99% Invisible - 78- No Armed Bandit

Episode Date: April 30, 2013

Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded as vending machines. They gave out chewing gum as prizes, and those prizes could be redeemed for cash. That’s where … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded as vending machines. Or a trade machine as they were called. And the symbols on the machine had to obscure its true intent. So you'd have these fruit symbols of cherries and lemons and oranges on the reels and they would offer prizes Like chewing gum or other treats. That you would then have to redeem for cash. Like tickets at Chuck E. Cheese. So it was almost like laundering it back into money.

Many slot machines have retained the fruit symbols to this day. Heck in the UK they're actually called fruit machines because of this. So that is a carryover from that era. The new universal bar symbol, which I always thought represented, stacks of bars of gold, has a similar origin. The bar symbol is actually based on the logo of the Bell Fruit Gum Company. I'm talking with Natasha Dao Shoe. My name is Natasha Daushel and I'm an associate professor at MIT and the title of my book

is Addiction by Design. All about machine gambling in Las Vegas. You can probably picture a slot machine pretty easily. The image we have that we carry around in our minds of the slot machine. It's pretty much the same machine that came out in 1895. Three wheels, mechanical wheels that spin, and you are playing to line up symbols across one line. So one bar of symbols.

And to get the machine to play, you're putting in coins, and then you're reaching up with your arm and pulling this lever. So it's a very mechanical interaction. This is the famous one-armed bandit. Today, if you walk into a casino, you may still see those levers, but they have a new name, Legacy Lovers. Because they're basically just there

to evoke that bygone mechanical machine and to attract us over, we recognize it, we can pull the lever, but we very quickly realize after sitting down that it's a lot faster and more efficient and ultimately less fatiguing if we're sitting there for a while to press the buttons or in some cases to touch the screen. A classic skewomorph. The physical machine, the hardware that you're interacting with, has really shifted. Skewomorphs are design elements that are retained as an ornament past the point where they serve any meaningful function.

Slot machines are skewomorphic champions. They're lousy with design elements that make you feel like you're interacting with a trustworthy mechanical objects. And it's not just the legacy lovers. It's also the screen you're looking at. So this is typically now a video screen rather than a mechanical three-reel setup. Some of these video machines, however, try to make us think we're playing a mechanical machine. They sort of have a kind of analog, kachink, kachink to them. Military visual mapping technology is used.

It's like this three-layer plasma screen. So there are actual real spinning, they're blank, and what's happening is there's a video projection onto them. So it's not like they're marked with actual symbols. The symbols that appear can just be changed up. So there's lots of little tricks by which designers try to get us to feel that we are still playing an analog mechanical device. According to CBS News, Americans now spend more money on slot machines than movies, baseball and theme parks combined. But this wasn't always the case.

These were seen as really just frivolous little devices that were there to occupy the wives of the real gamblers or to occupy people in these sort of transitional spaces while they were waiting online or in hallways or around the fringes of the main gambling pit. So they didn't tend to have stools much less the precise ergonomic seeding that they have today. They weren't destinations. They were really transitional devices.

But not anymore. And then there is this historical association in this country between women, particularly older women nowadays, and these slot machines. So in every way these machines are thought of as being light, a light form of gambling. And the real irony there is that these machines that anyone can be very approachable, you don't have to know the rules, you have to be wearing a suit, or interact with other people in some intimidating way. The irony is that they are the most potent, if you want to use that word, in terms of how addicting they are. It's been shown that you get problematically involved with these devices,

three to four times faster than you would at the racetrack or playing card games. Problematically involved is my new favorite euphemism. Despite the slot machines very familiar appearance, this is a device that has evolved dramatically with one goal in mind to keep you playing that machine. We often think, especially people who don't play these machines, the assumption is people must be playing these machines, especially the people who play them a lot

because they want to win. And these are sort of dupes. These are poor people who don't understand how probability works. They're not rational. If only they could be educated, they'd make these proper consumer decisions. But in fact, if you talk to a lot of these gamblers, they are incredibly savvy. They're not doops. They know they're not going to win, and they know that if they do win a jackpot, that means they'll just sit there longer and play it off. So it's not really about winning. It's about getting into the zone. Everything else falls away, a sense of monetary value, time, space, even a sense of self is annihilated in the extreme form of this zone that you enter.

There was one moment in Shul's research where the whole concept of the zone really sunk in for her. She was talking with a gambler. And she said, you know, sometimes I have to say I get this sense of frustration and irritation when I win a jackpot. Because it just freezes up my flow. I just want to continue playing. I've witnessed this in a casino. The player wins, and as the credits are accruing,

ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, they're just continuing to bang that spin button. They just can't wait to hit it again. So there's this design imperative to overcome the problem of interruption, a design imperative to overcome the player's problem with winning. And you know, the gambling industry has its own way of freezing this. They're aware

of this zone. Sometimes they call it a zone. They also have a term that there are played win players or jackpot players. And then there's played a win to play players. Otherwise known as time on device players. And Shul's book tracks this sea change in the gambling industry away from jackpot play and towards time on device play. So this is not play where you go in and you're excited and you're out to get this euphoric thrill from a big win. Or from the industry side, you're not out to sort of flee someone and take all their money right away and then get them off the machine so you can take someone else's money. This is more about profit from volume. The idea is that gamblers want to sit there longer and the industry has realized profit really

isn't about the price of play, it's about the volume of play. And once you understand that, it begins to make a lot more sense why penny machines, machines played with the denomination of one cent are generating higher profits than any other machine today. Now, if you had asked the industry a decade ago what's going to become of penny machines, they would have laughed at you because at that stage, even nickel machines were considered, they were really mocked as games you'd only find in grind joints. But if we look closely at some technological advances, that certain makers have hit upon,

they started to realize, aha, if we take the bet and we break it down into pennies and find ways with the computer algorithms inside the machine to extend betting over a longer period we can ultimately make more money. So the lights in the sound attract you. The casino atmospheric draw you in. The ergonomic seats keep you comfortable. The max of bet and spin buttons don't even require you to move your hand from its resting position. The max bet and spin buttons don't even require you to move your hand from its resting position. The recess screen pulls you into your own private world and you enter the zone.

