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."

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Tag: UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA

[eldavojohn]

Konami Slot Machines Flashing Subliminal Messages?

Also suspect was the fact that if you pressed up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B and then A, the machine would flash the jackpot screen continually while declaring all its cash "are belong to you." Casinos grew suspicious after younger and younger players continually cleaned out the machine in a methodical manner before eventually treating their "conquering" of the slot as a standard Saturday morning ritual.

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.

Re:Tag: UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA

[nacturation]

What an amazing post. Someone mod this guy up up down down left right left right!

It doesn't work

[Harmonious Botch]

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.

Re:It doesn't work

[Hrodvitnir]

Mod parent up!

Please, I don't have any mod points, but something tells me this post really needs top moderation.

Re:It doesn't work

[yali]

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.

Subliminal? What about overt?

[TinBromide]

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.

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

They're trying a three-pronged approach: subliminal, liminal, and super-liminal.

What's superliminal, you ask? "HEY YOU, GAMBLE!"

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[Skadet]

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.

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[drinkypoo]

Well, considering it's a Canadian story, and we have $1 and $2 coins rather than bills, it's not really ALL that surprising, is it?

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.

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[skuzzlebutt]

I've always found it interesting/creepy how in many of the big casinos in Vegas it is really easy and welcoming coming in, but confusing and cumbersome to leave...Excalibur is a good example: a moving walkway shuttles you right in the door, but to leave you have to find your way around the moving walkway, since there is no outbound equivalent, sometimes shuffling between turrets, up stairs, etc. Station Casinos are another good example, where the entrances are all big and well-marked from the outside, but once you get in the door, the exits are all blackened/darkened/mirrored so they kind of blend into the rest of the decor, and the inside of the casinos are labyrinthine at best. At many like Sahara, Imperial Palace, Luxor, and Wynn, the main entrance dumps you out into the valet horseshoe, so you have to brave walking in front of taxicabs, limos, and impatient drunk drivers to get off of the property.

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[Joe The Dragon]

I just hope that in a fire people don't get lost trying to get out.

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[adam613]

Yvan eht nioj!

Re:Subliminal? What about overt?

[drinkypoo]

I can confirm the first paragraph and deny the second paragraph of your report. It does use a centralized database. It does not use sequential numbers, at least not in clear - they are at minimum obfuscated in some way. But I suspect they're guaranteed unique and psuedorandom.

it can work... sometimes

[symes]

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?

Re:it can work... sometimes

[FleaPlus]

So if you flash jackpot unconsciously you might have a similar but subdued reaction.

This has been proven to be fiction.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but certain subliminal effects are quite real.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&scorin g=r&q=motor+subliminal

http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/3 /483

The Neurophysiology of Response Competition: Motor Cortex Activation and Inhibition following Subliminal Response Priming
Peter Praamstra and Ellen Seiss

University of Birmingham, UK

Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such "conflict tasks" are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how response competition evolves in the motor cortex. To investigate the dynamics of motor cortex activation during response competition, we used a subliminal priming task that induced response competition while bypassing preresponse stage processing conflict. Analyses of movement-related EEG potentials supported an interaction between competing responses characterized by reciprocal inhibition. Inhibitory interactions between response channels contribute to the resolution of response conflict. However, the reciprocal inhibition at motor cortex level seemed to operate independent of higher level conflict-monitoring processes, which were relatively insensitive to response conflict induced by subliminal priming. These results elucidate how response conflict causes interference as well as the conditions under which frontal-lobe-based interference control processes are engaged.

http://www.unicog.org/publications/Dehaene_Sublimi nalPriming_A&P2002.pdf

The neural bases of subliminal priming

Stanislas Dehaene

Psychologists have long reported that words that are made invisible by forward and
backward masking can nevertheless cause behavioral priming effects. Functional
neuroimaging can now be used to explore the neural bases of masked priming. Subliminal
priming causes reduced activation in multiple areas (fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, and
motor cortex), in direct correspondence with behavioral manifestations of priming at the
orthographic, semantic, and motor level. This implies that a whole stream of processors can
operate unconsciously. The neural code in each area can be assessed by varying prime-target
relations. A simple mathematical framework is proposed that tentatively relates priming at the
voxel level with the shape of the tuning curves of single neurons in the underlying tissue.
Priming thus provides a general method to study the fine microcode in each brain region (the
'priming method').

subliminal, liminal, superliminal

[RelliK]

yvaN ehT nioJ

Re:subliminal, liminal, superliminal

[Tihstae]

yvaN ehT nioJ Have you been reading my nickname again?

A what province?

[PhotoGuy]

"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...

Slots are based on fraud.

[shoolz]

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.

Re:Slots are based on fraud.

[grahamwest]

I worked on spinning reel slots for WMS Gaming. To my knowledge all jurisdictions have laws regarding the relative frequency of physical reel positions (in Nevada it's 6:1 for adjacent positions and the labs got antsy if you went beyond 4:1) and as a consequence of these laws all physical reel positions must be hittable.

24 stop reels are very rare (never seen them in the real world in fact) because it makes the 12 symbols have to be pretty narrow. 22 stop is the standard although 18 stop was used from time to time. Virtual reels were commonly 72 stop. 32 stop doesn't extend the odds enough to be very useful and it also doesn't give you enough granularity between positions. You can go higher than 72 of course. I saw a math model for an IGT Five Times Pay that used a 90 stop virtual reel and one for a Triple Triple Diamond that used a 200 stop virtual reel. Those were 92% payout games if I remember rightly. I was told Quartermania used 255 stop virtual reels but I never personally saw math for it.

As a general point for people I'd like to say that there are indeed several techniques the machines use that are not commonly known, but all slot machine behaviour is VERY heavily regulated by law. If you want to know what they can and cannot do, look at the statutes. Ironically basically all the things people think the machines do are illegal and therefore not done.

Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Key is hilarious

[PapayaSF]

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.