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Comment by WORMS_EAT_WORMS | Hacker News Reader

In other news, water is also wet!

But in all seriousness, what these companies have done is take gambling to a newer, worst level. It’s just packaged different, but I’m not really opposed to it unless with minors.

A more interesting story is the shifting market. Casino-gaming and sports betting is basically stagnant on innovation and growth because of regulation — trapped to bubble cities or locations — while tech companies are allowed to slap a cute UI on basically the same thing and run wild unregulated anywhere in the world via the Internet.

Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech? Would be fun to walk into a casino and have it be a real world game experience.

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> Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech?

A while back I was in Vegas. I don't gamble but some friends did, so I spent hours wandering the casino floors. With my product hat on, I could see so much to improve in the computer-driven games like slot machines. So many ideas for making things more fun.

What stopped me was watching faces. Most people on casino floors are not having fun. They looked miserable, desperate, compelled. I wasn't looking at play, but addiction. That's not something I wanted to make more of.

I’ve seen that at the slots. People just staring.

what got me was I saw someone win, the sounds and light where amazing, but I think I was more excited than the winner.

If you play a lot maybe you get immune to the sensory overload that is a casino.

If you gamble the game I like to play is craps. It’s more social and a more fun way to loose your money.

A craps table that has recently produced several wins for players (colloquially a “hot table”) is an amazing social experience.

I prefer poker for a combination of mental exertion, social banter, and entertainment. You don’t have to be great at it for it to be a very slow bleed of chips and at a lot of low-limit tables, the other players are so fundamentally unsound that you can have a break-even or positive expected-value from fairly basic play that you could learn in a few hours.

I'm mediocre at poker but generally turn a profit in casino poker rooms. The trick is to never go up against the sharks unless you've got the nuts (for those not familiar, "the nuts" is a poker term that means the best possible hand on the table)

I guess you also have to have developed the ability to identify who the sharks are at a poker table.

I was just reading about this phenomenon. It seems these machines have been designed to create flow in the gambler's mind. If the win disrupts this flow it is actually annoying to the player.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/5976927/slot-machines-casinos-a...

The saddest thing I ever saw with my own two eyes was at a blackjack table in a smaller, rural casino. I was at a table with my sister and we were playing $5 and $10 rounds.

A man walked in with a duffel bag on his shoulder. It was a chilly day outside but he was in just jeans and a T-shirt. He walked up to the table, pulled a $100 bill out of an envelope, and put it on the table for a cash play.

Busted. -$100.

He pulled out another bill and played another round.

17, dealer had 20. -$100.

Third and final bill.

20. Dealer blackjack.

He didn't say a word, or show dismay, or really have any expression at all. Just slung his bag back over his shoulder and walked out.

That actually sounds like a much more healthy way to gamble than spending hours at the table/machine chasing dopamine hits. You can plan how much you are willing to lose in advance and more easily stick to it (rather than after hours of the game and casino feeding you chemicals).

He probably was a gambling addict. They develop weird routines like this to deal with it. I knew a guy that would just walk in and play one round of roulette with everything he had planned to spend there, then walk out win or lose.

To his credit, if you're compelled to play roulette, that's the optimal way to play. Every spin is stacked against the player (that is, the payout * the odds of hitting a particular bet are all less than 100%), so minimizing the number of spins minimizes the stacking of the odds against winning.

Yep, that was basically what was going on in his head. He was compelled to go there and gamble but had some control over how. The whole thing reminded me of a methadone clinic.

No, it’s more like he sold his coat for $300 and left with the last of his belongings in the duffel bag

Sure, I guess. The pall it put everybody under killed the table, though. Even the dealer was sad for him, and I assume a dealer at a rural U.S. casino has seen things.

Joylessly losing as much as possible as efficiently as possible, and then leaving? What’s the healthy part? Or do you mean more that it’s less acutely harmful than enjoying the games while you lose?

The benefit that the tech industry has is that each person carrier their addiction in their pocket and are mostly alone when they look miserable, desperate, and compelled.

There's a lot of truth to this. When I looked at the revenue from mobile gaming "whales" I was shocked. I remember some Zynga people explaining things at a conference and I couldn't tell if they were oblivious to the harm they were causing or just indifferent. Either way, it repulsed me.

With my product hat on, I could see so much to improve in the computer-driven games like slot machines.

Everything about these machines has been painstakingly A/B tested to maximise their intended purpose - there was nothing that you saw that would be considered an improvement by those machines owners.

