Losing Sound
From Australia: a project to make slot machines (aka poker machines or pokies) less addictive. To quote the key person behind the project:
Aussies lose $12 billion a year on pokies. Why? Because machines are psychologically rigged to keep players in a trance - they deliberately don't have losing sounds.
After watching a relative lose $150k, I decided to expose this. I bought a black-market pokie machine - risking 12 months in prison - and hacked it. We engineered a psychological "losing sound" using 8-bit game-over cues and secretly tested it on real punters.
The result? Their urge to keep playing halved.