But what's going to keep you playing is the math and that's really the revolution of these new video slots. And the math, and that's the term the industry uses, has gotten very complicated. So if you imagine our friend, the old one, are abandoned, you had these three reels with symbols on them, and you were betting on lining up one single line of symbols across. Now, even on mechanical machines designers quickly

found creative ways to add in other lines of play. So usually when you see these reels you can sort of see the line above and the line below. The genius of showing extra lines above and below the winning line is that it introduces the near-miss phenomenon. It's that feeling that you almost won when you see that winning symbol so close on that adjacent line. But the extra lines are also available for placing extra bets. So the idea was let's let people bet on three lines and let them bet instead of, you know, one token, they can bet two tokens on two lines or three. So you did see these early multi-coin games, but there was limits to them because there's really a limit when you're talking about mechanical reels to how many

symbols you can fit on the screen. But then video technology came along and slot machines could do whatever the designer wanted. So you started seeing this progression from not just lines, you know, you had even your two diagonals from the corners of the screen down. Then you started seeing, well, let's add extra reels. Let's add five, six, seven reels across. And let's add extra reels. Let's add five, six, seven reels across. And let's add zigzags and weird directions.

So it's typical today to see 20, 50, 100 line games. And it gets so complicated it begins to get really hard to tell if you even one or not, the on-screen graphics have to draw the lines for you. Some machines have even gone so far as to do away with lining up altogether. They have what's called scatter play, so it's really quite random. You're no longer playing to line up that one line of symbols across. Which is insane!

So that's all going on. You say, well, what's going on here? What's significant about that is that if you're playing on a penny machine, you decide that you're going to bet a penny per line. So that would be 100 pennies. That's a dollar. In fact, you can max it out and bet, you know,

three pennies per line. So in fact, you're making $3 a bet. That's quite significant. You know, when quarter players started disappearing, when video slots came out, researchers were sent onto Casino floors to find out where did our, where are quarter players going? Are they migrating to dollars as we thought they would? No, they were kind of regressing back to nickel machines, but in the end, they were actually paying more, they were betting more per hand than they had on the quarter machines. So the question is why would a gambler do that?

The slots aren't more appealing because they take more coins. Here's the real trick. When you're betting 300 pennies on 100 lines, you're going to win back a portion of those. For the first time in history, you're not betting a token and then losing it all or doubling it, tripling it. That's a really volatile setup. This is much less volatile.

You're spreading your bet across 100 lines and it's really a lot safer if you wanna see it that way. Because chances are you're gonna win back something on some of those lines. lines, and it's really a lot safer if you want to see it that way, because chances are you're going to win back something on some of those lines. And it just so happens that these machines are designed when you win back something, to give you all the winning stimuli that comes along with a real win. And so one researcher has aptly called this a false win, or losses disguised as wins, because you're putting in 45 coins, you're winning, quote, unquote,

winning nine back. That's a pretty radical net loss. But yet, there's little ditties that are being played. It's virtually no different than when you really do win. Another key factor in making penny machines possible in all their little microbeats are updates on how the player feeds money into the machine. Yeah, this is a huge part of it alongside the ergonomics of the chairs

and the changes in the responsibility of the buttons and how they're placed came the financial access technology. And, you know, if you think about the past, if you ran out of money and you wanted to continue to play at a machine, there was a lot of steps you had to, you really had to work for it. You had to leave your machine, maybe wouldn't be there when you got back, ask someone to hold it, and then go off and search of an ATM, get some cash. Then you had to search

out a cashier's cage or a roving chain detending by these coins, return to a machine, open the coins, and put them in one by one. That was very labor intensive. And then imagine feeding in 300 pennies. So you started seeing bill acceptors. It would take $20. It was sort of a move to credit play. And with the bill acceptors, you got these little digital monitors where it wasn't exactly telling you how much money was in the machine. It was telling you how many credits. So already there with bill acceptors, you saw kind of turn toward credit play, which

really dematerialized the money, made it less real somehow, and allowed you to get in that zone, you know, disconnected you again from the everyday world. Nowadays a lot of machine gambling uses these player reward cards. Which are essentially credit cards that the casino sets up for you, where you store credit, you'll often go into a casino and see people, they're seemingly connected to these machines, almost like life support with these plastic bungee cords that are attached to their cards, they won't forget them and lose them there. So you'll look down a whole line and everyone's sort of attached to these machines with these plastic ropes. But ticket in, ticket out technology,

where you're playing with these barcoded tickets and player cards were really necessary piece of the technological puzzle for pennies to come on the scene in the way that they did with multi-line machines. And this design evolution is the reason why slot machines are the most profitable form of gambling, even though there is no skill involved, and the player doesn't even know the odds of winning for any given machine. One gambler in my book Rose, who said, you know, I became a slot machine technician to understand more about these machines, and I thought it would be a good part of my recovery

from the addiction, because I thought if I understand how these machines work the spell will be broken and she said you know even after I was putting these machines together and designing them at work. On my lunch breaks I would just go down the street and play the exact same machines. Because that is how addiction works. 99% in visible is Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars, we're a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars but we'll have more info about Shul's really great book addiction by design and her film about all you can eat Vegas by face.

Oh my god. At our website 99%invisible.org.