Casino Enterprise Management

Creating a compelling and profitable gaming machine grows more expensive and treacherous with each passing year. A top-tier game out earns a bottom-dwelling game by a factor of five or more in a typical casino—a difference that easily approaches $100,000 per game, per year.

What’s worse, virtually every gambling operator is drawing up plans to expand existing properties or build new ones. Unless games are constantly made more appealing, there’s a risk the average win per day on gaming machines will drop exactly when operators are counting on that income to pay for expansion and rising costs.

Most of today’s games are designed by engineers who rarely, if ever, set foot on a casino floor. There’s little communication with gamblers, and focus groups that ask people to play with house money are exercises in futility—how can you measure a machine’s gambling appeal when there’s no gamble?

If you’ve read my past columns, you know I believe a game has to challenge a losing player to continue to chase a win, as well as offer wins with emotional value. I believe today’s games are often overly complex, unintuitive, and boring. A successful game not only has to earn that first $20 from a player’s pocket, it must also compel the player to reach in for another $20 when that first stake is gone.

Based on responses to past articles, you generally agree with my findings; but you’re hungry for game ideas that actually accomplish these goals.

It’s time for me to move from the safety of criticizing the general state of today’s gaming machines and show you what an ideal machine might look like. For the past eight months, I’ve been working with a talented designer, Rich Fiore, to develop a better game. We’ve even convinced Bally to provide its Cinevision video platform to build on. I think we’ve got the makings of a great game, but we really won’t know until it reaches field trials—hopefully early this summer.

Design Essentials
Our design started with six important elements:
    • Emotion—Players should sense the approach of a winning event and feel the importance of a win—not just a monetary win, but an emotional win as well.
    • Simplicity—Game play and how to win should be easy to understand.
    • Intuition—How the game is operated shouldn’t require explanation. Colors, sounds, and graphics should guide the player. Details are learned through exploration.
    • Choice—Without reaching the complexity of video poker, players should have the ability to test their luck by making meaningful choices.
    • Personality—The game shouldn’t be a cold and calculating odds machine; it should have a persona players can relate to.
    • Patent-Sensitivity—We don’t want to encounter a patent lawsuit on our first game, so we need to be especially respectful of the intellectual property of others.

The game we’ve designed is called Spin Star, though that may change before final production. So far, we think the name embodies our design essentials. Whether that’s true—indeed, whether these elements matter at all in the marketplace—remains to be seen. Meanwhile, let me tell you about Spin Star’s operation, and you can decide for yourself if we have a snowball’s chance of success.

How it Works
Spin Star features an oversized 3-reel base game that is configurable for quarter, dollar, and high denomination play. The game is a straight forward three-credit game; the first credit buys a single payline, the second doubles those rewards, and the third buys the bonus star. We chose to avoid the l¢ games, with more paylines than Albert Einstein could calculate, for simplicity’s sake.

Emotional Appeal
We’ve eliminated words and numbers from the game’s artwork, the idea being if explanations are necessary, the game isn’t intuitive. We want players to feel the joy of winning and pain of loss without having to logically decipher words and numbers. Base game paytables are, of course, accessible from the game’s touchscreen menu.

Certainly the dominant feature is the wheel. Our original thought was to shape the bonus game like a spinning star, but in the final 22-segment design, it looked far more like a pointy wheel than a spinning star.

Simplicity and Intuition
Spin Star’s wheel is won in a manner similar to a mystery jackpot. Every max credit wager is another chance to win. For example, suppose we want a wheel bonus to occur an average of once every 100 max credit games played. At startup, we choose a lucky number between one and 200, the average of which is 100. Then we set a game counter at zero, and increment it at the start of each max credit game. When the game counter grows to match the lucky number, the wheel is enabled.

A crown of lighted crystals surrounds the wheel and changes color as a wheel award approaches. When first initiated, the background color is a deep, icy blue. As the wheel award grows closer, the colors turn from blue to violet and on until reaching a fiery red when the wheel is about to hit. Just as excitement builds when a mystery jackpot approaches its upper limit (because the odds of winning increase), players will chase the wheel award and understand how close it is by the color of the crystals. Unlike low hit-frequency mystery jackpots, this award occurs often enough that gamblers will play through the color spectrum.

