ScrollCure

Videogames & slot machines are two of the most addicting digital inventions out there. Inducing a flow state of mind paralleled by no other digital invention to-date. Instagram & Tiktok come close to it and are getting closer with each day but despite being as addicting as they are, are still leagues behind the level of addiction that videogames & slot machines ensure.

At 20%, slot machine addicts also have the highest rate of suicide attempts among all other addictions. (Zangeneh and Hason 2006, 191-93)

“There was a woman who was a severe narcoleptic. She said, ‘I fall asleep driving on the highway, having sex, the only place I do not fall asleep is playing video poker’…We think of Vegas, blackjack, high stakes, the tuxedo. But really, the cash cow, the golden geese are these basically adult arcade games that take money…Something about this activity and the way that it modulates your attention, right? It literally can keep a severe narcoleptic awake. So something is happening there."

That is Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addicted By Design which compiles over 15 years of her in-field research in Las Vegas on addictive slot machine mechanisms. Below are few more excerpts taken from her interview for the brilliant Your Undivided Attention Podcast:

“Yeah, I mean just on the diapers, because some listeners may say oh this is a sensationalist sort of sound byte about the diapers, so I even had thought, like how common is this diapers thing? So it came up in a few of my own interviews, and these were very rational, reasonable people, who said you know I’ve never done anything like this before and I’m ashamed to admit it, but I get the adult diapers. I wear these like dark blue wool pants, and I can just stay there longer, I don’t have to leave the machine. But when it was really driven home to me as a point, was listening, I was actually maybe a speaker on a radio show in Las Vegas and it was calling around on this topic. And someone called in who had worked for 20 years at a casino and she attested there on the phone that every single night in her casino, and it was a popular casino, in the back alley sort of off the side of the gaming floor, would be a whole row of machines that had been essentially urinated on and were going out for cleaning…So you know, whether people are planning it or not, you get so absorbed because there’s many little sort of loops happening, and the loop would be playing a particular hand, or a spin, or a round of video poker, right? And if they happen so rapidly, one to the next, sometimes 1,200 hands an hour on the latest penny machines, you, again, not only are you not making choices to continue, it’s almost like you feel like your body is continuing”

How Infinite Scroll Uses Similar Mechanisms As Slot Machines And Causes A Similar Level Of Addiction

An Infinite World: Slot machines & videogames are infinite by nature and infinite scroll, as the name suggests, offers the same: Infinity.

Try to re-collect the videogames you’ve played growing up or still play to day and you will notice that in most of them you can keep driving till infinity or keep running till infinity or keep building more stuff endlessly or keep wandering around the game till you tire out & then wander some more.

The infinity scroll achieves the same for modern websites & apps today. You keep scrolling down & down and the content never ever ends. You click on a piece of content and that too is followed by more content related to it which scrolls endlessly. You tire out from it & go to an other section of that website or an another piece of content or an another platform and again you’re confronted with the infinite.

Put the app away & open it as many times as you wish, the world you step into offers nothing less than the infinite. Until you literally fry your dopamine receptors, you are unable to put the phone down because the content by itself will not reach an end.

This is quintessentially every videogame today. They want to induce a flow state of mind & have you chase infinity.

Pinball On A Neural Level: The manner in which you access content on an infinite scroll platform lights up your brain like a pinball machine on a neural level due to the sheer variety & combination in the content presented to you in quick succession.

One moment you are watching a video of a cat caressing a new born baby which lights up the parts of your brain related to feeling pleasant & wholesome in your brain, the very next second you are viewing someone falling off a bike, triggering a feeling of worry, concern, anxiety and death. Within seconds after that you are browsing someone partying in a luxury yacht and seconds after that a meme on an ongoing war.

This makes the different parts of your brain or it’s emotional centers to light up in quick succession. This is addictive, tiring and disorienting to your brain.

Nano-anxiety: When you play the hand of a slot machine, for a nanosecond, your brain is anxious because the outcome can be anything between zero to jackpot. Your brain is anxious because it is uncertain and anticipating whether you will win or lose in those micro-seconds during the course of play. Dopamine is the anticipation molecule. It’s gets secreted when you’re anticipating something (Not when you’re happy, contrary to the popular belief)

The infinite scroll achieves the same to a large degree. Your brain does not know what the next piece of content will make it feel. It could trigger any emotion on the entire spectrum of human emotions. Your brain for those few nanoseconds does not know if it should feel happy, enraged, anxious, bliss, annoyed, erotic, kind, satisfied, sad, excited, depressed or lukewarm. It does not know whether the emotions triggered will be positive ones or negative ones.

When this happens in quick succession, that is nano-anxiety interspersed with a strong emotion to follow after it, it is extremely addictive to the brain even at the cost of your brain feeling terrible later.

