Gambling Enters the Family Zone

You were always meant to lose money at Dave & Buster’s. Maybe it would be to Pac-Man or the milk-jug toss, maybe to the claw machine and its confoundingly ungraspable stuffies, maybe (and perhaps most painfully) to several middling cheeseburger sliders and an oversize margarita as you watched a football game on a towering wall of TVs. This past spring, however, the restaurant-and-arcade chain announced a new way to help people part with their money: gambling.

Of course, the company doesn’t call it gambling. Dave & Buster’s has taken as a partner the technology firm Lucra, which specializes in “gamification” software, to facilitate what Lucra’s chief operating officer has said are “real-money contests” for its customers. Through D&B’s app, the chain’s “Loyalty” members will be able to place cash wagers on the so-called skill-based games they play—Skee-Ball, basketball shoot-outs, and the like—in what the companies characterize as an elevation of friendly competition: Why not let the arcade help you keep track of that $5 Skee-Ball bet before your ability to calculate washes away in a Bud Light haze?

But then again, why should it be involved? The Dave & Buster’s slogan—“Eat. Drink. Play. Watch.”—evokes the lighthearted fun of corporate outings and kids’ birthday parties. But make no mistake: The company’s new initiative is a move into commercialized betting, a symptom of a larger and troubling trend. Suddenly, gambling seems to be everywhere. This sort of vice creep, a societal normalization of what used to be seen as unsavory habits—gambling, smoking marijuana, watching porn—is accelerated by people’s addiction to devices, in this case giving casual bettors the tools to become compulsive wagerers and easing the way for gambling to become a constant part of life.

For most of American history, gambling was generally frowned upon, assumed to sully the integrity of the sports on which people wagered and the souls of the gamblers themselves. In 1934, The New York Times quoted ministers of New York churches denouncing gambling as a “leprous touch on sport”—antisocial, corrupting, character-destroying, a danger to young people. In 1995, the Public Broadcasting Service was still hosting debates about whether allowing public gambling would teach the “wrong moral lessons.”

Gambling also used to be much more difficult to access. Before the internet, you had to go somewhere to place a bet—to the racetrack, a bookie, a casino. The moral stigma and the relegation of gambling to specific (and somewhat tawdry) locations made it clear that the practice was not something to be entered into without caution. Over the past several decades, though, American society has lost some of its fervor for policing morality (recent developments around abortion and in vitro fertilization notwithstanding). See, for instance, the efforts to mitigate the harms of drug use as opposed to proscribing individuals’ activities. Governments in particular are declining to prohibit what used to be seen as vices—especially when, as with gambling, taxing them brings in revenue.

Although regulated state lotteries have existed since 1964, and the first Native American–run casino opened in 1979, a significant cultural shift took place in 2018, when the Supreme Court, in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, invalidated the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. The decision allowed individual states to legalize commercial sports betting, kicking off a boom that has yet to subside.

[Read: Online betting has gone off the deep end]

Now you can’t turn on a football game or drive down a highway without being encouraged to make a wager. DraftKings and FanDuel, online sites whose ads blanket TV, radio, and the internet, launched in the early 2000s as daily fantasy-sports platforms and, since Murphy, have recast themselves as smartphone-friendly sports-betting destinations. A herd of other companies have followed suit, seeking to cash in. (The online sports-betting industry took in $10.4 billion in revenue last year alone, an approximately 50 percent increase from 2022.) Today, 30 states and Washington, D.C., allow mobile sports betting, according to the American Gaming Association, and three have legislation pending.

Some people might argue that this is simply the way of the market—and not particularly sinister, because consumers can always choose not to gamble. Technically, this is true. But that reasoning becomes a bit less convincing when you consider the technology most people now carry in their pockets.

In a sense, Americans have been training themselves for years to become eager users of gambling tech. Smartphone-app design, as has been amply reported, relies on the “variable reward” method of habit formation to get people hooked—the same mechanism that casinos use to keep people playing games and pulling levers. When Instagram sends notifications about likes or worthwhile posts, people are impelled to open the app and start scrolling; when sports-betting apps send push alerts about fantastic parlays, people are coaxed into placing one more bet.

