Sounds of Desire: Slot Machines, Dopamine, and Magical Thinking

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Introduction

Sound is one of the oldest and most biologically immediate channels through which the brain understands the world and navigates through it. Long before the evolution of modernity’s sophisticated visual systems, auditory processing enabled organisms to detect danger, locate resources, and coordinate social communication. In humans, sound still exerts a powerful influence on attention, emotion, and decision-making, engaging subcortical circuits that encode salience, reward, and threat.

Starting from the audible ecosystem incapsulated in the casino slot machines, this article examines how these sounds operate across multiple domains of contemporary life, how they interact with human psychology and physiology, and how the architecture of our sonic environments continues to sculpt desire, attention, and lived experience.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research in neuroscience, gambling studies, sound studies, and gambling regulation, the article explores how auditory cues, predictive reward, and responsibility are distributed across bodies, technologies, and institutions. It combines theoretical analysis with two qualitative interviews conducted in December 2025, with a former slot-machine player reflecting on addiction and sensory immersion, and another with an industry insider involved in the design of gambling platforms.

“Sounds of desire refer not only to the sounds we intentionally seek, but also to those engineered to seek us: sounds that promise reward, convey acceptance, regulate perception, predict and shape behaviour and emotion simply by appearing in our sensory field.”

What Sounds Do?

In everyday life, sound permeates experience with a force that is often underestimated and taken for granted, despite its pervasive impact. Sonic environments can shape emotion, cognition, and bodily states in ways both intentional and incidental. Today’s world is saturated with engineered auditory cues, from smartphone notifications, to payment-approval chimes and digital alerts, each crafted to capture attention, signal opportunity, and subtly guide behaviour.

These modern cues coexist with ancient, evolutionarily salient sounds such as rustling leaves, flowing water, or the sudden crack of thunder, forming a continuous spectrum between the natural and the artificial. Within this spectrum lie the sounds of desire: auditory signals that prompt anticipation, modulate physiological stimulation, and direct everyday decisions.

Neural principles underpin the design of many contemporary auditory systems. For example, casino slot machines, smartphone notifications, social-media alerts, and video-game reward sounds all exploit the brain’s sensitivity to novelty, prediction, and reward.

Payment systems operate similarly: the bright ring accompanying an approved card transaction conveys not only technical and financial success but a momentary sense of permission or social inclusion, while the dull, discordant tone of a declined payment introduces embarrassment or exclusion.

Public transit gates replicate this semiotic structure: crisp, high-pitched beeps signal access, while low-pitched error tones function as auditory refusals. Across these contexts, sound becomes a medium of authorization and denial, shaping the emotional texture of daily life.

Digital communication platforms amplify these dynamics. The ping of a message, the soft swell of an email alert, or the familiar tri-tone of a WhatsApp notification carries emotional weight, often signalling connection, validation, or social presence. These brief cues can trigger microbursts of dopamine-driven anticipation, reinforcing cycles of checking, responding, and seeking further stimulation. Conversely, silence, or the presence of negative tones, may evoke anxiety, frustration, or a sense of exclusion. In this way, auditory design subtly modulates interpersonal perception, digital attachment, and patterns of social engagement.

Layered upon these engineered cues are the broader acoustic ecologies in which everyday life unfolds. Urban environments are characterized by dense, overlapping soundscapes: traffic hums, braking hisses, crosswalk signals, and a continuous stream of mechanical and human noise. These sounds generate a high-arousal ambient state, heightening vigilance, accelerating physiological rhythms and contributing to stress or sensory overload. By contrast, rural and wilderness environments present thin, low-density soundscapes (such as birdsong, flowing water, wind through vegetation or forests), known to reduce cortisol, lower heart rate, and foster calmness. The contrast between loud, saturated urban environments and quiet, expansive natural ones shows how acoustic density modulates emotional and physiological experience.

More recently, artificial soundscapes increasingly started to simulate natural ones, to a point in which the gap between natural and artificial, real and unreal, becomes loose. Rainfall loops in spa centres, ocean-wave soundtracks in meditation apps, ambient music in waiting rooms or forest-ambience recordings in therapeutic settings reflect an implicit cultural recognition that sound regulates the body.

In this sense, sounds of desire refer not only to the sounds we intentionally seek, but also to those engineered to seek us: sounds that promise reward, convey acceptance, regulate perception, predict and shape behaviour and emotion simply by appearing in our sensory field.