Over-saturated, bright colors everywhere: I’ve covered this topic before. While the short-form platforms provide content in rapid succession, it also provides the colors just like that in a pinball machine to go along with it. Mind you these colors are also overly bright, loud, saturated and edited artificially to be as attention sucking as possible.

One moment you’d be watching someone wearing a beige dress in a white-marbled home, the next moment you’re watching someone walking under blue skies & green forests and few second later, you’re watching someone driving a red mustang on gray concrete, ad infinitum.

Slot Machine Like Reward Timings: Like in the Rat-Skinner box experiment, it is not constant rewards but haphazard reward that drives the mice crazy. With infinite scroll, or digital technology in general, you never know when your positive reward will be delivered to you & in what form. You do not know when your inbox will light up with the bright red notification bubble nor do you know exactly which reel in your scroll next will make you feel joyful or will make you laugh. That anticipation & delay in-between two rewards and then finally receiving the said reward is extremely addictive to the human mind & has devastating consequences.

Crazy combinations & infinite novelty: In a three-reel slot machine with 6 symbols, the maximum number of combinations is (6 x 6 x 6) which is 216 combination. If its a six-reel slot machine with 20 symbols, the maximum number of combinations is (20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20) which is 64 million.

However in the case of digital content, the number of symbols are infinite and hence the total number of combinations are infinite too. Just the sheer quantity & variety of topics on which reels can be made on, the ability to creatively alter every element in it, the infinite choices of the design elements whether it be music, animations or colors, makes digital content the grandest game of slot machine ever to confront humanity.

Always Accompanied By Ambient Music: Almost every piece of visual content we consume today whether it be on short-form platforms or more traditional long-form medias like shows & movies today, is overlayed with music to go along with it. Besides the fact that music is extremely stimulating, layered & addictive by itself, when it goes along with addictive visual content, it packs that much more potent a punch. Music has also gotten shorter, snappier, louder, more transient, more artificial and more manipulated over the years. This acts like a pleasant ambient noise to keep you in the hypnotic trance state of your devices and increase the magnitude of it’s hypnotic effects by a notch.

“Just as graphic designers’ color palette and pixel count have increased exponentially, in the span of a single decade sound engineers have gone from using as few as fifteen sounds per game to an average of four hundred unique “sound events,” each calibrated to encourage play while remaining in the background. Sound, when properly configured, “can actually energize the player, keep him there longer,” writes David Kranes, a consultant to the gambling industry. “I can go longer if the machine sounds are right,” a longtime machine gambler observed of her play. “Last weekend, the sounds were turned off on a machine I was playing, and even though it wasn’t playing bad, I switched because I couldn’t handle playing a silent machine—it didn’t have the same flow to it.”
Astute audio engineers have learned that the art of facilitating time-on-device involves paying as much attention to softening and equilibrating sound as to intensifying it. In the late 1990s, for example, the prescient audio director at the new company Silicon Gaming programmed its video slots to play every one of their different sounds in the universally pleasant tone of C. To make sure the custom sound would blend smoothly with existing casino acoustics he sampled the noise of various slot floors, his aim being “to add a new and better track to the traditional sound, but not to clash with it.” Along similar lines, others have attempted to limit potentially disturbing elements of sound through the application of anti-noise technology. Positioning speakers to create a sound cone directly in front of players, Kranes tells us, is one way to “limit aural intrusion” and reduce fatigue.”

Hyper-stimulation of the mind in a stationary, isolated position: And all the above, which is hyper-stimulative to the brain, happens while you’re sitting or lying down comfortably while being isolated for everyone else around you. Similar to being in a casino where you play the slot machine comfortably lounged in your chair without communicating much with anyone else.

Casinos realized that physical discomfort in any form was directly proportional to reduction in the time patrons spent on the machines. Hence, they continuously strive to make the play as comfortable as possible by changing machine designs or by delivering your refreshments to your seat.

With smartphones today, what’s more comfortable than lying down on your couch or bed with a blanket wrapped around you & all the snacks available at your fingertips. It a level of comfort that even casinos would be jealous of. Both your mind & your body hate breaking it’s homeostasis. More so when it is being hyper-stimulated. This is precisely why few minutes of scrolling turns into a few hours of scrolling so easily.

Conclusion

So it doesn’t come much of a shock that app developers, UIUX developers, data scientists and tech engineers today are tapping into & imbibing into their designs the same tactics & the same exploits of human psychology used by slot machine developers & designers.

It would be too cynical to say that all of it is done consciously in a Dr. Evil “Let me get people as addicted to this & churn out as much money as I possibly can” style but it would be too naive to deny that a lot of it is being done without the developers being completely aware of exactly what they are doing & what the consequences of the same are on individuals & the culture as a whole