A gambling machine with a spinning reel, which pays off in coins or tokens after the symbols line up in winning combinations. The symbols can include card suits, bars, numbers (7 is a favourite), various pictured fruits (cherries, plums, oranges, lemons, and watermelons are popular) and words like jackpot and bar.
While slot machines are the most important revenue-generating source for casinos, they have always been a puzzle to researchers seeking to understand what attracts players and makes them stick with one game over another. A new study by ReelMetrics, a company that provides gaming data analytics, may help solve the mystery.
The new measures measure how much players enjoy their games, a key factor in why people play them. Unlike psychophysiological methods that use cumbersome electrodes and wires, these measures do not disrupt the flow of play. They also do not require the player to think about the results, which is an important factor in reducing stress and distracting thoughts that may interfere with the measurement of enjoyment.
Although many gamblers view their games as harmless entertainment, a subset can experience serious gambling problems. Dixon et al. suggest that this is because of the way slot machines induce dark flow experiences. In their experiments, the authors found that while the mentations of problem gamblers in everyday life are characterized by habitual bouts of mind-wandering, slots play reins them back in and offers them intermittent attention-capturing rewards. The high fidelity and visual feedback of wins contrast with the absence of auditory and visual feedback during losses. This difference likely explains why problem gamblers endorse flow experiences more strongly when playing slots than in other gambling contexts.