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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?
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?
yvaN ehT nioJ
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Agreed - the likelihood of this being a "bug" seems monumentally remote. How could a "draw screen" routine keep accidentally writing a screen that it is least likely of every drawing? Did they optimize by doing a call to displayJackpot() on every screen flip just in case it's that one in a billion or so times that it actually needs to?
To state the obvious, the reason for this screen is starting in the poor gambler's face -- the whole point of the drawn out process of a slot machines (versus just saying "Nope...nope...nope...nope....") is to give the feeling of being "close".
"DAMN! I almost won. Just have to feed it a few more as this one is getting lucky."
Flashing the grand prize for brief moments obviously compels that feeling. And when you're talking about problem gamblers who are already addicted, it is nothing like trying to get people in a theater to buy coke.
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.
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 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.
...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".
"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.
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