Gary Rivlin has a fascinating and informative article about slot machines in The New York Times Magazine. It’s well worth your time if you’re interested in gambling. More so if you are a victim of it.
Some factoids from the article:
“In its 14-year lifetime, ‘Madden N.F.L. Football,’ from Electronic Arts, has made roughly $1 billion, making it one of the most successful home video games ever produced. ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ [the slot machine] by contrast, takes in more than a billion dollars each year.”
“[Slot machines] gross more annually than McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Starbucks combined.”
North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in 2003 — an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion spent on movie tickets or the $10 billion on pornography in all commercial forms.
“[T]he machines’ ability to hook so deeply into a player’s cerebral cortex derives from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral scientists call infrequent random reinforcement or “intermittent reward.”