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Photo credits: Las Vegas Games

The Illusion of Chance

Unlike other industries that had long exploited human vulnerabilities and turned addiction into profit (such as the tobacco or alcohol industries), gambling brings the promise of something profound which is at stake, something that has long concerned the human mind: fundamental ideas about fate, chance, gain, and loss.

Behind all this lie a persistent, fundamental illusion that regardless of who you are, your social class, background, upbringing, or education, there exists a unique opportunity reserved just for you; one that destiny itself has granted. Luck and misfortune cease to be abstract human inventions and become real, tangible experiences with their own truth value. This perspective resembles Christian thought: no matter how sinful one may be, there comes a moment when all sins will be forgiven and the sinner soul will eventually be purified. Or, following the Old Testament, the appearance, once every 50 years, of a year of Jubilee, when all debts were erased and enslaved people freed.

The fate itself is being regulated by a sort of “invisible hand” that operates like a higher authority to ensure prosperity. Economist Adam Smith famously used the phrase “invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations (1776) to describe how individuals pursuing their own interests can unintentionally contribute to the overall good of society. “He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Thus, when individuals act in their own economic self-interest, seeking profit, efficiency, or advantage, markets tend to self-regulate, coordinating supply, demand, and resource allocation without direct central control, symbolising spontaneous order arising from decentralised decision-making.

La Roulette in the Casino, from Monte-Carlo, 2nd Serie (ca. 1910) by Georges Goursat [Sem] (1863-1934). Source: metmuseum.org

The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoievski’s novel The Gambler (1866) serves as a psychological study of how gambling can hollow out identity, distort judgment, and entangle personal desire with ruin. He portrays this with striking realism, drawn in part from his own struggles with gambling.

The novel follows Alexei Ivanovich, a young tutor working for a formerly wealthy Russian General’s family in the fictional German resort town of Roulettenburg. Alexei becomes increasingly entangled in the chaotic emotional world of the General, his creditors, and especially Polina Alexandrovna (the General’s stepdaughter), for whom he nurtures a tormenting love. The atmosphere of the town revolves around the roulette tables, where both aristocrats and opportunists chase rapid fortune, creating a sense of constant tension and imminent ruin. Alexei’s descent into gambling addiction forms the core of the novel. Initially playing roulette as a reckless gesture to impress Polina, he soon becomes consumed by the thrill of risk and the illusion of control. His behaviour grows erratic, swinging between euphoric confidence and despair, reflecting the psychological grasp of compulsion. He convinces himself that winning will resolve his emotional suffering and secure Polina’s affection, yet every victory only accelerates his obsession and keeps him in a cycle of humiliation and hope. By the novel’s end, Alexei is left wandering Europe, still chasing the roulette wheel despite having lost love, stability, and self-respect.

Dostoevsky’s involvement with gambling began in 1863 during his first visit to the Wiesbaden gaming tables, marking the start of nearly a decade of compulsive play. Between 1863 and 1871 he frequented the casinos of Baden-Baden, Homburg, and Saxon-les-Bains, typically experiencing the same destructive pattern: “beginning by winning a small amount of money and losing far more in the end.” His initial enthusiasm is visible in a letter written to his first wife's sister on September 1st 1863, in which he confidently described what he believed was the key to success at roulette. He insisted that gambling could be mastered through discipline, claiming: “I possess the secret of how to win… merely a matter of keeping oneself under constant control and never getting excited… you just can’t lose that way and are sure to win.”

This early illusion of control collapsed almost immediately. Within a week Dostoevsky had lost all his winnings and was forced to appeal to his family for financial help. Writing to his brother Mikhail on 8 September 1863, he confessed how quickly his so-called “system” failed. After winning “600 francs… suddenly I started to lose, couldn’t control myself and lost everything.” His account reveals impulsive, addictive behaviour: “I was carried away by this unusual good fortune and I risked all 35 napoleons and lost them all… In Geneva I pawned my watch.” These letters offer a rare, direct window into the emotional volatility and loss of control characteristic of his gambling addiction.

