More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Like casino designers’ spatial strategies, their ambient strategies treat affect not as something passive or static, but as an active and dynamic capacity that can be harnessed and guided in lucrative directions.
slot revenue rose by a full 45 percent in a gambling area where machines had been subtly treated with a certain pleasing odor
while remaining static in another area that had been treated with a different but equally pleasing odor.
it is best to communicate with players at a subliminal level, so that they may “simply respond to how they feel.”
“bright or vivid colors, or incompatible color schemes, can tax the senses.”
When it comes to lighting, he explains that human “perceptual systems” must expend extra energy to process the imbalance of intensity that occurs when ceiling and wall lighting sources are markedly brighter than
ambient levels (see
“sound usually bothers players only when it is bounced back at them from interior surfaces [since] it is impossible to identify the source of reverberated sounds.”
Another acoustic element that must be carefully regulated to encourage play is music.
You have control of the ambience.”
Like other atmospheric elements, music works best as a behavioral modulator when it remains in the background.
consciousness—“functional music”
Music that is too varied in these respects can disrupt gambling activity, for it “restores … your cognitive state to where you can make rational decisions,”
That “single point,” in the case of machine gambling, is the device’s screen—and it is less a point of spatial reference than it is a point of exit from space.
“I go into a tunnel vision where I actually do not hear or see anything around me,”
“If you really evaluate that moment, the only thing that exi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“a different plane in which they lose their sense of reality, existing only for the m...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
While the structural, decorative, and ambient environment of the casino is certainly geared to influence patrons’ conduct, its modus operandi is to coax rather than restrain, reward rather than punish, steer rather than transform.
Instead of moving people though space, the aim is to anchor them in one spot and manage their play through time.
“harness technology for continuous gaming productivity,”
accelerating play, extending its duration, and increasing the total amount spent.
“Economies in general are moving from creating goods and delivering services to creating experiences,”
“We keep player experience in mind at every step,”
Speed is a critical element of the zone experience.
“I don’t like to wait, I want to know what’s
gonna com...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If a machine is slow, I move to a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“I usually play just with...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“It was more about keeping the pace than making the right decisions.”
“The play should take no longer than three and a half seconds per game.”
Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange.
“The pace is
never yours. The rhythm of the game belongs to the machine, the program decides.”
desire for continuous productivity.
“I want to keep you there as long as humanly possible—
treat the machine unit as its own phenomenologically compelling mini-environment.
2007 G2E
“Boosting Machine Productivity: Creating an Environment.”
“We have five elements to work with—color, light, animation, sound, and space—and each can act as an attraction or an irritant,” wrote an industry expert.
2006 G2E panel “Sensory
Overload: Light, Sound and Motion on Slot Machines.”
2006 What Players Want
in the span of a single decade sound engineers have gone from using as few as fifteen sounds per game to an average of four hundred unique “sound events,” each calibrated to encourage play while remaining in the background.
Sound, when properly configured, “can actually energize the player, keep him there longer,”
Incredible Technologies’ ContinuPlay—“
“Players don’t just want to hear sound, they want to experience it.
universally pleasant key of C.
Capacitive Touchscreen System
audience, “everything would be smooth and rounded.”
To accentuate the illusion of control, some slot machines are designed so that players can manually terminate the spinning of one or all reels rather than wait until they run their full course—either by pressing a STOP button, by pressing the SPIN button a second time, or by touching one or more reels on the video screen.34 Although game outcomes are determined at the precise instant that the SPIN button is initially touched, gamblers using such “stop” features seem to feel they have an effect on outcomes and are known to persist at play for significantly longer periods than they otherwise
...more
