Slots/Gaming/Psych Rewards/Skinnerbox
May 12, 2015 6:05 AM   Subscribe

"But the expansion of gaming generally is the expansion of slot machines specifically — the modern casino typically earns 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from slots, a stratospheric rise from the 1970s when slots comprised 50 percent or less. New York, the latest state to introduce gaming, doesn’t even allow table games, and Pennsylvania, now the third-largest gaming state in the country after Nevada and New Jersey, only later allowed table games in an amendment to its legislation. And increasingly, the psychological and technical systems originally built for slot machines — including reward schedules and tracking systems — have found admirers in Silicon Valley."
posted by josher71 (28 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
I worked in mobile games for a bit and it's a very close match with slots. After you get over the fact that you're capitalizing on extreme addiction (they rely on the very small percentage that are truly addicted), it is a fascinating art form to design a clean, complete, trigger - action - outcome - trigger loop.

That being said, I think the claim that this can be generalized to other forms of consumer tech is a bit of a stretch - with mobile games, and with slots, you're making money off of the very few people who are spending hours upon hours in your game. With most social media you need audience breadth, not depth. The only reason that mobile games need breadth is that you need to get a lot of people into the funnel to find the few people you can truly hook.
posted by The Ted at 6:26 AM on May 12, 2015 [2 favorites]


The very fact that clicker games exist and are popular should be all the proof you need that skinner boxes work perfectly on people. You don't even need the flashing lights of a slot machine! Having seen Swarm simulator it wouldn't shock me if the next big mobile game is just an app that tracks eye movement and has a counter that only goes up when you're looking at certain ads on the screen.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:31 AM on May 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


WSJ had a recent article about mobile games companies seeking the high-spending "whales". [attempted google news link past paywall]
posted by theorique at 6:32 AM on May 12, 2015


In the last couple of months I tagged along with someone to two casinos. The open addiction was striking. People seemed to be having a good time, but there was definitely an edge to their experience.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:32 AM on May 12, 2015


I guess I'm lucky that whatever power slots hold over people doesn't work on me. The only time I ever played slots was when I was in a casino and quickly realized I was too fucked up to be able to play anything else.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:38 AM on May 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've been playing (though not spending money on) the Topps Star Wars Card Trader "game" recently, and it's fascinating how well it works, even when the payout is essentially nothing. I check in every day to get my reward and buy packs regularly hoping for that little thing that lets me know I've got a new card. I tried to explain it to some family members on vacation recently (I was still checking in during down time while we were all in Europe) and describing it in words made it sound like the dumbest thing a person could possibly do with their time.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:41 AM on May 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


All content needs to be made interesting. What you’re doing as a writer is introducing variable rewards into your story. Everything that engages us, all pieces of content are engineered to be interesting," he said. "Movies aren’t real life, books aren’t real life, your article isn’t real life. It’s manufactured to pull us one sentence after another through mystery, through the unknown. It’s a slot machine. Your article is a slot machine. It has to be variable. So just because an experience introduces variability and mystery — that’s good!"

This is like, the most dystopian thing I've read in a while. All art and everything in life is "content" that's been "engineered" to maximize attention=advertising dollars.

Maybe it actually is morally salutary to read a "difficult book" or listen to a weird atonal symphony or something.
posted by vogon_poet at 7:11 AM on May 12, 2015 [13 favorites]


Maybe it actually is morally salutary to read a "difficult book" or listen to a weird atonal symphony or something.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:11 AM on May 12 [+] [!]


Mordiously eponysterical!
posted by General Tonic at 7:23 AM on May 12, 2015 [8 favorites]


I have been playing Cordial Minuet, lately, and the feeling you get (OK, the feeling I get, but I don't think I am particularly unique) when you outguess someone (or maybe just get lucky; you will never know) is predatory. Terminology like "whales" just reinforces this, and it all really drives home the idea (I) encountered in Graeber's Debt that money is/was something used between people who have no ties to each other, don't really give a shit about each other, and in other contexts would be pretty ok committing violence against each other.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 7:33 AM on May 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


The gaming companies (and some of the mobile developers like Zynga) have all been making these plays in "social slots" for a while now.

They're all positioning for the day when Facebook (or whatever replaces it) is allowed to move virtual currency/points in and out of real currency. Then it's big money time. But it's a huge unknown and a massive shift in federal gaming laws if that's allowed to happen.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:07 AM on May 12, 2015 [3 favorites]


Maybe it actually is morally salutary to read a "difficult book" or listen to a weird atonal symphony or something.

You're still playing, just with a different longer reward schedule.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:21 AM on May 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


But the expansion of gaming generally is the expansion of slot machines specifically — the modern casino typically earns 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from slots, a stratospheric rise from the 1970s when slots comprised 50 percent or less.

Casinos Bet On Change After Younger Players Ignore 'Boring' Slot Machines [NPR]:

DAVID KESTENBAUM: If you run a casino, slot machines must seem like one of the greatest inventions of all time. You line them up on your casino floor. They vacuum up money all day long - nickel here, quarter there, dollars. The players, though, tend to be older. As one young guy at a casino told me recently, slots, he said, slot machines are for zombies.