The biographical consequences of these financial crises were profound. Desperate for income, Dostoevsky entered into a perilous contract with the publisher F. T. Stellovsky, agreeing to produce a full-length novel by 1 November 1866 or forfeit publishing rights to all his works for nine years. To meet this deadline, he relied on an innovative collaboration with Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, a 19-year-old stenographer. Dictating sections of the story to her while she transcribed and organized them, Dostoevsky managed to complete the manuscript in time. This achievement ultimately shaped both his literary career and personal life, as he later married Anna.

Slot Machines: From Bliss to Despair and Back

Photo credits: Las Vegas Games

In commercial and digital settings, sound is deliberately crafted to evoke pleasure, urgency, or reward. Casino slot machines, for example, employ a palette of bright, celebratory tones, engineered to create excitement and elevate immersion even when the player experiences net losses, offering one of the most intensively engineered examples of sonic desire.

The slots’ celebratory jingles, harmonic arpeggios and cascading tones are built to exploit reward-prediction circuitry, producing micro-rewards even in the absence of true financial gain. As we will further explore, neuroscience research shows that these cues amplify dopaminergic firing, especially when paired with visually salient animations or near-miss outcomes.

The ability to respond appropriately to unexpected events is crucial for survival because such events can signal potential rewards or threats. In a recent paper published in 2024 in the Nature Communications journal, researchers at Yale University Gloria W. Feng & Robb B. Rutledge tested whether unexpected, task-irrelevant sounds could influence decision-making, using a large sample (about 1,600 participants across seven experiments). “Many of us might have the intuition that hearing an unexpected sound would be distracting, that it might lead to errors or a loss of focus,” said Rutledge, assistant professor of psychology and senior author of the study. “But when we think about the neurobiology, we know that dopamine plays a role in decision-making and a surprising sound leads to a short burst of dopamine.” That’s because the sound may indicate something important, like something rewarding. When we make a decision, short dopamine bursts may be involved, in part, because the brain is weighing how rewarding the options are.

The study provides compelling behavioural evidence that unexpected auditory events can shape risk-taking behaviour, and it presents a plausible dopaminergic interpretation supported by existing literature. Nevertheless, without direct neurobiological measurements, the causal role of dopamine remains inferential. The modest effect size and laboratory specificity invite caution in generalizing to real-world decision-making. Even so, the research highlights an underexplored but potentially important phenomenon: the subtle ways in which everyday sensory experiences may unconsciously influence judgment, risk preference, and behavioural flexibility.

Dragoș Rusu · The sound of online slot machines

Another recent study (2025) titled Effects of Audiovisual Cues on Game Immersion during Simulated Slot Machine Gambling and published in the Journal of Gambling Studies, examined whether audio-visual cues, typical of modern slot machines, influence the subjective experience of immersion during gambling. According to the authors, design features of slot machines “may influence these experiences, potentially interacting with personal risk factors for disordered gambling.”

To test this, 156 undergraduate students played a realistic slot-machine simulation inside an authentic cabinet. The researchers manipulated the intensity of audio-visual feedback (three conditions: Minus, Intermediate, Plus) and afterward used a validated “game immersion questionnaire” to measure how absorbed participants felt. The Intermediate audio-visual cue condition led to significantly greater reported immersion than the Minus condition (p < 0.05). As the authors note: participants in the Minus condition “reported 12.3% lower immersion scores than those in the Intermediate condition.” Surprisingly, the Plus condition (maximal audio-visual intensity) did not produce the highest immersion; in exploratory models, some individuals reported lower immersion under Plus. Personal factors mattered: higher scores on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) predicted greater immersion across all conditions (p < 0.001). A gender × Cue interaction was observed: among women, immersion was significantly higher in the Intermediate condition compared to Minus or Plus; this pattern was not observed for men.

This study supports the idea that game design, specifically audio-visual feedback, plays a crucial role in shaping gamblers’ subjective experience of immersion, which is often associated with problematic gambling behaviour. The fact that immersion was highest with intermediate, not maximal, levels of sensory stimulation suggest a non-linear relationship: too little stimulation under-engages the gambler; too much may reduce the perceived immersion or overwhelm the experience, possibly because of sensory overload or cue saturation.

Moreover, the influence of personal risk factors (high PGSI, psychological distress) indicates that some individuals are more susceptible than others to immersive effects. This underscores the interaction between “product” (slot machine design) and “person” (vulnerability factors), a theme often highlighted in gambling-harm research. In regulatory and public-health terms, the findings imply that audio-visual features should be considered not as mere decoration, but as core structural design elements that can enhance immersion and potentially contribute to gambling harm.

