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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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...

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.

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

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