Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Las Vegas among game developers and machine gamblers, I correlate a set of digitally enhanced game features with phenomenological aspects of gamblers’ experience, demonstrating the intimate connection between extreme states of subjective absorption in play and design elements that manipulate space and time to accelerate the extraction of money from players. The case of the digital gambling interface exemplifies the tendency of modern capitalism to bring space, time, and money into intensified relation and sheds light on the question of what might or might not be distinctive about the rationalities and libidinal investments of the “digital age.”