Research Portfolio | Science, Technology, & Society 

Odds are that you imagine gamblers as people simply trying to get lucky and win a big payoff. But when Natasha Schull, Associate Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, began researching the lives of gamblers in Las Vegas, she found a very different motivation at work.

Story at MIT News 

Schull discusses her research on 60 Minutes

Natasha Dow Schüll
Addiction by Design: Gambling in Las Vegas 
Princeton University Press, 2012

Drawing on 15 years of field research, anthropologist Schüll shows how electronic gambling games are now designed to pull players into a trancelike state called the "machine zone"—a state in which gambling addicts will play not to win, but simply to keep playing, even to physical and financial exhaustion.