The Working Paper Series is intended to report preliminary results-in-progress. Comments are welcome. In this working paper I explore the links between caretaking responsibilities, video poker machines, and female compulsive gambling. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with women video poker addicts in Las Vegas, I suggest that they have discovered a highly addictive mechanism of escape from what they experience as an excess of relational demands at home and at work. The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) I argue that the desire for such an escape is symptomatic of unresolved anxieties and tensions surrounding the place of care in our discursively individualist society, and, (2) I argue that the gaming industry, by engineering consumer technologies that capitalize on this desire, is implicated in the phenomenon of machine addiction among women. These arguments offer alternatives to a neoliberal understanding of excessive gambling as poor exercise of “free choice ” and a related biomedical understanding of excessive gambling as a genetically based “pathology.” A woman whose 10 day old baby died in a sweltering car while she played video poker…pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the August 1997 death of her daughter, Joy. Mrs. Baker spent 15 months in jail awaiting trial. Mrs. Baker, who was then living in Savannah, Ga., left her daughter in the car for more than seven hours while she played video poker at a casino on the South Carolina state line. The car’s windows were closed, and the temperature outside reached the mid-90’s. The baby died of dehydration after about two hours in the car.

We study individual decision making in a lottery-choice task performed by three different populations: gamblers under psychological treatment ("addicts"), gamblers ’ spouses ("victims"), and people who are neither gamblers or gamblers’ spouses ("normals"). We find that addicts are willing to take less risk than normals, but the difference is smaller as a gambler’s time under treatment increases. The large majority of victims report themselves unwilling to take any risk at all. However, addicts in the first year of treatment react more than other addicts to the different values of the risk-return parameter.