Smartphones have thus habituated people to an expectation of stimulation—and potential reward—at every moment. “You’re constantly surrounded by the ability to change your neurochemistry by a simple click,” Timothy Fong, a UCLA psychiatry professor and a co-director of the university’s gambling-studies program, told me. “There’s this idea that we have to have excessive dopamine with every experience in our life.”

The frictionless ease of mobile sports betting takes advantage of this. It has become easy, even ordinary, to experience the “excitement” of gambling everywhere. “Bet on the election, bet on how long your co-worker stays employed in the job … what kind of grades your kids get, when Grandma dies,” Fong said. “I hate to be so flippant about it, but that’s exactly what [apps are] priming people to do. It’s to say that any unknown outcome in your life, we can gamify. We can make it more interesting.”

Both customers and the companies building tools to make betting easier might argue that there are upsides to the new gambling tech: It’s better that we don’t have mobbed-up bookies at the racetrack breaking thumbs, and it’s not terrible that, via taxes and fees, governments can make a buck from the gambling industry too. But gambling isn’t harmless—which is why it is subject to regulation. (Some state officials are already scrutinizing the Dave & Buster’s plan.) For one thing, gambling is addictive, the only non-substance addiction disorder recognized in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). For another, gambling addiction can have enormous ramifications: extreme debt, depression, broken relationships—crises that may not be visible until someone is deep in the hole.

[Read: Sports betting won]

Because the consequences of gambling typically don’t manifest as physical symptoms—unlike the health effects of alcoholism, drug use, or smoking—society is already behind on tracking and addressing gambling’s harms and preparing for the ramifications of its extended reach. Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at the Rutgers University School of Social Work, put it to me this way: “Think about the fact that there are all these regulatory agencies collecting data for substances … Look at the opioid epidemic—the hospitals, all these points of entry were collecting data,” which is how public-health officials realized that something was wrong. But there is no federal office overseeing gambling addiction, and no federal organization funding the development of evidence-based treatment, according to the nonprofit National Council on Problem Gambling. Among federal officials, gambling “is not on anyone’s radar as a serious public-health concern,” Nower said.

Perhaps more insidiously, gambling changes the culture. Compare a friendly game of Hot Shots basketball at Dave & Buster’s with one in which cash is on the line. Once money is involved, the dynamics change—not always predictably, but rarely in a positive direction. (Dave & Buster’s has said that it plans to limit the size of bets allowed, though it has yet to announce a cap; Lucra has said that the average bet on its platform is $10.) And even if there remains some lingering shred of stigma around gambling, legalization plus an enormous amount of advertising is likely to diminish it. The press release from Lucra is an almost admirably forthright admission about what the company has called “social wagering”: “Lucra’s approach will help to destigmatize cash-based competition by evolving it into a fun, friendly, and social experience.”

This approach is also likely to introduce gambling to younger audiences. Lucra says that it uses “third-party services” to verify people’s identity and age, and that its gaming products are available only to customers age 18 and older—a statement Nower scoffed at when I asked her about it. “That illusion is completely dead,” she said. “Once you move everything to an online venue and your smartphone, there is absolutely no way to police whether it’s a 5-year-old placing bets or a 55-year-old.” (Dave & Buster’s did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and a Lucra representative declined to comment.)

For companies courting new audiences, that’s probably part of the appeal. Commercialized gambling makes most of its profit from people who are heavy users, not casual ones. And the industry wants to draw them in earlier and earlier. “We absolutely know that the younger you are when you start gambling, that increases risk of gambling addiction,” Fong, of UCLA, told me. “We also know that when you do it more frequently, that absolutely increases the rate of addiction.”

So, sure—just for fun, Dave & Buster’s patrons may soon be encouraged to start placing casual bets on games with their friends on the company’s app. If they do, they should remember that the same calculus applies on their phone as in traditional gambling: When you throw down the money, you’re less likely to fill your own pockets than you are to boost someone else’s bottom line. “Social wagering” may be sold as a way to make experiences more exciting. But the house, as ever, is bound to come out on top.