She still struggles to rein in her spending.Ĭarrie had good reason to compare the seemingly benign world of mobile phone games to the more overtly controversial gambling industry, for the two pastimes are rapidly converging. Zynga agreed to lock her out of her account but, Carrie says, she was able to log back in a couple of days later. “Zynga deliberately uses the same techniques that bookmakers do with slot machines to feed people’s addiction and now I find myself addicted with no way out,” she told the company. Where once she got her dopamine hit from online casinos and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs), she now had mobile gaming. She craved dopamine, a chemical released by the brain that exacerbated by her ADHD. Carrie had begun playing obsessively through the night, spending thousands of pounds in the game and racking up huge debts.
