In this second part of my conversation with Morgan Dandie Hannah, I dig into the issue of behavioural addictions---which can be just as debilitating as substance abuse.
I originally asked Hannah about how common individual types of chemical addictions are in Ontario, and her response was to remind me that there are behavioural addictions too. That got me thinking back to a conversation I had with a lawyer I once worked with for a public campaign. He said that when he started out in his profession---I believe it was his articling year---he had a job foreclosing on people's homes for a casino in Atlantic city. From his description, it sounded like an absolutely horrible job.
Mainly, according to him, it involved men with gambling problems losing a bundle one way or another. Desperate to "win back" what they'd lost, they got the casino to front them money based on the equity in their homes. (I did some quick research on line and it appears that all of this is both quite easy to do and legal.) When that got lost too, eventually the casino would hire this law firm to take possession and liquidate the home so they could get their "pound of flesh". According to this guy, he'd often show up with the paperwork to evict the family and there'd be a wife who had no idea that her husband had lost their home while gambling---and it was all perfectly legal.
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| Natasha Dow Schull, from her website |
problem. This raises an interesting question, "Just how do people get so addicted?" There's an interesting book, Addiction by Design, by Natasha Dow Schull on this subject. She argues (I haven't read the book, but I did watch several interviews on You Tube) that casinos have been able to become very good at "reading the numbers" in order to "fine tune" the gambling experience in order to extract the maximum amount of money from people.
She focuses primarily on "Electronic Gaming Machines" EGMs---what ordinary folks call "slot machines". These have evolved from being mechanical to digital, which means that it is possible to infinitely modify them simply by changing the software. This means that a casino operator can routinely "tweek" a machine based upon the amount of money it makes over a period of time. The result is an evolutionary "arms race" where EGM owners are able to find better and better ways of taking advantage of human frailty.
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| An EGM, c/o Wikimedia Commons. | |
Through extensive interviews with problem gamblers she found that what motivates them isn't so much an idea that they will actually win money so much as the altered state of consciousness---"the zone"---that they achieve when they have been gambling for a long period of time. Indeed, she says that they often state that when they do win something they are irritated because it interrupts the "zone state".
People who design computer games (and, don't forget, that a EGM is basically just another computer game) spend a great amount of energy thinking about how they can engineer the experience of the person playing the game to create something called a "compulsion loop". That is, a feedback effect that creates a desire among players to continue to play the game.
To understand what I'm talking about, let me share a bit about my experience with the first video game I ever played: Space Invaders. This was a stand-up machine that showed up one day next to the pinball machines in the Massey Hall coffee shop at the University of Guelph.
The above gif basically shows what it was all about visually. You slide an icon back and forth across the bottom and shot at hordes of "invaders" coming at you. At the same time there was a sound track that mimicked a heart beat. As you went up levels in the game the invaders came faster and faster---and the sound got louder while the artificial heart beat sped up in lockstep with the game action. I found that by the time I got to the higher levels, I was so "trapped" that I was white-knuckling the joystick and felt like I was going to have heart-attack.
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| Sebastien Samson, Linked In |
As he describes it, what playing games is all about isn't winning, but rather the release of a specific chemical in the brain: dopamine. (I'm not sure that this is an accurate description of what really happens---I'm not a neurologist and neither is Samson---but that's not really all that important. Forget about the specific chemicals that are involved and simply accept that what is happening is a sort of brain event that results in a special feeling in the consciousness of the individuals involved.)
This is an important point because we can get hung up on the idea that what people always want are the external rewards (free play in the case of Space Invaders) or some other intangible result (ie: being the "cool guy" who can play the game for hours and hours on only one quarter). Samson's insight is that what people actually want is that special feeling that is associated with these rewards---which he identifies as being an internal reward. And even more interesting, he points out that people can get that feeling from anticipation as much as from actually getting something from the game.
