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The efficiency with which a player can lose their money neatly converts into a frustrated gambling rage. CCTV shows losing gamblers punching and kicking FOBTs until they're broken, throwing metal chairs into polystyrene ceilings and smashing glass windows. Survivors have spoken about their humiliating experiences: spending seven and a half hours glued to a terminal, spunking £3,500 of Christmas savings in an hour, losing £400,000 over eight years.
Last week, using figures from the Gambling Commission, the Campaign for Safer Gambling revealed the high streets in London where FOBTs have made the most profit. Sir Robin Wales, Mayor of Newham, said the existence of FOBTs on the high street is "crippling local economies".
Pressure is mounting on the government to do more to help. Not just gamblers who have lost entire life savings in afternoons slouched at FOBT terminals, but an NHS that is, it is today reported, now prescribing drugs to some of the country's 500,000 problem gamblers. Gambling addiction is also becoming a criminal issues. Last year there were 613 cases of violence and assault linked to bookies, up more than 100 on the year before.
Restrictions on FOBTs already exist: only four can be installed in any one premises at a time, and in 2014, aware of the damage they were causing, the government hiked taxation on FOBTs from 20% to 25%. The result was William Hill announcing the closure of 109 betting shops. If the Local Government Association (LGA)'s recently relaunched call for the Government to lower FOBT terminals' stakes from £100 to £2 comes off, it's likely that more shops will close, as the high-stakes machines make up more than half of betting shops' income.
These might sound like two positive solutions all neatly wrapped up – raise taxes and drive down stakes, then watch betting shops disappear.
But to think those measures would rid the country of problem gamblers is naive. I spoke to a William Hill spokesperson who said that FOBTs are the best of a bad bunch: "Gaming machines in betting shops offer high returns to the customer, higher in fact than almost any other kind of betting or gambling."
The bookies' statistics show returns to the player per bet are 97.3% for FOBTs, compared to 85-90% for slot machines, 84% on sports bets, 61.3% on scratch cards and 50% on the National Lottery. Their spokesman adds: "The vast majority of betting shop customers bet what they can afford, enjoy it, and return and occasionally enjoy a nice win."
Viral videos of angry blokes beating up machines may be the loud squawky canaries in the cavernous mine that is the UK's fucked up relationship with gambling
Of course, any company will defend its biggest seller, especially when online gambling has taken so much of its custom away and a younger generation aren't so well-versed in how to place bets on the horses. But while it still stands that some of the UK's 30,000 FOBT machines are making more than grand each a week, it's worth asking just how many of the UK's 500,000 problem gamblers are FOBT users? Could it be that the viral videos of angry blokes beating up machines are just the loud squawky canaries in the cavernous mine that is the UK's fucked up relationship with gambling?
Visibility is a huge issue when it comes to gambling behaviours, says Dr Alexander Grous, an associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He explains that there is a "spectrum" of gambling that no longer fits into the previous class-based boundaries of Ascot on one side and a high street bookies on the other: "To the left there's a casino, or placing a bet in a shop; you and your behaviour are visible to people. In the middle, there's fixed betting, where you can go on a machine and be semi visible. To the right, there is the biggest growth area in gambling, which is online. And it's the most dangerous area, it's the biggest area for concern."
Unlike the footage of a losing gambler smashing up a scummy-carpeted betting shop, the horror stories of gambling at home don't manifest in such a public way, says Dr Grous. "You don't tend to see the effects of the lounge gambler – marriage breakdowns, rental failure, suicides – but there are extreme areas to look at here.
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"[FOBTs] are one way to draw the attention to the problem of gambling, but no means is it proportionally representative. If it's looked at constructively, there are obviously people who are addicted."
Tony Franklin is one such addict, having spent £3,500 in 59 minutes at a betting terminal, later telling the Guardian: "I was in a fog. It was me and the machine. I threw it all away."
Problem gamblers' use of words like "hypnotism", "trance", and "autopilot" imply a symbiosis with the machine that's destroying you, according to Natasha Schüll, an anthropologist at MIT. In her 2012 book, Addiction By Design, Schüll elaborated on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's psychological theory of "flow", where "an individual is "completely involved in an activity for its own sake".
Even though gamblers at slot machines initially set out to make money, many simply get hooked into the almost-satisfying feedback loop of repeatedly clicking a button to create new outcomes. Maths goes out of the window and opportunities to cash in early are ignored, as the pleasure becomes about clicking on a button to see something change, no matter how minimal or wallet-rinsing that change may be.