Early empirical work focused less on “immersion” per se and more on arousal and reinforcement produced by slot-machine sights and sounds. Dixon and colleagues showed that “losses disguised as wins” (LDWs), outcomes where you win less than you wager, still trigger strong physiological arousal when accompanied by celebratory graphics and sounds. These LDWs have been described as net-loss outcomes “disguised by flashing graphics and high-fidelity winning sounds”, and are thought to inflate the perceived win rate.

More recent theory work by Murch & Clark (2021) explicitly conceptualized immersion in EGMs, describing the “slot machine zone” as a “trance-like state of diminished attention to time passing and gambling-irrelevant events”. They proposed the Gambling Immersion model, where structural features (like audio-visual cues, bet structure, speed of play) interact with individual vulnerabilities (e.g., impulsivity, gambling problems) to produce deeply immersive states.

Together, this body of research shows that immersion arises from the interplay of engineered design elements and player vulnerabilities. Audio-visual cues are not merely cosmetic; they meaningfully shape players’ perceptual and emotional states, influencing engagement and potentially contributing to gambling-related harm. The emerging consensus suggests that immersion is maximized not by overwhelming sensory stimulation but by carefully calibrated cue intensities, which may optimize attentional focus and reward processing. As such, contemporary regulatory and harm-minimization efforts increasingly view audio-visual design as a key structural feature warranting oversight.

Photo credits: Dan V / Unsplash

Adrian’s Story: A Slot Machine Player’s Descent

According to the World Casino Directory, in Bucharest alone there are 164 casinos, making it the second city in the world, after Las Vegas, with the largest number of casinos. But after the pandemic, the online gambling industry has exploded, moving from the physical realm into a virtual one, with tens of new legal operators.

In December 2025 I conducted an in-depth interview with a former slot-machine player who self-identifies as having experienced severe gambling addiction. To protect his identity, the name Adrian is used throughout this article. The interview took place after Adrian had already self-excluded from all gambling platforms and was in a period of recovery, which allowed for reflective distance and detailed articulation of his experience.

Adrian recalls that his first contact with gambling did not begin with play, but with atmosphere. At sixteen, he accompanied friends into casinos and remembers “a tension in the air, something electric,” even though he did not gamble himself. Years later, during a period marked by depression, emotional distress, and suicidal thoughts, gambling became what he describes as “the perfect form of escapism.” Unlike video games, substances, or books, slot machines offered him something tangible: “Here, the activity happens in real life. You escape the terror of the world you’re living in.”

His turning point came during a marathon session that lasted from early morning until the afternoon. Playing Gates of Olympus, he experienced what felt like an impossible run of wins. “I thought I’d hit the game on the day it had a bug,” he says. Starting with roughly 300 lei, he played continuously—drinking, smoking, barely leaving the machine—and within hours had won nearly €10,000. “I felt like the universe was on my side. Like I was God’s child.” Although he briefly considered stopping, he didn’t: “I wanted more. It felt unreal.” He never withdrew the money, convinced that the game’s mechanics, and destiny, were working in his favour.

His decision to keep playing, despite technical knowledge of slot mechanics and RTP, reflects a classic dopaminergic trap: once the brain updates its model of what is “possible,” future losses are interpreted not as failure, but as temporary deviation from a now-believed trajectory. In Adrian’s words, the win created “certainty” rather than caution. This certainty extended to his savings, 7-8k euros, money he explicitly recognized as a potential down payment for a home, yet which he reinterpreted as fuel for a process that now felt inevitable. Here, gambling ceases to function as entertainment and becomes a meaning-making system, structured around hope, destiny, and personal exceptionality.

Within days, then weeks, he lost everything: savings, salary after salary, and eventually borrowed money from friends, without telling them why. He took out multiple high-interest loans from non-bank lenders, losing those funds as well. The cycle escalated into a crisis. After playing for nearly twenty hours straight, sleepless and overwhelmed by debt, he reached a breaking point. “I screamed until I couldn’t breathe. The shame destroyed me.” He attempted suicide through an overdose and survived only due to physical tolerance. “I was lying in bed, exhausted, not knowing what to do, after more than thirty hours without sleep, with non-bank loans I couldn’t repay. When my phone started vibrating, I hoped it would be a warm voice—a rescue, a friend. Instead, it was an unknown number: the fifth or sixth loan company calling to try to convince me to take on more credit. I answered, said I wasn’t interested, and hung up.” What followed was profound isolation, until he finally told his parents. Contrary to his expectations, he received support rather than blame. “That was the only real rescue. A gambler’s only chance is to ask for help.” With their help, he paid off his debts and self-excluded from all gambling platforms.