That's right. The challenge can be an intrinsic reward into itself. Mind-blowing is it not! The challenge is.. a Reward! Jackpot! Alright that's great if it's the case but what if it's not though? What if it's boring? Good question! Sometimes the skills and outcome are all just uninteresting and I need an extrinsic motivation to do it. Like cleaning my room. First I do it in fear of punishment, then because I don't want to disappoint my parents, then finally I internalize it completely and do it just because I like it clean. It is still an extrinsic motivation to the activity unless I am a Kung-Fu master of cleaning, unless I like cleaning just for the sake of it and could do this all day because it gets me in the Zone. That would be intrinsic to the activity. But lets be honest, most people don't get there... and the Internalization stops there.
Notice that he's using the same language as Schull, "the Zone". Another key point comes from the last sentence: "most people don't get there... and the Internalization stops there".
What if the people who are problem gamblers are those folks that Samson describes as the "Kung-Fu master"s---only it isn't cleaning their rooms but rather playing EGMs? Could they be internally motivated by the act of seeing the spinning display teasing them into wondering that perhaps they will win---even more so than the external motivation of winning itself? And what if the Electronic Gaming Machines are being designed to maximize their attraction to these particular types of people because they are the ones that make the most money for the casino?
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I'm pretty happy with this post in that I've worked hard and dug up a lot of interesting info. (I know that I've learned a lot doing it.) But it is very hard work---I've felt absolutely whipped several days after a long session. I offer the results to the entire community freely because I think that it's important to a healthy democracy that people get access to good information. But if you can afford to buy a subscription, please do. I can use the dough and it's plug simple to do using Pay Pal or Patreon.
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The first thing to remember is that EGMs are by far the most used and most lucrative part of casinos. According to the website Fact/Myth,
From March 2015 to February 2016 a NEVADA GAMING CONTROL BOARD GAMING REVENUE REPORT shows that the “total gaming win” (the casino’s win) over twelve months from slots was $7,066,306,000 (about 7 billion) total. Meanwhile, the total table games win was $4,094,401,000 (about 4 billion).[3] The implication of this is that, even with sports gaming’s comparatively small return of $19,236,000 (about 19.2 million) considered, no casino game even comes close to slots in terms of revenue for the casino.
Another website, The BigThink.com says that 85% of all gambling revenue comes from EGMs. I don't know how that percentage was arrived at. That number of "85%" should be viewed somewhat skeptically, simply because how you define the terms has a huge impact on the results. For example, does it count lottery tickets? (Doubtful.) How about on-line gambling? (Maybe, maybe not. But is an on-line slot machine an EGM? If it is, we should add it to the percentage, not subtract.) I do believe, however, that whatever the specific numbers are, it's safe to say that EGMs are a very, very big part of the gambling industry. And that's enough for the purposes of this blog post.
In the December 2016 issue of The Atlantic magazine, John Rosengren writes
Problem gamblers are worth a lot of money to casinos. According to some research, 20 percent of regular gamblers are problem or pathological gamblers. Moreover, when they gamble, they spend—which is to say, lose—more than other players. At least nine independent studies demonstrate that problem gamblers generate anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of total gambling revenues.
Again, I haven't seen the research that Rosengren is talking about (it's journalism, not an academic paper---so there are no citations), but this is a pretty damning statistic. Over the years I've heard this idea before, so I'm inclined to believe that there is something to this.
And as you might imagine, given that so much money is coming from this very small pool of problem gamblers, casinos are very careful to identify and encourage these people to come to their particular place of business. The article goes on to cite evidence that casinos were at one time buying information from credit card companies in order to find addicts in the general population. Since then, they've started using loyalty cards to identify these people themselves so they can target their marketing campaigns towards them.
If this is all true---and I have no reason to believe it isn't---what exactly is the morality of what's going on here? Isn't this a bit like a drug company finding out everyone who is prone to becoming addicted to Oxycontin and then trying to sell then on the idea of taking opioids "out for a spin"?
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According to the 2018-2019 report of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLGC); casinos, lotteries, and, on-line gambling gave the province of Ontario a net profit of $2.47 billion, or, a little under 6% of total government revenues (which were $44.07 billion, according to Statistica.com). Compare that to revenue from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario: $2.20 billion, or a little under 5% of Ontario revenues. In addition, $137.3 million goes to First Nations communities under and agreement signed in 2008 that gives them 1.7% of gross gaming revenues. These are enormous amounts of money and there's about as much chance that the governments will do anything to threaten that revenue stream as there is that pigs will fly.
