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In addition, via a technique called “clustering,” a disproportionate number of virtual stops are mapped to blank spaces just above or below the jackpot symbols. This ensures that they will appear more often above or below the payline than they would by chance alone, enhancing the “near miss” sensation among players.
Although each symbol that players see seems to have an equal chance of hitting, in fact each does not; the actual reel merely communicates the mapping decisions of its much-expanded virtual counterpart.
“It is important to make a machine that is perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has.”
Through a technique known as “clustering,” game designers map a disproportionate number of virtual reel stops to blanks directly adjacent to winning symbols on the physical reels so that when these blanks show up on the central payline, winning symbols appear above and below them far more often than by chance alone
success.) By recasting losses as potential wins, near misses (which, some have pointed out, are more accurately conceived as “near wins”) prompt further play.
Behavioral-psychological explanations for why near misses are so compelling include the “frustration theory of persistence,”
near misses “have an invigorating or potentiating effect on any behavior that immediately follows it,”
gamblers’ orientation is experiential, affective, and focused on the unpredictable outcomes of the very next spin;
“Skinner boxes”
As behavioral psychologists found in their mid-twentieth-century experiments with carrier pigeons and lab rats—and as gambling researchers find today—the capacity of a given “reward schedule” to reinforce behavior depends less on the net gain or
loss that subjects experience than on the frequency and pattern by which rewards are dispensed or withheld.
