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Konami Slot Machines Flashing Subliminal Messages?
shadowspar writes "A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service after a news investigation revealed that they briefly flash a jackpot result on the screen every time they are played. Konami claims that the 'subliminal' jackpot images are unintentional and the result of a bug, but other US and Canadian jurisdictions are looking at pulling the machines as well."
I'm sorry, it's Monday and I definitely wish I could UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA my job right now. I used to think that this cheat code (or things like the game genie) were detrimental to youthful minds thinking that you just needed to figure out the trick to life and everything was over. I used to think that they would grow up expecting everything to be easy once you were "in on it" and that this would be bad and they would never understand that life is much more complicated. But, you know what? I sadly see more and more everyday that it's a matter of knowing what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA to tell your boss to make him/her think you know what's going on. Or what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA you tell someone to befriend them to hook you up with a position/help. And then it's to the pharmacy where you're given more UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA in pill form because your doctor (of which there are thousands of kinds) tells you you need it. Notice the tangents my brain flies off on when it's Monday.
My work here is dung.
All scientific tests done in a controlled (mod up) environment have come up with the same conclusion: it doesn't work. The one suggestion that (+1) has generated some interest recently, and (+1) has not been tested, is that the most that can be accomplished (modup) is familiarity with the idea. This is (+1) not the same as motivation. So you can put the tin foil hats away.
Who needs a subliminal jackpot flash that may or may not be proven to work when you have a 20' light up sign tallying the payout of the casino hovering a few feet above the slot machine trenches? Who needs a momentary flash when the payout trays are engineered so they ring extra loud and clear during a win that the entire casino floor can hear it?
Who needs subliminal advertising when the shortcut to riches is so ingrained into the psyche that this mere promise was enough to supply a city with excess revenue for over half a century before they decided to change gears into an entertainment destination?
I do, however, welcome our subliminal jackpot bearing one armed robotic masters/bandits.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Hi boss I know you read slashdot
Give davidwr a raise
</subliminal message>
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In other news, a mass recall has been determined for Diebold Voting Machines with similiar 'bugs'. Just before the "Are you sure you meant XXX for President?" dialog, the Diebold machine flashes a screen for 1/18th of a second that declares "All your votes are belong to us. Vote Republican!!". Then it spits out 50 cents in quarters... The Sticky Widget
These machines are made by Konami? And they're just across the border?
I'm gonna be rich!
...now, where'd they put that "B" button...
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
I coded a joke, and set the whole world crashing. But I didn't see, that the bug was on me. -- The Bee Geeks
While the evidence that subliminal advertising affects behaviour a very similar technique (backward masking) is used in psychology experiments to good effect. The upshot being that presenting stimuli below the conscious threshold *can* affect behaviour. Presenting images of a jackpot win on a gaming machine might just prolong the time that a player is willing to play. Good news for the manufacturer, not so good for the player. Anyhow - what are the changes of a *bug* causing this behaviour?
The real subliminal picture was supposed to be of an old lady getting money out of a mac machine and then inserting it into the slot machine. Damn the QA department!!!!
Some of the older machines were found to be flashing Burma Shave logos so the problem has been around a long time.
...but as a programmer I have difficulty believing that the images are "accidently" appearing. Bugs can be weird, but that really seems like it would take some Intent to produce. But then again I have a lot more experience with database programming than with graphics, so maybe someone else disagrees?
But like you said, it seems silly to deny a little subliminal advertising when the whole casino is a giant and explicit mind-fuck.
Unlike Canada, the USA doesn't believe in Blue Fairies.
yvaN ehT nioJ
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
So all those Ninja Turtle games I've played as a kid was really subliminial messages to get me to buy pizza? No wonder all those kids are so crazy over yugioh. It's all subliminall messages, I tell ya.
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
Are Your Money Is Belong To Us
I was under the impression that the idea of subliminal advertising was debunked some thirty years ago when Subliminal Seduction burst upon the scene.
What's really interesting in casinos is the soundscape. Most sound just settles into a constant wash of beeps and talking and mechanical noise.
Except for the sound of coin hitting the payout tray under the slot machine. That has a pitch and timbre so striking and unique that it jumps out at you every time.
