In Addiction by Design, Natasha D. Schüll’s compelling history and analysis of slot machine gamblers in Las Vegas, she describes the “machine zone” where players go into a cocooned hypnosis when they sit in front of a set of reels. Slot machine gambling provided one person Schüll talked to “a reliable mechanism for securing a zone of insulation from a ‘human world’ she experiences as capricious, discontinuous, and insecure.” Rather than the prospect of winning enough money to feel secure, gambling itself became the belief system. “The continuity of machine gambling holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance, granting her an otherwise elusive zone of certainty,” Schüll wrote. The promise was agency through risk; the reality is grim dissociation. The casino economy has become a sort of inescapable cocoon where one discovers that the real comfort isn’t in winning, but in the suspension of having to live in the world at all.
