Missive #264 Published 19 April 2024
31. THE SUN OR THE MOON?…
Slot machines, revamped by evermore compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll explores the dark side of machine gambling—a solitary, rapid, continuous form of play that has less to do with the competitive thrill of winning than with the pull of "the machine zone," as gamblers call the trancelike state they enter.