| Las Vegas Strip (Image Courtesy Getty Images) |
I found myself on the Las Vegas Strip in early June, not wholly by choice. I was there to attend the my partner's step-father's 60th (surprise) birthday celebrations - a lovely man, who unlike me is particularly fond of gambling. Las Vegas is not on my list of top 100 places to visit (it wouldn't make my top 1000) but I did leave with a heightened appreciation for human ingenuity and of our ability to be manipulated. In particular it made me reflect on how spaces and experiences are designed to capture and retain attention, and on the parallels between the strategies employed by designers of physical and virtual experiences. Las Vegas may trigger images of sharply dressed, attractive young people, sipping cocktails and playing Blackjack, but it's the middle-aged crowd sitting at slot machines who elicit the proverbial dollar-signs in the casino manager's eyes. More on that in a bit.
If you've never been there, the 'Strip' is almost 7 km long and features 30 hotels, most of which have their own casinos. If you step into one of the casinos, particularly at the fancier resorts like the Bellagio, Venetian or Caesar's Palace, it is very easy to get lost. This is not an accident. Pathways between slot machine pods twist in a maze-like manner, and exits are not easily visible. It is also quite difficult to gauge time of day, and the passage of time, with a seemingly perennial if changing occupation of seats at the slot machines, though it does get busier at peak times on the weekend.
If you are even slightly prone to paranoia and have an overactive imagination (or a fan of the Eagles), you could imagine yourself wandering endlessly looking for an exit. One very real concern is the length of time it would take for help to get to you, should there be a medical emergency. In fact, Richard Hardman, coordinator of emergency services at Clark County developed the AED (automatic external defibrillator) programme, after discovering the high number of cardiac arrest related deaths at casinos. Security personnel at casinos are all now compulsorily trained to react in the event of a patron exhibiting symptoms of cardiac trouble, and to use AEDs. The programme has been touted as a phenomenal success, with impressive results, but it's interesting that the response to a major health risk was to design a work-around rather than redesign the maze-like layout of Casinos. For more on the AED programme but also a much deeper and more rigorous look at how Las Vegas works to keep people gambling I'd recommend Natasha Dow Schüll's book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Or the excellent discussion on it by Cameron Kunzleman and Michael Lutz.
I was a terrible tourist and did not gamble (except with some leftover dollars at an airport slot machine). However I did have the opportunity to observe the expressions of those seated at the slot machines, many of whom seemed in a trance-like state, silently tapping at the large orange button, with the occasional loud ding and epiphanic announcement of a jackpot breaking the silence. Slot machines are the proverbial cash cows of the gambling industry - occupying most of the floorspace and accounting for between 70-80% of the revenue (Thompson 2015). Their design has been carefully calibrated to maximise time-on-device (TOD) the #1 metric to determine machine profitability. The new machines are sleek and curved with 32 inch 4K displays. Colours tend to be primary, all machines have a franchise tie-in, Wheel of fortune being the most popular, but you'll also find Big Bang Theory, Tomb Raider and Willy Wonka themed machines. In addition game soundtracks are invariably in a major key.
Across the road from where we were staying (at the Mirage) is Harrah's, a slightly seedy three-star hotel and casino owned by Caeser's Entertainment, which also owns Caesar's palace, the Flamingo, Bally's and a number of of others on the strip. I popped in out of curiosity and was immediately struck by the contrast in decor as well as the profile of the clientele, in comparison with the opulence on display at the likes of the Mirage and the Venetian next door. But looks can be deceptive. Harrah's pioneered the now industry standard Total Rewards player tracking system. As long as a player has her Total Rewards card inserted into a slot machine, the casino can record which game is being played, the size of bet, and how long she's been playing. This individualised data is highly detailed, and allows casinos to monitor levels of activity in localised areas in real-time, as well as make forecasts. The data also suggests that the small slots customer, typically older, is just as valuable over a lifetime when compared to the high rollers (Greenfeld 2010).