Three Squirrels
It's been debunked, but Subliminal Seduction hardly debunked it - it's partly thanks to that book (and its sequels) that the myth got so popular in the first place!
I believe this. . .
"the urban legend about theaters flashing "Drink Coke" on movie screens)"
is true.
Let me explain. . . in college (an Art School) I took Film History, and we went over this technique in class. . . so, the same summester I was also taking Film/Video I, and I decided that I would test this out on my next video assignment.
And guess what. . . it worked!!! I got an A.
Then again. . . I could not isolate this as the cause, because well. . . I'm a genius and I always get A's. (ok, ok, that last part isn't completely true, but it sounded good, to my ego.)
Self proclaimed wannabe geek. You know how it is. Most of us who read this stuff probably fit in that category.
Hey, if I see a jackpot, even for only one screen frame scan, I EXPECT TO GET PAID!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Next thing you know, those video billboards will start flashing subliminal messages of people getting speeding tickets, then everyone will slow down!
Actually, it works! Recently, there was a nice study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology on this topic:
Beyond Vicary's fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice
Johan C. Karreman, Wolfgang Stroebe and Jasper Claus
Abstract
With his claim to have increased sales of Coca Cola and popcorn in a movie theatre through subliminal messages flashed on the screen, James Vicary raised the possibility of subliminal advertising. Nobody has ever replicated Vicary's findings and his study was a hoax. This article reports two experiments, which assessed whether subliminal priming of a brand name of a drink can affect people's choices for the primed brand, and whether this effect is moderated by individuals' feelings of thirst. Both studies demonstrated that subliminal priming of a brand name of drink (i.e., Lipton Ice) positively affected participants' choice for, and their intention to, drink the primed brand, but only for participants who were thirsty. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.002
...that they would never risk losing their license over something like dumb like subliminal messaging. They promise to fix the problem. My question is, do they really have to "intentionally" put up subliminal images to lose their license. I think the casinos should ditch their machines for sheer stupidity in doing something like this, lest the casinos themselves tarnish their "good" image. Not that I believe something like this is a sheer coincidence or "glitch".
The payout trays are basically large hollow bells, specifically engineered to give the sharpest, clearest, most distinctive sound possible at the drop of every coin.
I think that may be on the way out. I was in Vegas last year, and the slots are almost all paper now. You put in dollars or coins, and, if you win, get paid in a printed receipt that you bring to the cashier. The receipts also have a bar code so you can put it in another machine. Much better for the old biddies instead of lugging around buckets of coins.
I imagine it cuts the costs of dealing with billions of coins every week and it's convenient for the slot players.
I think some use magnetic cards, but didn't see any of those.
"A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service
The summary is too afraid to actually reference the actual province, for fear that no one would recognize it??? It is actually the biggest one, Ontario, with 12,000,000+ people. Surely *some* of you 'Murkins must have heard of it.
Sorry, but surely such condescending summaries aren't warranted here...
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
In Maine we don't have coin-based slot machines because the quarters are so heavy they are considered to pose an unecessary work-injury risk.
The slot parlor in my city has a background sound of the familliar quarter-based jackpot payout to give the place the familliar casino sound
I've been developing casino-type games for over 12 years, so I know how they work. This is not at all surprising since slot machines are entirely based on fraud and conning you into believing and 'feeling' like you have a chance of winning - this is just another step in that direction.
The most sinister devices employed by the slot machines are the most fraudulent. I am referring virtual reel mapping and the near miss system. Here's how they work:
Virtual reel mapping works like this: You think that a reel has 24 symbols (12 symbols, 12 blank spots) and conclude that your chances of obtaining any particular combination is 24^3. Not so. What happens is that the slot spins 3 virtual reels, each one consisting of 32 symbols. Positions on the virtual reel are mapped to positions on the physical reel, but guess what, the virtual reels have 8 extra symbols, and they're all mapped to blank spots on the physical reels! This significantly reduces your chances of obtaining a winning combination.
