For my critical play, I played Slots on an online site called “Best Bet Casino”. This site was created by Ruby Seven Studios and is in partnership with Pechanga Resort Casino, a real casino and resort in Temecula, CA. Anyone under the age of 13 is not allowed to make an account on the site. They also offer a mobile app version of their games. Playing Slots on this site made me notice how the platform and game puts players at risk for addiction by heightening a sense of anticipation and highlighting player “wins” while masking their “losses”, making it easy for players to get sucked into a cycle of seeing how far they can push their luck.
One thing that immediately stood out to me about the site was that the visuals, audio, and effects were very stimulating. There’s a lot of crowded space in the design layout, as well as bold colors and sounds that immediately grab your attention. In addition, you’re immediately greeted with several pop-ups and notifications telling you about daily rewards and earnings. For example, immediately upon entering the site I was able to spin a wheel to earn a “Daily Bonus”.
The stimulating visuals and audio, coupled with the emphasis on immediately rewarding the player, made me feel more focused on the prospect of winning prizes rather than the risk of loss. By showering the player with reward after reward, the game already sets you up to feel “lucky” enough to see how far you can go and how much you can win, even before entering the actual game. Furthermore, the stimulating visuals reminded me of this point in the reading that says: “gambling companies have taken care to preserve the illusion of a mechanically actuated reel mechanism so as to perpetuate players’ sense of being involved with a game that reacts to them in a kinetically lively and direct manner” (p. 7). I only had to press a single button the spin the “Daily Bonus” wheel, so the result was probably already calculated at the time I pressed the button. But having to watch the wheel spin builds in a sense of anticipation and agency, as if I’m the one earning this bonus for myself, making the resulting reward all the more exciting. Similarly, the same feeling arises when pressing the roll button in Slots. Slots could work just fine if every roll was just automated and displayed. But allowing users to press the button themselves heightens the sense of excitement and anticipation.
Furthermore, the site’s emphasis on highlighting reward over risk appears when you’re playing the actual game as well.
For instance, in the bottom tab you only see a calculation of your balance and how much you’ve won so far; you don’t get any indication of how much you’ve lost. This plays into the masking of losses that gambling machines do in order to encourage further play; in the reading, they explained how “By recasting losses as potential wins, near misses (which, some have pointed out, are more accurately conceived as “near wins”) prompt further play” (p. 19). Since everything was framed as a “win” or a “near win”, I never felt like I was at risk or losing when I was playing. In the pictures above, for example, I would earn smaller amounts like 17,000 but then occasionally earn bigger amounts like 121,500. I felt like this encouraged me to frame the smaller amounts not as “losses”, but rather as being one step closer to potentially earning a big amount. This just encourages you to keep re-rolling and re-rolling to see your “win” amount climb higher and higher, without thinking of the losses that you incur along the way. Keeping players in the dark about the chances of winning also contributes to this. This section of the website’s FAQs stood out to me:
They seem to be intentionally vague about how their algorithm works and what the player’s chances are of actually winning. I think this further feeds into player addiction by giving them false hope about their chances.
