After seeing another classmate play FreeSlots, I wanted to try it myself to see if I too would feel the pull of addiction and enchantment. FreeSlots is a free online slot machine game with a variety of different slot machine game styles to offer its users. I opened the website and chose the Mountain Fox because I like mountains in general and I saw little pictures of animals on the thumbnail.
At first, I was actually pretty confused by the game. I had never actually played a slot machine before so I wasn’t too familiar with the interface. Thankfully, the game is primarily played by clicking a single button: “spin”. After playing the game for about 10 minutes I understood the mechanics and came up with the following conclusion. The game embeds psychological exploits into game mechanics and user interface features to intentionally widen the dissonance between the perceived and actual probability of winning.
As I learned in the reading, modern slot machines use a technology called virtual reel mapping. While traditional slot machines had a fixed number of physical stops (symbols or blanks), virtual reel mapping allows for an almost unlimited number of virtual stops. This means that while the physical reel may show a limited number of symbols, the virtual reel can be programmed with hundreds of stops, most of which are blanks or low-paying symbols.
When a player presses the SPIN button, a Random Number Generator selects a virtual stop. This virtual stop is then mapped to a physical stop on the reel. The majority of virtual stops are mapped to non-winning or low-winning physical stops, significantly reducing the chances of hitting a high-paying combination. This is very basic and blatant probability engineering that most users are likely not aware of— or perhaps they wishfully think them not to be true.
FreeSlots also creates an illusion of control and skill. Players often believe that their actions influence the outcome when in reality, the RNG and virtual reel mapping are the true determinants of the result. For example, after toggling between the different number of “lines” options in the game I realized that they have literally no effect on the outcome, they are just a multiply on the speed of the game. More specifically, setting a spin look for wins on 7 lines will burn 7 credits instead of 1 credit for looking for wins on one line, but will 7x the chance of a win. The more options there are, the more the user is given an illusion of control and skill in the game, further widening their cognitive dissonance between perceived and actual probability.
Additionally, the concept of “near misses,” where the reels stop just above or below a winning symbol, enhances the psychological allure of the game. Near misses exploit the player’s cognitive bias, making them feel that they were “close” to winning and encouraging them to continue playing. Meanwhile, there is no specific rule for digital slot machines requiring them to adhere to the physical mechanics of physical slot machines, in which a near miss genuinely was a near miss.
To bring these ideas together, for a moment imagine the MVP version of the game (in its simplest form). The game is simply a row of four values and a SPIN button and some scores below the button (credits). The user simply clicks the button, the values instantly get replaced with new ones and the user checks if their credits went up or down. In this version of the game, the user’s idea of perceived probability and actual probability will converge after playing the game for a bit. In the real version of this game though it is clear that the features we discussed above subtly prevent this convergence and allow the game to exact time and money from the user. As observed by Dante, it is pretty scary to think that there is not an age limit on this game!
