Rage Alongside the Machine?

Exploring Consumer Softproducts' latest game-design hijinks.

Jul 02, 2025

...machine gambling is not a symbolically profound, richly dimensional space whose ‘depth’ can be plumbed to reveal an enactment of larger social and existential dramas. Instead, the solitary absorptive activity can suspend time, space, monetary value, social roles, and sometimes even one’s very sense of existence.
— Natasha Dow Schüll

THE HAND WE’RE DEALT

You know, I’m arguably the greatest Blackjack player in the history of the world. Not because I’ve cashed major tournaments or won remotely significant amounts of money, but because I’ve played for real stakes exactly four times and beaten the house on three of those occasions — a grand statistical anomaly. In my most recent session, I won twelve of sixteen hands and celebrated by sticking a dollar into a random slot machine. I pressed the “SPIN” button (this was a no-armed bandit), somehow won thirty bucks, realized my luck would never get better, and then left the casino and swore off gambling forever. That was nearly eight years ago, and I’m proud to say that my 75% Blackjack win-rate remains untouched by even the most elite professional players. American casino staff typically drag you out back and break your legs when you hit ratios like that, yet I walk comfortably to this day. I suppose they were afraid to tangle with me.

With my world-leading credibility on the matter thus established, I’ve got to tell you about what put it on my mind. Regular readers may recall that, this past April Fool’s Day, we took a look at the Early Access release of Consumer Softproducts’ Psycho Patrol R. We’re now about three months removed from that release, and the game is evolving in remarkable fashion. Just ten days ago, developer Ville Kallio dropped this news update on Steam that really stuck with me. I encourage you to read it even if you have no interest in the game itself, but I’ll give you a little overview anyway.

Polite notice: we’ll talk a lot about compulsive gambling and addiction below. I’ll try my best to be tactful.

“I had originally wanted to make some sort of content update in June… but there isn’t much of June left and I’ve fallen into a bit of a research hole, reading the book Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll...” the post begins. “Video games are just complex forms of video poker… To maximize the addiction potential of Psycho Patrol R, to make ‘Good Game’ I need to understand how [casino gambling] machines will suck the life and money out of human beings. I want to let you experience the ‘Machine Zone’ as described by gambling addicts.”

Well, that certainly comes across as a dominant commercial strategy. But what exactly is this so-called “Machine Zone” of which Kallio speaks? I don’t own a copy of Addiction by Design, but I did find a PDF of the introduction. Schüll doesn’t bury the lede — the book begins with a recollection of an interview with a compulsive player of video poker, who introduces the term on page two and gives us a definition right after. I’ll let it speak for itself:

Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing — to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”
I ask [her] to describe the machine zone... “It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there—you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”1

Designing game mechanics in order to deliberately facilitate psychological dependence thereupon is nothing new these days. Neither is producing experiences that rely foremostly on overwhelming spectacles. But what makes this particular instance especially thought-provoking is that Kallio is doing so for reasons that, while mysterious on the whole, are clearly not related to profit or marketability. “Let’s do this, let’s make this game suck,” the post concludes.

It all begs a strange question: why exactly would a game designer want to evoke the monstrous human cost of gambling addiction without even the promise of raking in piles of filthy lucre? I assumed at first that the answer was simply “because abstract art.” Kallio is the type of lad who exhibits sculptural installations about bureaucratic warmongering and develops games like Cruelty Squad, so it’s not very surprising that he’d take inspiration from what might be the twenty-first century’s most depressing book. He’s truly the Hideo Kojima of hypercapitalist misery simulators.

But while I’m sure that an artistic statement is part of the equation, it seems more like an exploration of how game design can not only facilitate altered states of consciousness in a player but actively exploit those states toward mutually pragmatic ends. We already know that one can design a game in order to habituate players and extract cash from the arrangement, but could it be taken in a non-nefarious direction? That’s what we’re talking about this week. Let’s begin as we always do when I write about Consumer Softproducts’ work, i.e., with a flailing attempt to make sense of the deep-fried memery before us.

