Is There a Ludic Loop?

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YouTube is a machine that's playing you like a slot machine to see how many views did I get and Twitter is a slot machine. Should the technology designers know now that this is all out there? "I think we can identify specifically what they are," he says of social games. 'The profit logic here is that it's the click economy'

In part two of our interview with cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, we learn what gamblers are really after a lot of the time — it’s not money. And it’s the same thing we’re looking for when we mindlessly open up Facebook or Twitter. How can we design products so that we’re not taking advantage of these universal urges and vulnerabilities but using them to help us? Tristan, Aza and Natasha explore ways we could shift our thinking about making and using technology.