The near-miss system works like this: Considering the virtual reel mapping mechanism described above, the near miss principal works on the basis that the extra 8 blank spots on the virtual wheel are mapped to locations on the physical reel RIGHT NEXT TO the jackpot symbols. That's why you'll see "7 BLANK 7" and "7 7 BLANK" with frightening regularity.
And here's the kicker: There are jackpot symbols on the physical reels that aren't mapped to the virtual reel. Which means that there are symbols on the physical reels that will NEVER EVER show up on the pay line. If that isn't outright fraud, I don't know what is.
If one puts on their cynic hat to appreciate slots from a purely human-psychology point of view, one can truly appreciate how masterfully crafted the whole set-up is. It disgusting and magnificent at the same time.
If you want to see some real thing like Neuro Language Programming, sublimal advertising, misdirection, suggestion etc, look for Derren Brown at youtube.
n +brown&search=Search
I guarantee it will blow you away.
To save you the trouble: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=derre
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
One of the examples in his book is a Playboy centerfold of a beautiful blonde reclining on some silky sheets. The brilliant Mr. Key discovered that if you hold the page up to the light so that the printing on the back shows through, and look carefully at the folds of the sheets in a lower corner of the photo, you can kinda-sorta see the letters "s e x".
I read that and thought: How naive of the rest of us to think the sexiness was due to something as obvious as a large, clear photo of a beautiful naked woman, when the real secret was three fuzzy letters in the corner that can't even be seen under normal magazine reading conditions! In other words, the guy's a loon.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Hey you! Join the Navy!
>Except for the sound of coin hitting the payout tray under the slot machine.
They don't even have this anymore, and with that went 100% of the appeal that slot machines ever had for me!
I always enjoyed scooping large cups of quarters out of the tray, or hearing the payout sound (even when it wasn't mine!).
Now all you hear in casinos is "bloop bloop bloop" and "WHEEL...OF...FORTUNE!!!" and a payout means taking a receipt to the
cage. No thanks.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
That book was crap, and has been thoroughly discredited. However, cognitive psychologists have been aware of the existance (and impact) of subthreshold primes for some time now.
Like other posters, I am surprised that gaming companies need to resort to this, when there are so many overt attempts to manipulate the sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers to keep playing. Mind you, their job is to keep people passively feeding the machines, and anything that aids that goal is fair game...
Strangely enough, the kaptcha for this post was unprimed...
Subliminal messages are a scam. The Vicary studies of the 1950's had falsified results. Its like 4 decades later and you people still believe this crap. Just like the silly hippie idea "talk to your plants" crap was faked.
Let go of the conspiracy.
SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE.
Never saw it myself but was told about it, Anyone notice?
I don't know about that, but your subject line reminded me of a completely different experiment about hiding the obvious. Subjects were shown a scene where there were a number of people, one of whom was doing something repetitive. (I can't remember what.) They were asked to count the number of times he performed the action (which required concentration). Halfway through the scene, someone entered wearing a gorilla suit, beat his chest a few times, then ran off.
After the experiment, most of the subjects counted the repeated task quite accurately, but a large fraction of them, when asked about the gorilla, replied "What gorilla?"
Subliminal advertising is an old story. The real trick, practiced by companies and governments worldwide, is hiding the gorilla.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Now we need tinfoil goggles 0_0!
Having worked in the Casino industry, and spent considerable time coding player menus for use on graphic displays for networked slot machines, it is very, very, very likely this is a bug in their display. Networked slot machines communicate via broadcast messages, and their display code likely has a bug that triggers stored images to display upon receipt of certain messages.
I'll bet that the porn industry would absolutely *LOVE* to get their sticky little hands on this technology.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Subliminal messages do not work.
sic
It's a funny video to show to your friends and test their visual perception.
I've found about it through growabrain: White Shirt Experiment
Here's the actual video (Java Plugin required)
guru in training
Ontario is a town in southern California. Quit pulling our legs. Next you'll try to convince us that your prime minister's name isn't Jean Poutine.
I was a game tech at Mystic Lake casino and I wouldn't doubt that it is an actual bug! All those slot machines like IGI-qwest and Williams that use linux to do there dirty work are poorly programmed and take forever to boot (old IGT slots almost had an instant on)
so I've always had a feeling those programmers didn't know what they were doing! But like my first assembly dos subliminal program which switched the bios pages real quick like; If the page switching looks intentional pull it!
