Digital Gambling: The Coincidence of Desire and Design

Natasha Dow Schull

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2005, vol. 597, issue 1, 65-81

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.â€

Keywords: technology; ethnography; gambling; culture; digital age; capitalism; modernity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716204270435 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:597:y:2005:i:1:p:65-81

DOI: 10.1177/0002716204270435

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().