The game I played is Blackjack, specifically the web-app blackjack I accessed solo on my laptop via the Washington Post Games website. The target audience is adults 18+ with an interest in casino-style card games, though the free-to-play structure and polished UI means the actual audience skews younger than a Vegas floor would. Blackjack is one of the oldest gambling games in recorded history, with no single developer, though this particular digital version follows standard Vegas rules. Each round, the player and dealer are both dealt two cards; the player’s are face up while one of the dealer’s stays hidden. The goal is to build a hand closer to 21 than the dealer without going over. Players choose to hit (take another card), stand (keep their hand), or double down (double the bet and take exactly one more card). I argue that Blackjack is more addiction-prone than pure chance games like slots precisely because it gives players just enough real time skill to feel in control while hiding the randomness that actually determines outcomes. This is what Schull calls manufactured incalculability, the deliberate engineering of a gap between how much control players believe they have and how much they actually do, and it becomes morally impermissible when, as this platform demonstrates, design decisions actively exploit that illusion rather than correct it.
Blackjack presents itself as the thinking person’s gambling game. The ceiling set at 21 is visible to both player and dealer, making a basic strategy a solved decision tree. Koster argues that fun is what the brain feels when it is absorbing patterns for learning purposes, and by that definition, blackjack earns its appeal, as you can actually get better at it; you can learn to read the dealer’s exposed card and estimate exposure. However, Koster also warns that the more rigidly constructed a game is, the more limited it will be, because the pattern eventually resolves and boredom sets in. Blackjack avoids this not through good design but through deception, as you master the decision to make but can never master the result.
Take this example of a round I played against the dealer. The card underneath the dealer’s King is the mystery chip that Schüll describes because it contains the game’s script for chance. In slot machines, this is represented as the microchip running RNG behind the scenes. In blackjack, it takes the form of a physical card face down, which feels transparent to the player, making it more dangerous. The difference is that slots players often know they have no edge, while Blackjack players genuinely believe they do, which makes them more likely to stay at the table and more likely to attribute losses to execution rather than probability, believing that if they play more skillfully on the next hand, they can get their money back. Schüll writes that gambling machines exploit the gap between the calculative rationality of designers and the experiential, affect-driven orientation of players. Blackjack widens that gap by making the player feel like they are on the designer’s side of it.
To me, this isn’t a failure of skill but rather contrived contingency, the sensation that the right outcome was almost there and that with slightly better luck, it would have landed. Behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner noted that almost hitting a jackpot increases the probability an individual will play again, and because this near-miss cost the house nothing, I played the next hand immediately.
What distinguishes blackjack’s addiction profile from slots is that the near-miss feels earned rather than manufactured. When Rose from the reading became a slot machine mechanic, hoping that technical knowledge would release the machine’s hold on her, she found it couldn’t, and blackjack players face an even deeper trap because the game never gave them full knowledge in the first place.
On a different hand, the opposite happened. I decided to go all in, and luckily got the best possible hand. Surprisingly though, the next betting screen did not suggest the standard $200 buy-in but instead auto-staged $600.
Schüll describes how gambling platforms cultivate the zone by removing friction between the player and the next bet, sustaining the self-liquidating aim of continuing over the self-maximizing aim of winning, and auto-staging three times the default bet right after a high-adrenaline win, which is what the platform engineering does. What’s being sold to players is that you’re a skilled player on a hot streak, while the truth is that the RNG has already determined the next hand before you place a single chip.
Using chance in a game becomes morally impermissible when its consequences are systematically hidden and when winning moments are designed to deepen exposure rather than inform it. Blackjack posts its rules clearly, but does not tell you that the platform is using your momentum to pre-stage your next bet. Schüll quotes a Nevada gaming regulator explaining that odds are never posted on slot machines because doing so would remove the mystery and the excitement, and blackjack operates on the same principle while hiding behind the appearance of transparency. Compared to slots, blackjack is the more ethically compromised design because it borrows the credibility of player skill to hide what is ultimately a probability trap. A slots player knows they are surrendering to chance, while a blackjack player believes they are negotiating with it, and that belief is something the platform actively cultivates rather than corrects. Blackjack teaches players enough to feel competent while withholding exactly what you would need to stay safe, and that asymmetry is not an accident but the core of the product itself.