*Above: A portion of Ville Kallio’s* Venmo Combat, *exhibited at SIC Gallery, Helsinki, Finland in 2019.*

SO WHY IS BRO DOING THIS?

I should probably start by acknowledging the inherent strangeness of a game designer openly declaring his intention to develop gambling mechanics that maximize his game’s addictive potential. It should go without saying that, had the CEO of a major publisher said this instead of Ville Kallio, I’d be sharpening a pitchfork right now instead of drafting a thoughtful reflection. Fortunately, I can say with confidence that outright exploitation is not the endgame here. Psycho Patrol R just isn’t that kind of game, and I have no reason whatsoever to believe that Consumer Softproducts is even glancing in that direction.

Instead, Kallio postures this as a reification of his theory that video games are essentially video poker with extra steps. His exact words: “When you think of good game mechanics you mostly just mean something that ‘feels good.’ It has very little to do with how the game is actually structured, it has more to do with the look, feel and sound. You just want to sit on your machine and push the buttons to feel good.” If this is true, then recreating the Machine Zone in a game with no real-world stakes is an obvious avenue for game designers to explore, if not necessarily a utopian one. We’ll talk about that in the next section. For now, let’s think more critically about the arguments being made here.

The essence of Kallio’s claim is that most gamers don’t boot up a game with refined expectations for the holistic experience in mind. Instead, they’re after a recreational pastime which, after all, is how modern video games are typically marketed to the wider public. The modal gamer isn’t looking for deep narrative experiences or innovative gameplay paradigms, in other words — he’s after a predictable and reliable source of dopamine. This might sound unnecessarily dismissive of the gaming public at first blush, but I think it holds some water from a statistical perspective: year after year, the list of top-selling games is dominated by multiplayer shooters and the annual installments of this-or-that officially licensed sports franchise, and neither category is known to be heavy on context.

We can infer, then, that the vast commercial and psychological appeals of these games are not so much to do with the specific activities they portray — e.g., playing sports or shooting dudes — but more so with the generic qualia associated with getting tiny but regular neurochemical rewards at a minimum of effort. In theory, just about any game could capture this audience if its gameplay predictably reproduced a soothing flow-state of this nature, perhaps even a single-player RPG-come-mech-sim with extraordinarily nontraditional design sensibilities like Psycho Patrol R.

*Above:* Psycho Patrol R *inherited a stock market mechanic from* Cruelty Squad. *Is speculating in assets just machine gambling of a different sort? Who cares? There was a huge sell-off of PotatoX, so I bought the dip with everything I had. For a potatoform future!*

If this turns out to be feasible — if Kallio actually succeeds at designing a game mechanic that reproduces the Machine Zone as experienced by compulsive gamblers — then I foresee some significant implications for the medium. It’s long been clear that video games can dominate the attention and immerse the psyche to a profound degree under the right circumstances. One can get a playerbase hooked on spinning for lootboxes, of course, but one can also facilitate a deep psychological connection that gets players invested in a setting or a story. As I’ve remarked in the past, video games tend to be whole-brain experiences that demand more of a participant’s cognition than is typical in the communication of artwork. It seems only reasonable that this could be put toward ends other than exploitative manipulation.

What ends might those be?

DIGITAL METHADONE

I didn’t have to read much of Addiction by Design before it became clear why it was so striking to Kallio. By far the most shocking assertion in the introduction is this: despite all that one sacrifices while in the throes of a gambling problem, compulsive gamblers are not generally invested in winning. In fact, most of them are distinctly aware that they are guaranteed to lose over the long-term and actively prefer not to win big. The portion of AbD that I read didn’t go into much detail on this extremely confounding idea, so it’s fortunate that this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered it.

