I’m no expert in the matter; but I’ve read that pathological gamblers exhibit an interesting difference vs. others in their response to ‘near miss’ conditions.
In practice, non-wins are just losses; but many games have flavors of non-win that look ‘closer’ to win states than other losses do and some people are a great deal worse at correctly identifying those as just plain losing rather than as getting close to winning. Generally to their profound detriment.
