From CBC.ca: "Some problem gamblers spend less because of new rules: N.S. survey". The VLTs are turned off at midnight and lots of people can't be bothered to go to the casino. I have to admit that I find it baffling that anyone would play video gambling for more than five minutes. I read somewhere that people find VLTs more addictive than real gambling precisely because there isn't another person there witnessing your losses and covertly sneering. Then there are these pachinko places in Japan where people play obsessively. According to this story from 2002: "Annual revenues of 28.7 trillion yen across the industry surpass the 17.6 trillion yen value of the vehicles manufactured at Japanese automakers last year and dwarf even the country's 4.96 trillion yen defense budget." (The article also talks about the games' sometimes being rigged and what pachinko parlour owners have been doing to improve things, such as making fridges available for players to stow their groceries in case they've just stopped in for a few hours on the way home fom the market.)

So what's the meaning of this meaningless behaviour? Maybe it's a sort of meditative state gone terribly wrong. Instead of getting away from mundane distractions in order to contemplate life, people vanish into a single distraction to get rid of the others.