The silent absorption of the gambling addict at a slot machine, repeatedly pushing the button for little or no reward has been termed 'the zone' by Schüll, a hyperfocused state, where neurotransmitters are abuzz. This has been likened by Thompson to the state of 'flow' described by psychologist Csíkszentmihályi, but 'through a lens darkly' - where instead of the hyperfocus resulting in productivity and a sense of personal control and achievement, the zone is solely about achieving numbness or even obliviousness to the external world. Andrew Thompson, writing for the Verge (referenced above) describes a conversation with two slot players in a casino in Philadelphia, where both talk of having turned to gambling for respite after bereavements.
For those of us with no experience or interest in gambling, it's worth considering that the basic psychological patterns behind prolonged slot machine use may not differ greatly from those that make us scroll endlessly through social media feeds or stay up playing Candy Crush Saga. As app developers increasingly use gamification to entice users to spend more time on our devices, whether it is checking our daily step-count, or the number of likes on our latest social media posts, the behavioural patterns are strikingly similar. Thompson draws a parallel between the slot machine 'zone' and the experience of users of the dating app Tinder, where continual swiping results in the intermittent reward of 'a match', allowing you to cash out or keep playing. While comparisons between health and dating apps, and slot machines may seem a bit of a stretch, there's no doubt that the strategies pioneered by the slot machine industry have implications for online businesses, which are vying for customer attention.
The term 'Attention Economy' which can be attributed jointly to psychologist Herbert Simon and the physicist Michael Goldhaber identifies the shift from an economy that values material goods and information, to one where the scarcest commodity, and therefor the most valuable, is human attention. According to Goldhaber, in order to understand economics in the internet age it is necessary recognise that the opportunity cost of paying a specific thing attention at a particular time is continually increasing.Your attention is also the thing that is valued most by others, and by businesses, particularly if they can monetise your attention. Now, I'm not completely on board with Goldhaber's framework, not least because he uses 'attention' to mean a number of different things. However the idea that attention can be commodified is almost self-evident today.
Ok, back to how the gambling industry may have pioneered attention-capturing strategies that are now pervading other industries. The online gaming industry is the most obvious, particularly visible in the design of multi-level games, with in-app purchases. According to data from 2021 Role Playing Games (RPGs) like the latest editions of Final Fantasy, Star Wars and Diablo make about 80% of their revenues from in-app purchases. According to Schüll (author of Addiction by Design), the dynamics of some of these games resemble what she terms slotification, where we slay an endless stream of monsters without any real progress in the narrative, or mine resources or coins without any real purpose other than accumulation. It is the willingness of users to dedicate considerable lengths of time to gameplay and to make repeated in-app purchases that seems strikingly congruent to slot players in the zone. More broadly the key metric used by slot machine designers (time on device), with a little modification (time on app), is the key to success for many online businesses, particularly ones where the business model involves ad revenues and/or selling user data. The corporation formerly known as Facebook makes no secret of the fact that they would like you to spend all of your time on their platforms - soon in the Metaverse. It gives a new dimension to the term 'captive' audience.
Well, those are my thoughts on Las Vegas - There's a lot more to it of course, bits that I didn't see, but also just the sheer scale of the enterprise, with roughly 150,000 hotel rooms and 600,000 odd residents, that's one hotel room per four residents. Pre-pandemic the annual number of visitors ranged between 40-45 million (Statista 2022), which is pretty remarkable given that there's not much to do aside from gamble, eat and drink. Vegas does of course cater to other appetites -while prostitution is technically illegal in Clark County, unofficial figures suggest there's an annual revenue of between $5 and $15 billion from the sex trade. What is legal however is cannabis, and Vegas boasts the largest Marijuana dispensary in the world. But these seem like footnotes compared to the sheer size, influence and strategic acumen behind the operation whose one purpose is to keep you hitting that button until you've run out of money.
I did end up having fun, though mostly because it was an unexpectedly effective vantage point from which to observe some of the more intriguing and possibly alarming dynamics of 21st century capitalism.