Game, Creator, Platform, Target Audience
This week, I played slots (Lucky 7s Classic), one of the games on Casino World, a browser free-to-play gaming platform created by FlowPlay. Its intended audience is adults who might want to play casino games online without needing to pay real money.
Formal Elements and Types of Fun
Lucky 7s Classic is a single-player game with a single player vs. game interaction pattern, although there is the ability to see other players and chat. The social component is likely very dependent on the group of players, as when I sent a message in the chat, no one responded. It has an objective of winning money/coins. The main actions are spinning/choosing the time to spin and perhaps changing the amount to bet. The game intends to have fun through sensation and submission, and it somewhat succeeds by allowing for pleasure as the user wins more coins and minimizing the thinking required as players just have to click to spin (and can even hold for automatic spinning).
Risk For Addiction & Other Games
The game and other similar slots games puts people at risk for addiction because it introduces unpredictable rewards, as not every spin will correlate with winning. However, I found it interesting that in the beginning, all of the spins did seem to correlate with some type of win. The game thus might use a strategy of giving the player a series of wins in the beginning to pull them in, but then adding unpredictability of wins by slowly increasing the number of losses. In contrast to poker, where there is some level of player choice involved, slots games are often entirely random, as we read about in the article. The fact that players have the illusion of control and can often see “near misses” adds to the potential for addiction for slots compared to other games like poker. The game engages with probability by determining the likelihood of different results for the spins based on a distribution, and randomness feeds into addiction because the randomness allows for the unpredictable rewards that contribute to addiction.
Clever Decisions and Potential Improvements
The strategy of having an initial series of wins to “hook” the player and subsequently taking that away is a clever decision by the game designers, but in addition, the designers use “charms” on the right-hand side that allow for “charm bonuses” even when not all the reels match for a traditional win. Since the game does not involve real money, the designers seemingly chose to allow the player to win more often since it might keep them in the game for longer. While this is a clever decision, it also contributes to a potential area of improvement because it felt like I was always winning and never “lost,” which is likely an unrealistic representation of many slots games in reality. Instead of displaying the total money earned, perhaps the game could display the total “profit,” as the user needs to start with a certain number of “fake” coins, but taking this into consideration when displaying the total coins could make the game a bit more realistic (similar to allowing for a “negative” balance in the beginning and having to make that discrepancy up through winning).