Choice
When the wheel is enabled, the base game freezes in its unplayed state. The player now chooses one of five different colored buttons. Each button spins the wheel at a different speed and produces an outcome that is separately determined from the other four buttons. Player choice does matter; they must rely on lucky instinct to select the highest paying spin.

The player wins whatever value is indicated when the wheel comes to a stop, after which the base game finishes play. It is entirely possible to win a wheel award and a base game payout on a single wager.

Personality
Another important feature is the message panel located above the reel symbols. Rendered on the video screen, this panel simulates the mechanical flip digits used in airport schedule boards and alarm clocks of the 1970s. More recently, the display technology played a feature role on the Lost television series.

The display is inherently dramatic as it flips from one character to the next, each flip accompanied by a soft mechanical clicking sound. Shown here displaying the phrase “COOL GAME” to indicate the game is far away from winning the wheel, we envision more advanced uses by the time spin star reaches the market. We want to encourage play, celebrate wins, and taunt losses. For example, suppose a player presses the green wheel spin button and wins 30 credits, and the yellow button would have paid 75 credits. The message display will let the player know by stating “POOR CHOICE” and then “YELLOW PAID 75.”

Wins are sweeter in light of punishing losses, and we believe there’s room for a machine that “talks trash” to players every now and again. One thought is to create a carousel of these games, each with its own personality.

Patent Sensitive
Trespassing on the patents of others—especially when those others have lots of money to sue with—is never a good idea. When demonstrating Spin Star, I’m often asked, “Doesn’t IGT hold a patent on wheel games? How will you stand up to the lawsuits?”

Indeed, there are several patents assigned to IGT regarding wheels as bonuses on gaming machines. One group, the Adams patents (U.S. patents 5,848,932 and 6,827,646 are representatives), describes a wheel that is enabled by a base game outcome. That is, a specific symbol or combination of symbols achieved on the base slot machine entitles a player to spin the bonus wheel—pretty much how Wheel of Fortune works today.

Another IGT patent, Baerlocher 5,788,573, describes a wheel that is activated by a “next level indicia” in base game play. This appears to be a similar method to that claimed by the Adams patents.

Because Spin Star’s wheel is completely disconnected from the base game, it is, in my opinion, not subject to this category of patent claims, and therefore does not trespass on IGT’s property.

A more recently issued patent invented by Jason Mayeroff, and also assigned to IGT, is U.S. patent 7,144,321. I came upon this patent after initial work on Spin Star had begun—it was only issued about four months ago. Mayeroff covers a wheel that is randomly triggered, apart from the base game, and is closer in concept to Spin Star.

However, in the patent’s prosecution history (the correspondence between the patent office and the inventor), Mayeroff specifically stated the claims cover only a truly random trigger in which every game play has the same odds of winning the wheel. In Spin Star, the chance of winning the wheel grows with each successive play—an arrangement specifically disclaimed by the Mayeroff prosecution history—leaving us in the clear.

Neither Fiore nor I are lawyers, and we’ll leave the patent infringement fights to those who are. Bally and IGT are currently locked in an epic battle over some of the very wheel patents mentioned above. Each side is spending millions of dollars and has expert legal advice saying their’s is the side of angels. Until a jury decides and appeals are exhausted, we simply will not know the answers—and there’s no profit in sitting on the sidelines until clarity is reached. Our goal in this design was to completely avoid the claims in question, and we believe that triggering the wheel based on max credit games played accomplishes this.

This whole matter of patents will only get more complex. During the past several years, thousands of patents related to gaming machines have been applied for. The time between application and issuance for patents is typically three to four years, so we’ll be seeing a whole lot more legal wrangling in the future. Many believe the patent system is broken, that it stifles innovation and needs a serious and immediate overhaul. Others say the existing patent system protects inventors and therefore encourages innovation. All agree that patent litigation is a lucrative career field.

We can also all agree that patent litigation will have significant impact on gaming floors in the coming years.

Shining Stars
Fiore and I got along so well during the development of Spin Star, we’ve agreed to become partners. Our new business name is Acres-Fiore, and we hope to survive in this business by helping you prosper.

As always, your comments and criticisms are welcome.

John Acres is CEO of Acres-Fiore and a Director of Game Logic Inc. He is the founder of EDT, Mikohn, and Acres Gaming, and holds a number of U.S. patents relating to the gaming industry. He can be reached at john[at]acresconcepts.com or (541) 738-4301.