took with some friends to Las Vegas. There, we played Slots, Roulette, Blackjack, and more, but I spent most of my time playing Texas Holdem Poker. All of these games are games of chance, but to different degrees. Through giving players a sense of control over the outcome, casinos use games of chance to give players a false sense of hope – that by willing something into being, we can affect a predetermined mathematical outcome.
From our first stop at a casino, it was clear that many people there seemed addicted to gambling. We started our trip by playing some slot machines, which dominated the floors of most casinos. I didn’t feel very drawn to the slot machines, in part because there were so many people using them who reminded me of zombies, pressing the stop button over and over, pulling the levers, and staring at the screens. Like Jacques Ellul, a philosopher and sociologist, stated in the companion reading, “Man is reduced to the level of a catalyst. He resembles a slug [fake token] inserted into a slot machine: he starts the operation without participating in it.” The author writes, “[casinos] preserve the illusion of a mechanically actuated reel mechanism so as to perpetuate players’ sense of being involved with a game… Although game outcomes are determined at the precise instant that the SPIN button is initially touched, gamblers using such “stop” features seem to feel they have an effect on outcomes and are known to persist at play for significantly longer periods than they otherwise would.”
Then, we moved on to Roulette. When playing Roulette, the sense of false agency was even stronger. We played on a machine with a minimum bet of $5, and the game forces the player to choose their bets – whether the ball will land on red or black, even or odd, which number, which range. All of these choices, made by tapping a machine, give the player a strong sense of control over the outcome. Being able to choose each bet meant that I would feel responsible for making the “wrong” or “right” bet, and kept me engaged even when losing money. My friends and I started to feel that our wills could influence the outcome of each ball roll, that our actions would have an influence on the outcome of each round. It certainly kept us playing Roulette for longer, since the betting mechanism was very engaging.
Finally, we played Blackjack and Texas Holdem Poker. These games, for me, were the most dangerous and addicting. Both of these games have a great deal of player agency – there is choice, at each turn, and there are mathematically sound choices that can minimize losses and maximize gains, which, coupled with my misplaced hope that I would win big and the right card would always come, was a recipe for disaster. When playing these games, I fell victim to the “ghostlike will” of the Random Number Generator. When the wrong card came, even when I had made the mathematically sound decision (i.e. in Blackjack the dealer would hit a Blackjack and I would bust), it would only encourage me to play more. However, there was another factor in these games: other players and player psychology. Because we were playing both at real tables, with real players, I would feel that I could try to “read” them, and intuit information about their cards from their actions and reactions, or the type of player I had typecast them as. In these games, my hubris meant I ended up losing hundreds of dollars :(.
I consider myself and my friends to be rational, logical people. We all know, definitionally, that casinos will stack the odds against us, that it doesn’t … but I couldn’t help but watch the roulette ball spin and spin and think that whispering “please land on black” would influence the outcome. But after a while, even winning became unsatisfying and losing money became unthinkable. We had certainly entered “the zone,” which the paper calls “a state of ongoing, undiminished possibility that came to trump the finite re- ward of a win.” The casino’s “entrapping mechanisms” had worked once again. We attributed agency to computerized devices and believed that our hope could influence mathematical randomness.