But having said that, we should get some handle on how much damage gambling does inflict on society. First of all, how many problem gamblers are there in Ontario? I found a 2013 report titled Gambling and Problem Gambling in Ontario that was prepared by Robert J. Williams, Ph.D. and Rachel A. Volberg, Ph.D. for The Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care. It came to the conclusion that in 2013---depending on how you defined "problem gambler" there were something like between 105,000 and 231,000 problem gamblers in Ontario. In 2011 there were about 12,852,000 people in the province, which translates to between 1% and 2% of the population.
Casinos in Ontario have a "Self-Exclusion Program" that gives people who decide at some point that they have a gambling problem the option of signing away their right to gamble. In effect, they sign a contract and this puts them on a database that is supposed to keep them from being able to get into a casino again. The problem is, however, that no one asks for ID when you go inside. The only thing that can catch someone is facial recognition software and that appears to be relatively easy to "spoof" through things like floppy hats and sunglasses. Lots of people who have signed up still routinely find themselves in a casino feeding money into an EGM.
One interesting by-product of this system, however, is that it is possible to track where people live who have signed onto self-exclusion. And this yields the surprising result that shows that there is a direct correlation between how close one lives to a casino and the odds that you think you have a gambling problem. This would suggest that the best way to prevent problem gamblers is to avoid building casinos.
Having said all of the above, there is an interesting finding from Williams and Volberg's study. They believe that rates of problem gamblers in Ontario show a steady decline over several years.
"The year to year variability in the Ontario rates is partly due to measurement error within each study as well as methodological differences between the studies. However, the one thing that seems apparent is that the prevalence rate of problem gambling in Ontario has decreased over time."
In my (admittedly cursory) reading of their study I didn't see any suggestions about why there has been this decline. But several hypotheses do immediately spring to mind. It might be the that self-exclusion is having a positive effect on a significant minority of the province's problem gamblers. It might also be that local communities have become better mobilized to exert pressure on their casinos to enforce rules more strictly. It might also be the case that local social agencies have developed new programs that are getting better at helping local people deal with their addiction or prevent them in the first place.
Having said that, even one person gambling away the family home is a tragedy and I think we should really think about preventing this sort of catastrophe. People kill themselves. Families break up. Talking about this with an aquaintence, he told me about his single mother making him and his sister go hungry because she put the grocery money into slot machines. Gambling addictions are addictions---plain and simple. And the work of Natasha Dow Schull would seem to indicate that at least some of them are created by very intelligent people---like Sebastien Samson (but working on EGMs instead of computer games)---who know exactly what it is they do. Just t Tell me---if anyone cares---just what about this is any different from someone out giving away free samples of heroin?
From my research it appears that there are some very simple policies that could dramatically cut down on the harm done by EGMs. The first one would be to require everyone who goes into a casino to show some ID. This could be checked against the people on the self-exclusion list. The casino managers argue that people would bristle at this invasion of privacy. But since most of them have already voluntarily signed up for loyalty cards and they are being scanned by facial recognition software too, it would seem that the privacy horse left the casino barn long ago.
The second idea would be to regulate the amount of money any given person can lose in one day. Again, this could be done through a computerized registry administered through ID cards. So when Fred loses $500 at one time, the computer kicks in, and a security guard sidles up to him and gently suggests that it's time to go home to Ethel to get some sleep before the next visit. The kids might end up without dinner that night---but there's a chance that the house won't get sold. According to Schull, this is already being done in Norway.
Of course, anyone without a vested interest in not seeing the obvious will suspect that the reason why these simple reforms haven't been made is because the casino makes a disproportionate amount of their money off problem gamblers. Getting people to gamble away their life savings isn't a bug---it's the program a feature. But there's no reason why a crowd of voters with torches and pitchforks couldn't get some government to institute these reforms.
This post is long enough already, so I'll stop here. Stay tuned for more next week---.
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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
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