Magical thinking plays a central role in Adrian’s account of his gambling experience. He describes how random coincidences were reinterpreted as meaningful signals: “I’d be looking at the list of games and suddenly hear the name of a slot spoken somewhere—on the bus, randomly—and I’d take it as a sign.” He also recounts choosing bets based on symbolic patterns rather than probability: “I’d play amounts made up of my favorite numbers, or I’d play at certain hours because I felt they were luckier.” These practices reflect what Adrian himself identifies as “a kind of superstition coming from magical thinking,” through which chance is transformed into destiny. Rather than counteracting loss, this symbolic logic reinforced his belief that winning was imminent and personally ordained, sustaining continued play despite mounting losses.

Adrian draws a clear distinction between sports betting and slot machines, emphasizing that slots exert a far stronger grip on the mind. In sports betting, there is at least an illusion of personal merit—the belief that intuition, analysis, or “reading the game” plays a role. Slot machines, by contrast, confront the player directly with chance. One knows that the house always wins, yet also knows that winning is still possible. This paradox of certain loss paired with the hope of exception makes slot machines especially damaging, as each spin becomes an attempt to be the one who defeats the system.

Even now, abstinent, the habit lingers in his body. “I still open my phone and go to where the apps used to be.” Reflecting on the experience, Adrian returns to sound, the element he once believed he could neutralize. Initially, he attempted to assert control by muting the audio: “I liked to believe I was in control by turning the sound off.” This belief mirrors a common cognitive defence, yet his later admissions undermine it. During moments of desperation, he played with sound enabled, and immediately recognized its effect: “With the sound on, it absorbs you completely.” He explains how slot machines use distinct audio cues for small wins, big wins, and “mega wins”: “The coins explode, the universe cracks open, that loud metallic ringing that doesn’t stop.” Over time, he could identify outcomes without looking at the screen: “You know what symbols landed just by the sound.” This indicates a deep coupling between auditory processing and reward anticipation, where sound alone becomes sufficient to trigger predictive neural responses. His description of the experience as “synaesthesia”, coins exploding, metallic ringing that “doesn’t stop”, captures how sound collapses sensory boundaries, producing a full-body immersion state.

Slot-machine addiction is not merely a failure of will, nor simply a matter of financial loss. It is a neuro-sensory entanglement, where dopamine, sound design, and predictive reward converge to create a self-reinforcing loop of anticipation and meaning. This case underscores the need to understand gambling not only as a behavioural issue, but as a designed experience, one that exploits fundamental properties of the human nervous system, especially in moments of vulnerability.

Constanța, September 2024. Photo credits: Lavinia Cioacă for Teritoriu • Bani • Dependență

The Architecture of Desire

To complement the testimony of a former gambler, I conducted a second interview in December 2025 with an anonymous professional working in online gambling platform design. The interview focused on how desire, engagement, and retention are deliberately engineered within gambling systems.

“I mainly work on improving slot and betting experiences, shortening the journey from registration to the first deposit.” The primary design objective is clear: “to convert quickly a registered user to a depositing user,” and, crucially, “to keep winning users playing and not withdrawing their winnings.” Engagement is operationalized through mobile-centric metrics such as “taps to register” and “scroll-depth,” reflecting the dominance of mobile play (95-97%).

Sound plays a central role in this architecture. “The most important sound is the notification sound,” he explained, comparing casino platforms to streaming brands: “Think of Netflix’s ‘too duuum’ intro. It’s iconic, it’s Netflix. It brings brand awareness in a new way. It’s also important to come in an unexpected time. Empirical studies have shown that sending notifications at random hours increase the click-to-open rate. When you pair an unexpected notification, a slogo and a message that you were granted 300 free spins, you’re more inclined to open and deposit.” In the shining universe of slot machines, different laws apply. “It’s research, it’s iteration. To put it shortly, it’s intentional. The sound of each line spinning, how it slows down to create anticipation, each symbol landing with a sound and a flash and how each line of winning per spin creates a dopamine inducing reaction of the brain. It becomes rather chemistry than design and surely sound is a big part of the recipe.”

