Random rewards while spinning for random rewards?
Online slot games developer White Hat Studios recently announced that it has launched its new “Super Mode” tool with Fanatics Casino. The company proudly described it as a “random prize mechanic designed to increase player activity and session duration.” But really, this just feels bad, injecting further risks of addiction into a product that already has innate addiction issues.
According to White Hat’s press release, Super Mode awards players random prizes when they play any of the company’s games. The operator, in this case Fanatics, can tweak the settings such as prize frequency, participating games, and whether the tool should even be active at all.
“Super Mode allows us to add a new layer of excitement to White Hat Studios’ already popular titles,” said Fanatics Casino Senior Manager Casino Content Kieron Shaw. “With customizable graphics and full control over promotions and player segmentation, it will enable us to deliver more engaging campaigns that prioritize the user experience.”
It’s gambling squared.
So flashy graphics surrounding a random prize mechanic. Sounds like online slots to me. But this is a random prize mechanic placed on top of an online gambling game. It’s one thing to add features that make the games more fun or interesting, but it’s an entirely different thing to pile on yet another feature specifically designed to stimulate the gambling brain. It’s gambling squared.
Classic psychological manipulation
Remember the classic rat and lever experiment? Researchers trained rats to press down on a lever. When the rats activated the lever, they would receive a food pellet. The rats learned that lever equals food, so when they were hungry, they hit that lever. Of course, since they weren’t always hungry, they would leave the lever alone for stretches at a time. Their relationship with the lever was healthy.
When the researchers changed things up and made it so that no food would appear when the rats pressed the lever, the rats soon figured out that using the lever was futile, so they completely stopped using it.
But, when the lever was randomized, sometimes giving food and sometimes not, with no predictability at all, the rats mashed the lever repeatedly, wouldn’t leave it alone. The lever became an obsession above all else, including sleep. It’s called intermittent reinforcement, and it contributes to addiction.
Online gambling is basically the rat experiment with humans, but White Hat’s Super Mode is like adding a second lever that moves when the first one is pressed. It’s super sizing the intermittent reinforcement.
Unhealthy manipulation
Obviously, internet gambling sites want customers to say on as long as possible, but they need to encourage that by making their products better, not by introducing features explicitly designed to take advantage of the part of our brains that is prone to addiction. It’s a cynical way to look at your business – you can’t make enough money by simply making your customers happy, so you try to make money by hooking into our unconscious rewards conditioning.
Super Mode is psychological manipulation disguised as a benefit to players.
There are ways to design a rewards system to encourage people to play. The healthy, responsible way to do that is through predictability, not intermittent reinforcement. Slot players have plenty of levers to pull already.
