A lot of people who gamble compulsively don’t do it because the odds are beyond them. (It’s really easy to play slots a bunch of times, lose a lot of money, and realize you lost a lot of money.) There’s something neurologically strange about people who gamble frequently even though they lose, and it’s hard to pinpoint it, but it seems like variable reinforcement is winning out over logic.
If you buy a large number of lottery tickets, you’re pretty likely to win some sort of prize. Related example: slot machines are designed to generate a bonus round or a jackpot about once within each ~$100, and that’s a pretty normal level of play for someone who does it compulsively. Also, like casino games like slots and blackjack, lottery tickets are pretty good at generating near misses and losses-disguised-as-wins, particularly scratcher and instant-ticket lotteries because those tend to involve a small pool of symbols and elaborate presentation.
There’s also a giant sunk cost fallacy problem—the problem is that understanding the sunk cost fallacy isn’t enough to defeat it for a lot of people.
I would be willing to guess that a significant proportion of the people who play the lottery a lot probably have an accurate picture of the odds, but due to mental health problems they’re going to continue to waste far too much money on it. I’d also be willing to guess that they generate most of the lottery proceeds just because even though they’re numerically few, they buy more tickets than anyone else.
The most expensive games are free. I looked a little into the economics of mobile apps, and the most profitable seem to use the freemium business model. And furthermore, most of the profit in the freemium model is from a handful “whales” as they’re called in the business. A greater number of users spend only small amounts and most don’t spend at all. I suspect these “whales” have the same mental issue.
I also vaguely recall hearing about a Parkinson’s disease patient that got hooked on slots because of the drugs she was using to treat her condition. When she stopped taking the medication, her addiction also subsided. The whales may have a similar imbalance.
There’s a blogger you might enjoy reading whose name is Ramin Shokrizade: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/RaminShokrizade/914048/ . He’s some kind of consultant for video game monetization schemes. I think he’s a little bit hyperbolic and overwrought sometimes, but he has a lot of direct experience and textual evidence collected from other designers at companies like Zynga.
I think there are a lot of psych topics that are relevant for freemium games but not normal gambling, which means they’re a great zone for research. Normal gambling games like poker, blackjack, slots, and lotteries tend to play the same way from round to round, which means they get a lot of addiction potential from normal variable reinforcement-type stuff. But freemium games are allowed to exhibit significant differences in play as time goes on, which means they can give the user some free wins to start with, some powerups that will eventually deplete, stuff like that. (There was a great wrestling game I ran into where the first three bosses could be beaten by mashing buttons and the fourth one was literally impossible without cheating—too greedy, perhaps?)
Maybe the big important thing is that a lot of people are really loss-averse and having some kind of state between rounds means the game can threaten to take things away from you if it wants to. In a lot of normal gambling situations, you can cut your losses and walk away. Sunk cost fallacy means many people are bad at deciding to do that, but a force even stronger than sunk cost fallacy is loss-averseness. Common example: “you’ve won an item, but your inventory is full—delete something or you’ll lose it forever.”
Pachinko machines are more loosely regulated and if I remember right, some even implement F2P-like loss-averseness schemes. Remember Mann Co. Keys in Team Fortress, where the game presents you the opportunity for a reward but disguises it as a reward by itself? At one point it was in vogue for pachinko machines to tell you earned a jackpot, but make you play a ton of extra rounds to “unlock” it. (by getting lucky again) -- effectively the same scheme, not that evil by itself. What made it evil was that if you stopped playing the machine, anyone else could start up playing it and steal your jackpot.
It’s a tax on the mathematically challenged. The obvious path forward is better math education.
I think it’s a little bit worse than this.
A lot of people who gamble compulsively don’t do it because the odds are beyond them. (It’s really easy to play slots a bunch of times, lose a lot of money, and realize you lost a lot of money.) There’s something neurologically strange about people who gamble frequently even though they lose, and it’s hard to pinpoint it, but it seems like variable reinforcement is winning out over logic.
If you buy a large number of lottery tickets, you’re pretty likely to win some sort of prize. Related example: slot machines are designed to generate a bonus round or a jackpot about once within each ~$100, and that’s a pretty normal level of play for someone who does it compulsively. Also, like casino games like slots and blackjack, lottery tickets are pretty good at generating near misses and losses-disguised-as-wins, particularly scratcher and instant-ticket lotteries because those tend to involve a small pool of symbols and elaborate presentation.
There’s also a giant sunk cost fallacy problem—the problem is that understanding the sunk cost fallacy isn’t enough to defeat it for a lot of people.
I would be willing to guess that a significant proportion of the people who play the lottery a lot probably have an accurate picture of the odds, but due to mental health problems they’re going to continue to waste far too much money on it. I’d also be willing to guess that they generate most of the lottery proceeds just because even though they’re numerically few, they buy more tickets than anyone else.
The most expensive games are free. I looked a little into the economics of mobile apps, and the most profitable seem to use the freemium business model. And furthermore, most of the profit in the freemium model is from a handful “whales” as they’re called in the business. A greater number of users spend only small amounts and most don’t spend at all. I suspect these “whales” have the same mental issue.
I also vaguely recall hearing about a Parkinson’s disease patient that got hooked on slots because of the drugs she was using to treat her condition. When she stopped taking the medication, her addiction also subsided. The whales may have a similar imbalance.
There’s a blogger you might enjoy reading whose name is Ramin Shokrizade: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/RaminShokrizade/914048/ . He’s some kind of consultant for video game monetization schemes. I think he’s a little bit hyperbolic and overwrought sometimes, but he has a lot of direct experience and textual evidence collected from other designers at companies like Zynga.
I think there are a lot of psych topics that are relevant for freemium games but not normal gambling, which means they’re a great zone for research. Normal gambling games like poker, blackjack, slots, and lotteries tend to play the same way from round to round, which means they get a lot of addiction potential from normal variable reinforcement-type stuff. But freemium games are allowed to exhibit significant differences in play as time goes on, which means they can give the user some free wins to start with, some powerups that will eventually deplete, stuff like that. (There was a great wrestling game I ran into where the first three bosses could be beaten by mashing buttons and the fourth one was literally impossible without cheating—too greedy, perhaps?)
Maybe the big important thing is that a lot of people are really loss-averse and having some kind of state between rounds means the game can threaten to take things away from you if it wants to. In a lot of normal gambling situations, you can cut your losses and walk away. Sunk cost fallacy means many people are bad at deciding to do that, but a force even stronger than sunk cost fallacy is loss-averseness. Common example: “you’ve won an item, but your inventory is full—delete something or you’ll lose it forever.”
Pachinko machines are more loosely regulated and if I remember right, some even implement F2P-like loss-averseness schemes. Remember Mann Co. Keys in Team Fortress, where the game presents you the opportunity for a reward but disguises it as a reward by itself? At one point it was in vogue for pachinko machines to tell you earned a jackpot, but make you play a ton of extra rounds to “unlock” it. (by getting lucky again) -- effectively the same scheme, not that evil by itself. What made it evil was that if you stopped playing the machine, anyone else could start up playing it and steal your jackpot.
In a perfect world, the better math education would be funded by the proceeds from said state lotteries.