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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I have always heard this, but I suspect it’s less of an intentional trick and more just a happy accident of how large Vegas gambling floors are. Even if the buildings were wrapped in floor to ceiling windows natural light would only penetrate the first couple rows of slots.

The Mirage in particular actually has a pretty large skylight towards the front of the gambling floor.

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There's a lot of psychological stuff going on with the casino floors but I'm not sure how you'd design a massive ground floor room in a way that there would be a lot of natural light. And it would actually be user-hostile (and, yes, doubtless business hostile) to spread the casino across a lot of floors.

Skylights

I thought about that after I wrote the comment although a lot of the time there's convention center and other expansive spaces above the casino.

Works for the floor that is under the roof.

I've seen (but not entered) casinos in office towers. I imagine you have the sea of slot machines on the first floor or two, and then table games and high roller rooms on the upper floors.

For a las vegas style ginormous casino and hotel, many of them have the casino footprint much larger than the hotel footprint. You could have big diffused skylights over much of the gaming area, if you wanted. Of course, you'd augement that with lots of artificial lighting, so it would save energy, but not change the experience of roughly constant lighting 24/7

Internal courtyards is how you add light and air circulation to a large floor plan, typically

I worked at a casino (albeit different country) and I was always told this is on purpose. My casino also didn't have windows, and there were no clocks. And the very busy patterns on the carpet are made like that so visitors don't look down and keep staring at their slot machines.

The lack of clocks is deliberate, I think the natural light is simply a case of it not being practical to allow it. Furthermore, the space around the gambling areas is used for various business purposes, both to get gamblers to see the businesses and to get people to walk past the machines to go to the businesses. To put in windows would be to give up prime areas.

Some gaming jurisdictions mandate that slot machines must display the time in a font at least 7mm tall.

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