I played slots online at 247 Slots (https://www.247slots.org/) by 247 Games LLC on my web browser. The targeted audience is anyone who wants to gamble but doesn’t have money to spend (kids, or poor people). I also played 247 Poker to compare the two, but I’ll focus on Slots for this critical play writeup.
“How might this game put people at risk for addiction? How does it compare to other games that use chance or probability? How does this game engage with aspects of probability, and how is randomness feeding into addiction?“
Slot machines put people at risk for addiction because of the hidden underlying mechanisms that cause wins (+$) or losses (-$). The online slot machine I played doesn’t use real money, so there’s not loss capable from playing it, however, it could be thought of as a “gateway” to real slot machines because it familiarizes the player with the game and might make them believe they are “good” at playing it.
This compares with other chance games like Poker, where the player is playing against other players instead of a machine/algorithm. The player might be able to read their expressions, develop a pattern for their betting/playing, or see how much money they have left to decide what to play. With slots, the player is playing against themselves in a way: they are merely trying to find the line between when to keep betting and when to stop betting (betting = pulling slot machine lever).
From playing, I’m not exactly sure what the underlying probability distribution is for slots, and I think that’s the point. There were times when I felt like I was “good” at the game because I was winning more often. This made me feel like I should keep playing to continue the streak–I was addicted. I also found that the more money I bet, ($100 vs $500) the more often I felt like I was winning. I tried to continue this by betting $1000 but then I lost all my money ($9000+) very quickly. My addiction and greed led me to develop a false mental model of how the game worked, which made me incorrectly extrapolate this model, causing me to lose my money.
In Poker, this extrapolation can still happen, but is much less likely. I believe this is due to social pressure and seeing what other players are doing. That being said, if other players are betting poorly, you might too. But due to competitive equilibrium in game theory, it is unlikely that all players will converge on a bad strategy, and more likely that they will converge on better betting strategies.
The simplicity of Slots, from a game design perspective, is quite interesting. The player has 3 options: change bet amount, pull slot lever, or leave with their winnings. This enables a very low skill ceiling and floor since there are so few choices and such a small decision tree (ex: there could be a game like Poker with very few choices of moves to make but a large decision tree as each round has many components). With very few options, the player MUST know that the game is up to chance: how could they be skillfully playing? This cloudy fog of what is happening behind the scenes, in terms of how much expected payout the player receives, is a clever design decision because of its reliance on dopamine. Humans often get releases of dopamine based on the expectation that of something rather than actually getting something (like imagine getting a new iPhone vs. actually receiving it… the former is way more fun to imagine, but in reality its probably just a tiny bit better than the iPhone you already have). With this knowledge of dopamine release compared to expected revenue, players see the slot machine and think of it as exciting and something to learn because its mysterious. They really want to keep playing because they think that they will win some money soon. There are two cases to consider: 1) they lose the current slot lever pull or 2) they win it. In case 1: the player thinks that because they lost the current pull, they are more likely to win the next one (faulty reasoning), so they pull again, like the sunk cost fallacy. In case 2: they are happy that they won and believe they are on a streak, so they pull again. However, THEY WILL NEVER WIN IN THE LONG RUN. The game is designed such that, due to the law of large numbers, the player’s expected profit is almost certainly negative.
In addition to a lack of clear explanation of how the probability works in the game for winning/losing, there also isn’t really an explanation of what some of the symbols mean. For example, what does the 7 reward me with? How about bar? or triple bar? I never won with these three symbols so why are they in here?
In this Slots, there lacks a clear end or exit, another clever decision from the designer. The only defined end/exit is when you run out of money. The two smart decisions in Slots are 1) don’t play at all or 2) quit as soon as you’re ahead. But as soon as you make money, you feel like you’re winning, so you want to keep playing even at the risk of losing everything you just won. There is no way to “win” slots. TLDR: Don’t play slots because you’ll lost all your money in the end.
A way to change Slots to make it less addictive would be to provide data visualizations to the players as they play. You could show them patterns in their betting, current losses, expected probability that they win the next pull, etc. All of these would be bad for the casino since it incentivizes the player to not play, so none of them will be implemented.
In Slots, the mechanics are betting, leaving, changing bet size, and in the game I played, multipliers are added after certain checkpoints for betting.
One dynamic that arises from playing slots is when players change their bet size based on arbitrary mental models they have created.
The aesthetics of this game include: sensation and submission. Sensation because there are lots of bright colors and exciting sounds that happen when you play; you also get to pull a physical lever in real life. This game is submission because you can play it quite passively without evaluating your decisions at every step (this might have drastic consequences for you). Due to these two aesthetics, the player monotonously continues playing and gets entranced by the sounds and visuals so they are eventually addicted and financially drained.
This is me playing poker: it shows what other players are doing which may influence how I play my next move.
This is when I played slots: you can see that the 10x multiplier has reached its max and I’ve lost a lot of my money by betting $1000 at a time 🙁 It’s also unclear what exactly each “bar” or “7” will reward me with.
