Addiction by Design
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Addiction by Design
| Full title | Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas |
|---|---|
| Author | Natasha Dow Schüll |
| Published | 2012 |
| Pages | 442 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Schüll’s fifteen-year ethnography of Las Vegas slot machines and the people who play them — how the cabinet, the odds, the near-miss and the loyalty card are engineered together to hold a player in what she calls the machine zone. The standard reference for how an industry designs compulsion on purpose. |
Where I heard about it
- @WillManidis’s thread — a reply to his question “what is the single best book you can read that will explain an entire industry?” in the thread, June 2025. The full list of replies lives on what is the single best book… (tweet).
Connections
- what is the single best book… (tweet) — the thread this came out of; the full recovered list lives there.
- Product Design — the book is read as a design text as often as an anthropology one.
- Technological Innovation — the portfolio idea this sits closest to.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.