On December 18th, 2024, IPK Senior Fellow Natasha Dow Schüll‘s book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas was recommended by D. Graham Burnett in The New York Times’ list of “62 books to read, recommended by influential people.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

Natasha Dow Schüll is a science and technology studies scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas. It’s kind of a presmartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit. And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated, dark pattern technologies that can be achieved, even in the most primitive technologies — those machines are not fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th-century printing press to a modern, full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets. But already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them, it’s amazing.

Read the full article here.

Photo credits: Matt Chase/The New York Times