The sound of loss

Fruit machines, or in Australia, poker machines, are used by many and, as far as this project is concerned, those same machines are stacking the odds against users by shouting about wins but remaining silent about losses. 

The project, called Losing Sound, was created by Neil Walshe in association with The Truth About Addiction and Stories of Hope, and highlights the fact that poker machines reward their players with a celebratory sound each time they win something, but play no sound at all when players lose... which, let's be honest, is far more often that not. 

Australians, the above film tells us, lose AUD12billion each year on such machines, and we hear from a selection of users about whether they've noticed the lack of losing sounds, and we also get insight from an addiction psychologist about the role sounds play in the addictive nature of these games. The short film goes on to rig a machine with specially designed sounds that play each time the user loses, noticing the effect it has on their approach to gambling. 

The project came about due to a family member's addiction to such poker machines, as Walshe notes on the porject's site; "In the space of one year they slapped away the credit cards, the children’s bank accounts, the entire house deposit, and broke their family apart. I became very angry, until recently when I overheard the pokies at a pub. There was not a single losing sound coming out of them. It changed my view. I was less angry at the person and more angry at the machines. Pokies are designed to be addictive. Adding losing sounds is one small way to change that."