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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."
In a case that was reported in Canada, but mostly ignored elsewhere, Yaghi went to officials of the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, who videotaped the consultant winning hundreds of dollars, according to The Edmonton Journal. He turned all the money over to the officials on the spot.
Both Yaghi and the manufacturing company say the software error in the machines allowed millions of dollars of fraudulent gains. At least two people other than Yaghi took advantage of the bug at casinos in the United States and Canada before the software was fixed, the company says.
Yaghi may have erred when he proposed to the company that they hire him as a consultant to find and repair such flaws for a fee of $250,000. The company offered $50,000 instead, which Yaghi declined.
The company then obtained an order from a Canadian court to seize computers from Yaghi's home, persuaded the gaming commission to ban him from Alberta casinos, and filed the $10 million lawsuit.
In response, Yaghi is suing WMS Gaming for $1 million and the gaming commission for $3 million.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
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?
Your subliminal advertisement is clever, but what really works is superliminal: HEY PEOPLE, MOD ME UP.
Everything in a casino is engineered to encourage you to keep playing. From the obvious (as you said, huge jackpot signs, loud noises when someone wins) - to the not-so-obvious (carpets on the gaming floor are often intentionally ugly to encourage you to look up at the gaming). Have no noticed there are no clocks *anywhere*? That is, except for the computers. If I'm playing blackjack, which I do once or twice a year, I try to grab a 3rd base seat near a computer if I don't have a watch or phone on me.
Some places even have huge fish tanks as you're exiting, some would say to calm you down after a big loss so you're more likely to come back.
Sony ha
Joking aside, subliminal priming is making a comeback in experimental psychology. It was somewhat discredited in the 60s and 70s (i.e., the urban legend about theaters flashing "Drink Coke" on movie screens), but more recent work has uncovered the parameters and boundaries to make it a viable experimental technique. It is typically used in controlled lab situations to study automatic processing of information in isolation from conscious, intentional thought. It's not entirely clear from the research literature whether it would work in this kind of real-life applied context. But it wouldn't be hard for a casino to do the testing to find out.
Yes, because here in the US, we don't want to deal with fills (in spite of the comments about Vegas having slots with coins, properties that actually use them are in the minority, and the coin-filled slots are far in the minority even at those properties) so we just use ticket-out; the slots print out tickets with unique barcodes which are linked to a row in a database. The tickets can be inserted into another machine (ticket-in) or they can be redeemed at the cashier's cage or, on properties which have them, a kiosk. Most properties have at least a redemption kiosk that looks like a bill changer, some have a full kiosk with a screen that lets you redeem points and such as well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is not that uncommon that you end up with stuff flashing on the screen for a fraction of a second in game programming. It can for example easily happen when try to place a sprite on the screen, but only initialize its positions position value after having gone through the draw loop once, i.e. something like this:
1. call update() to handle game events, one of them triggers the creation of a new object A
2. call draw() to draw the current game state
3. call update() and only now finalize the initialization of object A now
4. call draw() to redraw the screen again
With that code you would get some object flashing up at some random position. Other easy causes for random flashing could be texture loading that happens in a separate thread, since the game doesn't wait for the texture to be fully loaded, it will use a placeholder texture for the first few frames of a new scene till the real texture is loaded (see for example Halo2 on XBox). If that placeholder texture happens to not be specified the renderer might just use whatever texture is just in memory and so you would get the desired effect of textures appearing in the wrong places. Double buffering can also lead to all kinds of subliminal errors.
So in short, there are plenty of ways to get subliminal errors in game programming, if Konami did this by error or intentionally is of course a different question, but those kind of errors are not that uncommon.
You must not have had any friends to play with - its "Select - Start" for 2 players.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
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.
Derren Brown is a magician (most specifically a mentalist).
He uses standard magic tricks, plants and actors just like every other magician. He just pretends that he doesn't.
NLP (Neuro linguistic programming) and all the other crap he talks about is complete and utter shite. It is psuedoscience. It doesn't work and doesn't exist.
He is a magician and nothing more.
If you believe he really can do the things he says he can (on his heavily edited tv specials), then I have a bridge to sell you.
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.