ERIC MEYERHOFER: They have no interest in slot machines whatsoever. They find them kind of boring.


Demographic threats aside, the slots industry is already facing a 'bleak' economic outlook.

TLDR; optimizing for addictive behavior isn't a guarantee of success.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:23 AM on May 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Possibly because the same experience has been duplicated on phones where there's no monetary buy-in?
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:55 AM on May 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Tomorrow’s Advance Man
The random, contingent way that the future comes to pass is a source of endless frustration in the Valley. Sam Altman, the president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, notes that his early investment in Stripe is now worth, on paper, more than 2,000x. “So ninety-seven per cent of my returns from 2010 and 2011 are concentrated in one investment, which I could easily have missed,” he said. “I only let myself think about this sort of thing on vacation, because if I acknowledged that I was wasting more than ninety per cent of my time—which is true, from an economic perspective—I couldn’t get through my days.”
posted by kliuless at 9:06 AM on May 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'd been collecting links about cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll for a possible FPP. Now I can just put them here!
...it makes sense that if digitally-mediated forms of gambling like slot machines are able to intensify the event frequency to a point where you’re playing 1,200 hands an hour, then they’re more addictive. Waiting for your turn at a poker game, by contrast, isn’t as fast – there are lots of pauses and lots of socializing in-between hands. Slot machines are solitary, continuous, and rapid. Uncertainty is opened up and then it’s closed — so quickly that it creates a sense of merging with the machine.
— from an interview about her research and her book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

Short talk (11 min video) at the
Cambridge Science Festival

Speech (30 min video) at the Habit Summit [!]

(And, not quite so related, Buffet: a documentary film about all-you-can-eat buffets in Vegas which I wanna see)
posted by moonmilk at 9:07 AM on May 12, 2015 [6 favorites]


I guess I'm lucky that whatever power slots hold over people doesn't work on me. The only time I ever played slots was when I was in a casino and quickly realized I was too fucked up to be able to play anything else.

And yet you've still recieved 20K favs.

The reward mechanism is just too damn fundamental for anyone without serious mental impairment to be overall immune to it.
posted by srboisvert at 9:13 AM on May 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


But I mean Metafilter doesn't have Downvotes. It's an all positive platform. Which makes it moral, like a video game or a book, rather than immoral, like a slot machine or candy crush. It's designed to get more content out of you, sure, but only along a specific pathway that leads to more community building, jokes, stories, passionate and erudite political opinions, etc.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:19 AM on May 12, 2015


The admiration of Silicon Valley is not that recent. I would, however draw a distinction between the esurient greed of marketing departments and the game designers/analysts who must compete for their next gig. Natasha Schull nails the result but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed the method.
posted by NoemaSlur at 11:30 AM on May 12, 2015


You also don't know if The Card Cheat has favorites hidden as a preference.
posted by Chrysostom at 12:28 PM on May 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


Fair enough; I didn't mean to imply that I was somehow immune to this basic psychological mechanism, just that I find slots (and most of the online games I've tried) to be tedious.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:08 PM on May 12, 2015


How do these people sleep at night.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:14 PM on May 12, 2015


I'm not convinced they're people.

Seriously.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:09 PM on May 12, 2015




I worked in mobile games for a bit and it's a very close match with slots. After you get over the fact that you're capitalizing on extreme addiction (they rely on the very small percentage that are truly addicted), it is a fascinating art form to design a clean, complete, trigger - action - outcome - trigger loop.

Maybe if enough people DID NOT get over this fact, things might improve.
posted by maupuia at 3:46 PM on May 12, 2015


The most depressing description of an addiction I've ever seen was actually in Natasha Schull's book.

She describes this one serious gambling addict who was playing the slots at like 2 in the morning. He was exhausted and wanted to go to bed, but he couldn't stop playing. Eventually it got to the point where he was just praying he could lose all his money so he could go home and sleep. The whole logic of gambling was inverted: every payout was a defeat and every loss was a victory.

You don't often hear about people stealing or being coerced into sex work to feed a gambling addiction. But in terms of time and money wasted it's definitely as bad as any drug.

I really have to wonder about the people who read the stories in that book and saw a business opportunity.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:47 PM on May 12, 2015 [4 favorites]


I really have to wonder about the people who read the stories in that book and saw a business opportunity.

It's an interesting question about free will. Do people in society have the "right" to gamble (or spend on virtual goods) in a way that is likely to result in bad outcomes for them?

In physical casinos (Vegas, Indian land, etc) there are lots of signs with 1-800 numbers about problem gamblers, and you can see actually see people who are in a creepy "trance". In the mobile/online case, people can spend and/or gamble aggressively and in complete privacy, so the potential problems are much more concealed. Out of sight, out of mind, perhaps.
posted by theorique at 8:43 AM on May 13, 2015


also btw...
rat park (previously; 1,2)
posted by kliuless at 9:16 AM on May 13, 2015


Actually many problem gamblers DO have stealing problems. They often take longer to uncover because they don't always lose, so sometimes they can return the money or thing before it's too late.
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:45 AM on May 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


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