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SPEAKER_04: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford Molly's first job as a young teenager was dispensing change for slot machines on a military
SPEAKER_02: base. By the time she hit middle age, Molly was no longer earning her wages from the slots. She was feeding her entire paycheck into them in two-day binges. I even cashed in my life insurance for more money to play.
SPEAKER_02: That's what she told Natasha Dow Schull in a hotel room high above the Las Vegas strip. Schull is an anthropologist who's been studying the world of slot machines for two decades. Slot machines are no toy. They are fantastically profitable and they've grown like an invasive species. Molly spends so much on the slot machines that a Vegas hotel has invited her to stay there free of charge. Is Molly hoping for a big win? Natasha Dow Schull asks. No, she knows there's no chance of that.
SPEAKER_05: The thing people never understand is that I'm not playing to win.
SPEAKER_02: A gambler who doesn't care about winning? That doesn't seem right. But we've long struggled to appreciate what slot machines really are and the lesson they have to teach us about the modern economy. Slot machines are generally reckoned to have appeared in the US around 1890. The Ideal Toy Company of Chicago made one with five spinning drums, each with ten playing cards. Insert a coin and if five cards lined up into a decent poker hand, you could collect a prize from an attendant. Then Charles Fay, an immigrant to San Francisco from Bavaria, hit upon the idea of simplifying the device. With just three reels, the mechanism became straightforward enough that the machine would pay out without the need for a human attendant. Modern slot machines are simply computers in shells with their chunky levers designed to evoke the old mechanical machines. It is this digital shift that has made the slot machines so profitable. No need to worry about making change, the job that teenage Molly used to have, because players carry digital cards on lanyards that connect them umbilically to the machines. The players need never move. They enter what Molly calls the zone, a trance-like state of absorption where the rest of the world dissolves. Winning simply means more credit, and more credit means more TOD, the acronym for the term of art, Time on Device. That's what Molly was talking about when she said she wasn't playing to win. Modern slot machines are not like lotteries or roulette, with players living in hope of the jackpot. Instead, the slots gulp down low stakes, perhaps 100 one-cent bets spread across a dizzying grid of possible winning combinations. And they constantly spit back small wins too, if indeed they should be described as wins. If you've placed 100 one-cent bets and win back 20 cents, is that really a win? With flashing lights and celebratory jingles, the machine will tell you it is. In one device studied by researchers, 100 spins would be expected to produce 14 real wins, in which the machine paid back more than the punter put in, and 18 false wins, in which the player received something with great fanfare, but less than he or she had wagered. The same research team went on to demonstrate in laboratory experiments that a slot machine with that 18% rate of false wins was more addictive than machines with far more, or far fewer, false wins. The slot machine designers aren't doing this stuff by accident. The industry is ferociously competitive. A $10,000 device can pay for itself in a month, if it attracts the players. If not, it will be replaced, with a contraption sporting a popcorn kettle in which lottery balls bubble over, or that wafts the smell of chocolate in the face of the player, or that in the voice of Donald Trump announces, you're fired. Anything to delight and to surprise. They're always on the lookout to build a better mousetrap, and we are the mice. B.F. Skinner, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, would not have been surprised. At Harvard University, Skinner used to investigate behaviour by giving rats who pressed a lever the reward of a food pellet. Once, trying to eke out a supply of those food pellets, he gave the reward intermittently. Often the pellet would come, often not. There was no way for the rat to know. Surprisingly, the unpredictable reward was more motivating than a generous and reliable payoff. Slot addicts such as Molly are similarly hooked, absorbed in the zone. The anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull once watched footage captured on a casino security camera of someone having a heart attack at a slot machine.
SPEAKER_05: He collapses suddenly onto the person next to him, who doesn't react at all. Few gamblers in the immediate vicinity move from their seats. In less than one minute, a security officer appears on the scene, bearing a defibrillator. He applies the pads, clears, and shocks the man twice. Despite the unconscious man lying quite literally at their feet, touching the bottoms of their chairs, the other gamblers keep playing.
SPEAKER_02: Research suggests that slot machines can create addicts far more quickly than other forms of gambling such as lotteries, casino games, or sports betting. But just as unnerving is the sense that in the past few years, the psychology of the slot machine has escaped the casino and migrated to our pockets. Recovering addicts avoid going to places where they might see slot machines. But there's nowhere that we can escape our phones, and plenty of good reasons to start looking at them. We all see people in the zone, oblivious to their companions or the traffic, because the phone is all that matters. It's that intermittent reinforcement again. Is there any more email? Any likes on Facebook? Many computer games are more brazen in their use of intermittent reinforcement, offering loot boxes with those familiar sparkles and unpredictable rewards. It looks a lot like gambling, often underage gambling at that. A 2003 book, Something for Nothing, begins with the shocking image of slot machine gamblers urinating into cups because they don't want to break their streak on the game. But these days, many of us know what it's like to urinate while looking at our phones. It's not just me, is it? We may not be looking to maximise time on device, but the big tech companies who make their money from advertising certainly are. The more we look at our screens, the more advertisements they can show us. Most of us will never find ourselves in Molly's position, enslaved by slot machines. It's a shame we can't say the same thing about the shiny devices in our pockets.
SPEAKER_03: Natasha Dow Schul's book is Addiction by Design. For a full list of our sources, please
SPEAKER_04: see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_01: Last year, the BBC World Service told the story of the first moon landing. And now, 13 Minutes to the Moon returns with the real story of Apollo 13, a dramatic rescue mission from the depths of space.
SPEAKER_00: We're not going to the moon anymore. We're going to just be damn lucky to get home.
SPEAKER_01: 13 Minutes to the Moon, Season 2, coming soon. Search for 13 Minutes to the Moon to hear more.