Asked about desire, he stated plainly: “It goes beyond desire. There are efforts to exploit cognitive biases, dopamine addiction, and psychological effects.” Time perception, while harder to manipulate online than in physical casinos, remains a target. “In online gambling these are harder to control than in brick and mortar as well. While in brick and mortar you can black out the windows and have someone bring you drinks and snacks, in online you cannot do that. Sure, you can take over the entire screen in the app and cover the phone’s UI that also shows the time, but users are more free in online regarding this matter.” Even in the absence of funds, the platform continues to occupy attention. “Casinos will make great efforts to give you something to do in the platform even when you don’t have any money left in your balance, like spins on a wheel.”

“When users are not informed, not in control, or are faced with shame-inducing messages,” engagement crosses into entrapment. He illustrated this with two contrasting examples:
Engagement: The casino sends a private in-app message to user X: You’re doing amazing. Claim here 300 free spins for your next play + a button CLAIM BONUS.
Entrapment: The casino automatically sends 300 free spins in user’s X account: notification 1. After that it sends a second in-app message/email/SMS with a message like 210 people already won X amount with their free spins (social proof). Your free spins are expiring in 30 minutes (urgency) PLAY NOW!”

Finally, when asked what he would change if given full freedom, he pointed to regulatory limits rather than design ideals, citing the EU Digital Services Act and responsible gambling rules as “gatekeepers that prevent trapping mechanisms,” but added a critical observation: “When a customer is registered, the damage has been done. People have been desensitised to casino advertising and promises of fast winnings drive a lot of young people from neglected parts of the society to register/deposit/spin.” His proposed solution was not better design, but structural reframing: “A rebranding regulation approach like in tobacco and alcohol would actually change the perspective from fast winnings to entertainment and shift the audience to a more financially potent segment.”

Ploiești, September 2024. Photo credits: Lavinia Cioacă for Teritoriu • Bani • Dependență

The Social Impact of Gambling

In 2025, the gambling industry in Romania remains heavily unregulated, yet increasingly shaped by tightened state control and regulatory pressure. Under the oversight of Oficiul Național pentru Jocuri de Noroc ONJN (National Gambling Office), operators of both physical and online gambling must hold valid licences (Class I for B2C operators, Class II for B2B providers) to be legally allowed to offer slot machines, casino games, online sports betting and poker.

Recent legislative changes crystallized in Law 141/2025, which raised authorisation fees, increased financial guarantees for operators, and introduced stricter oversight, reporting obligations and traceability for both land-based gaming equipment and online platforms. These reforms come alongside broader 2024 and 2025 amendments, including geographic restrictions on slot-machine halls (banning them in towns under 15,000 inhabitants) and new rules aimed at prevention of fraud, money laundering, and under-age gambling.

Amid this regulatory tightening, the platform Joc Responsabil plays a central and contested role. Officially presented as the leading industry-backed effort for prevention and support, the organization offers public awareness campaigns, psychological counselling, self-exclusion tools and outreach for vulnerable players. In practice, however, the model often ends up shifting the burden of “responsible gambling” onto individuals themselves. Instead of structural reforms that limit exposure, reduce predatory marketing, or restrict access (systemic measures that could address root causes), the focus remains on personal self-control, self-monitoring, and personal accountability. Thus, it becomes the individual player who must navigate temptation, control impulses, and seek help if needed.

Viewed through a broader lens, this dynamic reflects deeper traits of contemporary capitalism and the ethos of individualism. Under capitalism, market expansion and profit imperatives drive the proliferation of gambling venues and online platforms; the state regulates, but also profits via taxes, fees, and guarantees. Meanwhile, individuals are depicted as autonomous actors responsible for their own choices. The social narrative emphasizes personal responsibility over structural inequality, moral hazard over systemic risk. The result is a societal framework where gambling is legal, widespread, tightly regulated, in a way that places the moral and practical burden of harm prevention on the individual consumer rather than on industry or state. The emphasis is not on limiting supply or exposure, but on educating each person to “play responsibly.” In this way, late stage capitalism shifts risk and responsibility downward: from institutions to people; from structural factors to individual behaviour.