Exactly right. This is like all the people here who thought they could unstick the Ever Given.

A lot of machines in a casino may be quite ancient and we learn new things about manipulating each other every day.

If your point is that the intended owners don't care about player experience except to the extent it maximizes revenue, I agree. But I disagree that there's no possible improvement in those terms.

A/B testing is great for incremental improvement. It's bad for major innovation. Which is why a lot of the pioneering work in engineered addiction is not being done in Vegas but in "game" companies. I note that "gaming" use to mean gambling [1], but now the very term is being taken over. This is classic Innovator's Dilemma territory, where an existing micro-optimized industry segment ignores major changes for way too long.

[1] E.g., https://gaming.nv.gov/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

I used to go to casinos with the idea of spending some money to have a good time interacting with pretty machines, lights, other people -- breaking even would be a win because of the fun times. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize what I actually wanted was to go play at an Arcade. There aren't any in my city anymore though, and that always makes me sad.

>In other news, water is also wet!

I dislike this mentality that I often see. Common sense can be misleading and humans like to deceive themselves. Studies on things that are obvious often yield surprising results.

Agree, just playful commentary here.

A news article insinuating morals about an industry of ridiculously paid engineers creating the most addictive possible behavior, through extremely optimized gambling mechanisms, being posted to a forum of other ridiculously high paid engineers.

It deserves a little jest...

Edit: To be clear, I don’t think being paid well is bad — it’s obviously good thing. I don’t think working for big tech is bad — it’s also a good thing. Just when stuff like this gets posted, the info really deserves “all the cards on the table”. This in particular is extremely greed driven dark corner of tech from the bottom workers to the top workers and honestly I don’t blame any of them.

>being posted to a forum where those very engineers congregate

ftfy

The point of the comments were to bring serious discussion to tech’s presence in the industry of feasting on humanities worst behaviors — not to poke fun of article or research.

> Studies on things that are obvious often yield surprising results.

No, they don't. Empirically false.

Empirically false that they "often" yield surprising results - i think the adjective "occasionally" would be more correct.

'Occasionally' invalidates his entire premise.

I think even doing this to adults is reprehensible. And what makes a 17 year old not able to manage it but an 18 or 19 yr old is free reign? As I get older, the more I realize we're all just kids but a little bigger. But that shift from being a teenager to an adult didn't make me substantially more able to cope with addiction.

> Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech?

Cryptocurrency exchanges are the new casinos, and to some extent apps like robin-hood.

yeah, and there are literally crypto gambling games out there too. I'd really advise not to play any of them, though

Paid loot boxes in video games come from Japan, a territory where gambling is illegal (except for pachinko parlors, where gambling with added steps takes place) and they're known as gacha.

They got very good at improving the system to make it increasingly addictive, eventually creating "kompu gacha", a system so addictive that it left thousands of families with telephone bills in the thousands of dollars. That's when regulators intervened and now kompu gacha is illegal.

Loot boxes are meant to be addictive and make you lose track of your spending.

I know a lot of gaming (as in Vegas) developers that were way into Facebook games and slots back in the mid 2010s, on the hopes that FB would eventually allow you to cash out FarmVille-type points into USD.

It's pretty apparent that this wasn't going to happen under governmental watch, since it's a literal opening of the barn doors to federally-endorsed gambling. So the developers lost interest and went elsewhere.

AFAIK none of the CuteUI mobile games can covert back to cash, and luckily the idea of a rare skin or weapon has taken the place of cash.

They also target children. And they don't just target them. These people have read every book there is about emotional and social manipulation tactics in order to hook people.

>Does anyone know of any casino-gaming companies innovating in this space like tech?

Not quite what you asked but prediction markets are perhaps the only gambling space that's both useful and innovating but sadly some jurisdictions like the US are especially harsh on it.

Crypto prediction markets like poly.market or augur (finally picking up steam) come to mind.

I met a guy in a Starbucks in Palm Springs... He was working at a casino gaming company that was like making a Diablo clone or something. Like you'd pay to play and could play with your friends and get a pay out somehow. Sounded cool actually.

Maybe it can't really be improved. Do their clientele really want improved roulette or slots? Or even something completely different/complicated like a RPG? I doubt that.

There are people who really, really love the video slots that were designed in the 80s for CRTs. They've been upgraded and ported to new platforms and now run on LCDs, but they don't dare change the game or graphics because there are total diehards that are into the specifics just the way they are.

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