If you're going to make an old nes contra joke please use the entire code so that noobs might understand the joke... NM they won't either way. Howabout using a code for sega genesis altered beast instead? A+B+C LR Start. Or a cryptic hexidecimal gameshark code and see if anyone can figure out which code the game goes to. :)
BTW I beat contra without the code.
They are subliminally flashing "jackpot" so you get used to seeing it, ignoring it, and pushing the buttons for the next bet. Then, when you do win something that requires someone to come over and pay you off, you just push those bet buttons and carry on with the smaller machine-provided payout only.
The other way this scam happens is to display the jackpot in very small letters -- friends of mine put me on to this a decade ago with the early (fugly) poker slots.
I come here for the love
I do a lot of code for hand held, embedded, small scale, etc. systems and I'm very familiar with things like this. For example the GameBoy Advance has a fade register and very special video memory. The thing is no matter how quickly you set the fade register (100% faded out) anything you are transferring into the video memory will be shown first, for exactly one frame. Most people wouldn't see this, as it is 1/60th of a second long, but just because of how the hardware reads the registers it slips that one frame by. The way to get around this is to set the fade register, then blank the screen, then shove everything into video memory and gradually fade in for a nice smooth segue into the intro screen/video/whatever. Of course many games have that one frame slipping by because the developers just never saw it and didn't realize it was happening, or knew about it but just didn't care. Slot and pachinko machines use similar hardware methodology, and other than a few special registers holding some sort of statistic or seed they are probably blanking the entire game system memory every play so as to avoid buildup in some odd variable which could lead to a financially disastrous error condition. On each refresh they would of course wipe the video memory accordingly and the Jakcpot screen getting in there is just a hardware timing issue directly after or before the transfer.
Eta Kooram Nah Smech!
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
tell me where I can join the Navy?
Darwin Hawking Blackmore
That's because these are the clocks they use: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/7437/
Your thoughts form your reality.
Konami Gaming sues CBC
Yogonet, 3/1/07, Canada An item which aired on CBC's "The National" on February 26 is irresponsible, inaccurate and damaging, says slot machine manufacturer Konami Gaming. The company will pursue legal action.
Konami will pursue legal action against CBC.
The report by journalist Dave Seglins claims that a few older Konami machines contain a "subliminal message," implying that this may affect the behavior of the player but the story does not specify how, if at all, this could occur.
Seglins was told in an interview with Konami C.O.O. Steve Sutherland that the machines in question are actually some of the lowest performing machines, based on house averages, within the Konami game library.
"The performance of these machines directly disproves the CBC's theory, but the reporter conveniently neglected to mention that in his piece," says Sutherland. "The reporter did not ask for the data that shows these machines generate less revenue than comparable machines. Broadcasting a story based on controversial and vague theories, despite the facts which refute those theories, is irresponsible and impugns the integrity of an honest company."
In addition, the CBC reporter neglected to include that the psychologist he interviewed for the story, Philip Merikle, wrote in the Encyclopedia of Psychology that "there is no independent evidence indicating that embedded subliminal words, symbols or objects are used to sell products. Furthermore, even if such embedded subliminal stimuli were used, there is no evidence to suggest this would be an effective method for influencing the choices that consumers make."
According to Konami, the CBC story was also misleading by creating the impression that subliminal perception is a more powerful influencer. Merikle wrote in the same encyclopedia: "A common theme that links all extraordinary claims regarding subliminal perception is that perception in the absence of an awareness of perceiving is somehow more powerful or influential. This idea is not supported by the results of controlled laboratory investigations."
The CBC presented no evidence and no first-hand accounts to support any of its claims.
The report shows that five of the same symbol appear for 200-milliseconds on the screen at the start of a game on four (three in Canada) game titles developed in 2001. "Even though this has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the game, we have still offered conversion kits for every machine," adds Sutherland.
"Konami will pursue its legal options related to what it considers irresponsible reporting on the part of CBC, and the resultant impact on the integrity of Konami Gaming," says Sutherland.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
but only for a second. -- Steven Wright
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)