Schüll's book delves into the lives of compulsive machine gamblers—not the folks playing social games like poker around a table but the smaller percentage of the population who play alone at electronic slot machines or video poker terminals with such intensity that they enter a state of total gambling immersion, shutting out the world for long stretches of time. As one gambling addict told Schüll: "I could say that for me the machine is a lover, a friend, a date, but really it's none of those things; it's a vacuum cleaner that sucks the life out of me, and sucks me out of life."

The industry caters to such players:

For instance, video slot machines now deliver frequent small wins rather than infrequent large jackpots, to better sustain what she calls "the flow of the experience."