Name of the Game: Fountain of Wealth (Slots) hosted on Vegas World
Game’s Creator: FlowPlay, Inc
Target Audience: Individuals who are 18+ years of age and are comfortable with the possibility of losing whatever money they gamble with.
Platform of the Game: Personal Computer (PC)
The online slot machine game, Fountain of Wealth which is hosted on VegasWorld.com, puts people at risk for addiction by reducing the friction for a player to interact with the game, imprinting a false sense of causation and agency within the player, and misrepresenting the true odds of winning the jackpot. This game is different from other games that use probability like Monopoly, which relies on dice, in that the odds of hitting a desired result in a die are calculable and publically available as opposed to the unreleased, secretive true odds of the reel maps that power the probability of a slot machine. This game’s probability relies on a virtual reel mapping that weighs certain outcomes to be more likely than others. Specifically, slot machines typically weigh the slot that is between two large winning slots which are responsible for creating a false sense of being close (or owed) a win. This causes an illusionary feeling of “almost winning,” distorting the real odds in the player’s mind. This leads players to chase their losses as they fall prey to the “Gambler’s Fallacy,” giving the player the impression that the more they play, the more “they are owed a win,” when in reality each “spin” event is independent of their previous plays.
Fountain of Wealth is available on many platforms, including PC, Android, and IOS, which allows the player to save their progress in the cloud so that each instance of the game is synced, reducing the friction involved in starting a gaming session. Moreover, it uses slot graphics that are commonly associated with wealth: expensive sports cars, diamonds, gold, rubies, and jewelry. By doing this, the game implicitly communicates to the player that they can win those expensive items if they hit a jackpot. This might motivate a desperate/losing gambler to chase their losses since they have sunk all of their earnings into the game and are due for a win which would pay off their debt and more. The “auto” spin button can endlessly spin until the player tells it to stop, detaching the player’s sense of responsibility for continually losing money since it is now a number on the screen that is slowly decreasing like a video. The “auto” feature of the spin button also removes the logistical burden of repeatedly pressing the “spin” button, enabling longer play periods. When a player wins a jackpot, the real size of their winnings is misrepresented as it simply appears as a number at the bottom left, allowing them to easily bet with their recent earnings, leaving them at risk of losing money in the long run since it has negative ROI odds for the player.
The game obfuscates the cause-and-effect relationship between the player pressing the “Spin” button and when the machine decides on what the outcome of the game will be. After a player hits the “spin” button, their outcome is not revealed to them until after all slots stop spinning. This gives the player a false sense of control by pressing the button since players begin to anthropomorphize the machine as it spins, yelling at it to stop or give them the missing slot for their jackpot/bonus to hit. This happens despite the uselessness of their yelling as their outcome had already been determined by the time the slots start spinning. The machine routinely generates random numbers thousands of times a second, only stopping on their outcome the instant the player hits the button. The spinning of the reels is purely theatrical in this sense, warping the illusion of cause and effect. To help sell this illusion, the reels and graphics of the machine are layered to create a 3D effect to replicate the style of the old mechanical slot machines which spun around after a lever pull to reveal the outcome. To maximize the dopamine hit that the player experiences during a win, the game has visual explosions, moving icons, cashier and coin sounds, and other particles to make a win/bonus as viscerally rewarding for the player as possible.
