‘No way out’: how video games use tricks from gambling to attract big spenders
One evening in April, Carrie* sat down and wrote a suicide note to Zynga, the maker of mobile phone games such as Farmville and Words With Friends.
Carrie had been spending uncontrollably on one of Zynga’s less well-known apps, Wizard of Oz Slots, a game that mimics casino slot machines but with no payout available.
A recovering gambling addict, she had used a national self-exclusion scheme to bar herself from online casinos. There is no such scheme for computer gaming.
Carrie had begun playing obsessively through the night, spending thousands of pounds in the game and racking up huge debts. She craved dopamine, a chemical released by the brain that exacerbated by her ADHD. Where once she got her dopamine hit from online casinos and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs), she now had mobile gaming.
“Zynga deliberately uses the same techniques that bookmakers do with slot machines to feed people’s addiction and now I find myself addicted with no way out,” she told the company.
Zynga agreed to lock her out of her account but, Carrie says, she was able to log back in a couple of days later. She still struggles to rein in her spending.
Carrie had good reason to compare the seemingly benign world of mobile phone games to the more overtly controversial gambling industry, for the two
