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Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an improvement in performance and spur the player to try again. But gambling is a game of chance, which distorts gamblers' thought processes - near misses cause them gambler to overestimate both the level of skill involved and their chances of winning. This spurs them to continue gambling.Interesting to think about the implications of this sort of stuff on the "gamification" movement currently going on. The article also highlights that manufacturers of gambling machines have been smart to this effect for awhile: "Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves." [Via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]