A Romanian multidisciplinary research, Teritoriu • Bani • Dependență (Territory • Money • Addiction), seeks to investigate how the proliferation of gambling venues intersects with socio-economic vulnerability, and how aggressive advertising and accessibility contribute to risking addiction among already disadvantaged groups. Through reportage and sociological inquiry, the resulted materials evoke various systemic problems: from advertising and media practices deliberately blurring moral boundaries (presenting gambling as harmless entertainment while masking its potential harms), to the urban spread of gambling spaces. The project explicitly addresses gambling addiction, its psychological and social consequences, and the degree to which for many individuals the “game” ceases to be entertainment and becomes a harmful compulsion.

Gambling in Romania is no longer a marginal phenomenon, but a social problem with public health implications, particularly so given the industry’s rapid growth in recent years. Gambling regimes shaped by stronger egalitarian principles and a more interventionist state offer a revealing counterpoint to the Romanian case. Norway is often dismissed as an “extreme” or non-transferable example, and comparisons are frequently rejected on these grounds. Yet this reflexive dismissal itself warrants scrutiny. A closer examination of Norway’s gambling framework reveals not an unrealistic utopia, but a set of deliberate policy choices that prioritize public welfare over market expansion—choices that expose how regulatory priorities can fundamentally reshape the social impact of gambling.

The gambling sector in Norway remains under a strict state monopoly. Compared to Romania, where there are tens of private and state operators, in Norway only two state-owned operators are legally permitted to offer most forms of gambling: Norsk Tipping (lotteries, sports betting, online games, number games) and Norsk Rikstoto (horse-race betting). All other commercial, private, or offshore operators are generally banned from offering gambling services to Norwegian residents. The gambling regulation is governed by a set of core laws (including the Lottery Act, the Gaming Scheme Act / Gambling Act, and the Totalisator Act), which together establish the monopoly framework and strict licensing prohibitions. The regulator, Norwegian Gaming and Foundation Authority (Lotteri- og Stiftelsestilsynet), oversees licensing, compliance, and enforcement, including blocking foreign gambling websites and restricting unauthorized payment processing.

In 2025, the model remains politically supported: while there is public and political debate, as well as occasional criticism of regulatory failures, the state monopoly continues to be defended as a means to ensure safety, consumer protection and social reinvestment of gambling profits. These profits from Norsk Tipping and Norsk Rikstoto are directed toward public services, such as culture, sports and social projects, aligning gambling with public welfare rather than private profit motives.

Photo credits: Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

Conclusions

Across contemporary life, sound functions not merely as background accompaniment but as an active force that shapes behaviour, emotion, and desire. From the engineered chimes of slot machines and smartphone notifications to the validating beep of an approved payment or the rejecting groan of an error tone, auditory cues operate as subtle regulators of our psychological and physiological states.

Sound is never neutral. It is a tool of influence, a medium of control, a source of pleasure, and a trigger of desire. Ultimately, the sounds of desire are the signals that seek us out as much as we seek them. They guide us through systems of approval and exclusion, reward and frustration, immersion and escape. They reveal how deeply our perceptual and affective worlds are shaped by sonic design, and how vulnerable our neural machinery is to its cues.

Understanding the power of sound is therefore not only an academic exercise but a cultural and political necessity. It requires recognising that our acoustic environments are engineered spaces, that our desires can be modulated by auditory architecture, and that responsibility for managing these forces must be shared, not outsourced to individuals alone.

In acknowledging sound’s profound impact, we gain the possibility of reclaiming our sonic environments, designing them more ethically, and cultivating an awareness that allows us to hear not just the signals that call to us but the systems that produce them.

AFCN

Sounds of Desire: Slot Machines, Dopamine, and Magical Thinking

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Introduction

What Sounds Do?

The Illusion of Chance

The Gambler

Slot Machines: From Bliss to Despair and Back

Adrian’s Story: A Slot Machine Player’s Descent

The Architecture of Desire

The Social Impact of Gambling

Conclusions

About the Author

Dragoș Rusu

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THE ATTIC

Sounds of Desire: Slot Machines, Dopamine, and Magical Thinking

Written by:

Share article:

Introduction

What Sounds Do?

The Attic Newsletter

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

The Illusion of Chance

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

The Gambler

Slot Machines: From Bliss to Despair and Back

Adrian’s Story: A Slot Machine Player’s Descent

The Architecture of Desire

The Social Impact of Gambling

Conclusions

About the Author

Dragoș Rusu

Share this Article

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