The lulling psychological effects of gambling

I found this article on gambling and how it provides a gentle rocking of the emotions to put you in a pleasant baby-like state via a book called Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas [affiliate link] by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll:

As Schüll writes in her book, the popularity of machine gambling (which she says is the source of the majority of casino gambling profits in Vegas) is particularly puzzling in that people are just pulling the lever over and over again, without the sense of human context or any feeling of agency.

There’s also the interaction between the players and the people who make money from the machines:

For extreme machine gamblers, the experience of play is an end in itself–an “autotelic” zone beyond value as such, in that “no other reward than continuing the experience is required to keep it going.” Conversely, for the gambling industry the zone is a means to an end; although it carries no value in and of itself, it is possible to derive value from it. . . . In effect, gamblers’ drive to remain indefinitely suspended in the zone is rerouted, via the technological detours of the gambling industry, toward a destination of complete depletion.

It’s not just “the technological detours of the gambling industry,” it’s also politics: the industry doing what it takes to keep all this going, a gradual effort over many decades that continues to this day.