See, when I read the name “Natasha Dow Schüll” in that Steam post, I was certain I’d seen it before. And indeed I had! Enter Nate Silver’s On the Edge, a book from last year about modern economies of risk that I read this past Winter. As it turns out, writing a book about risks and the people who take them gives an author a great excuse to spend lots of time around casinos, so it comes as little surprise that Silver sat down with Schüll herself and included an account of their conversation in the book’s third chapter. Let’s wrangle some specifics out of it:

Why wouldn’t a gambler want to win? Well, when you win a slot jackpot, it’s a disruptive experience… [According to Schüll,] “When they won a jackpot, suddenly, music started playing loudly. People looked at them, marking them in intersubjective space…”
Compulsive slot machine gamblers, Schüll said, are seeking escape from the pressures of everyday life. Casinos are happy to facilitate this by placing players in what she calls the “machine zone” — a flow state where they can shut out the distractions of the real world… They are seeking comfort, not excitement.2

That’s exactly the context we need to understand Schüll’s formal explanation in AbD: “[It] is not the chance of winning to which [gamblers] become addicted, but rather the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play.”3 In short, the “reward” inherent to machine gambling is the ability to suppress one’s psychological stressors on a temporary basis, not unlike chemical narcotics or indeed certain video games.

That’s what’s so deeply intriguing about Ville Kallio expressing an interest in producing those sensations without the expectation of extracting anything material in return from the player. In the particular case of Psycho Patrol R, it certainly sows fertile ground for an acerbic critique of modern societal trends. When Cruelty Squad was new, the most relevant such trend worth lampooning was the alienation and dysfunction of the COVID era as long-standing contradictions in the global economic order were laid bare. In 2025, that order is now all but buried, and the most relevant trend worth critiquing is our growing tendency to seek refuge from emotional hardship in digital distractions built to exploit said hardship. What could be a more perfect framing device than a system dedicated to precisely that?

What I’m trying to establish is that Kallio is correct when he says “video games are just complex forms of video poker,” at least as far as the psychological underpinnings of the two are concerned. Consider also that the big-money video games industry exhibits precisely the same ambitions in the design of their games as do the manufacturers of gambling machines: promise folks the earth, keep them playing as long as possible, and extract as much out of them as you can without attracting the attention of regulatory authorities.

What then of independent artists like Kallio who aren’t so incentivized? This is a reconfiguration of the relationship between designer and player — to transiently obsess the player with a mechanic to render them not exploitable so much as suggestible. By my estimation, the ideal outcome of Kallio’s experiment would be thus: a player boots up Psycho Patrol R and whiles away his time on a gambling minigame rather than engaging with the “actual” game around it. But in the absence of progression mechanics or social incentives to make him carry on indefinitely, his mind suddenly supplies the thought, “wait a minute… why the hell am I wasting my time with this?” That might suffice to get an otherwise intellectually disengaged player to start critically engaging, and that’d be huge.

REICH ALL ALONG

At the end of the day, I don’t suppose that Psycho Patrol R will independently usher in a revolution in how gamers engage with theory. But I had to talk about this experiment anyway, because the slow and humiliating death of big gaming’s growth-at-all-costs business model has created positive ground upon which we can reinterpret the artistic and social utilities of game design. I’ll keep beating that drum until either it all comes to pass or someone takes this stick away from me.

And as it happens, I don’t think I’m done talking about Psycho Patrol R just yet. If you read my first-impressions writeup from April, you may recall that, while I enjoyed the game’s presentation quite a bit, I struggled to synthesize any meaningful takeaways. I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case. For one, I think I’ve figured out how to talk about the role of Wilhelm Reich without getting bogged down in Freudian sexuality. I also have a much clearer picture of the relationship between Psycho Patrol R and Cruelty Squad. And above all, I’ve finally accounted for the goddamn solar anus!

We’ll talk about all of that next week. In the meantime, be sure to check out that first-impressions piece if you haven’t already. The plan is to crash through the Minotaur’s Labyrinth and charge headlong at the bastard as usual, so you’ll want to come prepared.

Til next time <3

Thanks for reading to the end! What’s your take on Consumer Softproducts’ latest gamble? Have you played any games that attempt something similar? Are you a non-American who can’t stop laughing at our bizarre gambling culture? Tell me about it below!