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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Introduction When I joined a video slot game company, I thought it would just be like learning any other genre. I thought video slot games were simple because the interaction was limited to pressing a spin button and watching to see if you won. Raph Koster said in his Theory of Fun for Game Design that video slot gameplay was basically broken.

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Of course he hadn't made any slot games, like me at the time, so of course we were very wrong. Slot Players are NOT Mindless Slot players are gamblers. While the physical interaction of hitting a SPIN button is simple, the mental engagement is complex.

Gamblers base their decisions on what they perceive as the potential of a math model – in terms of how the game features work and what sort of wins or near-wins they experience. When all the games in a casino have to fall with a certain return to player percentage (RTP), how the players win and how often they win become much more important as differentiators. How else would some games become more popular than others?

This concept is expressed in basic slot math terms as VOLATILITY and PAY DISTRIBUTION. It's the Art, then the Math There is a saying in slot development, “The art is what attracts the players, but it is the math that keeps them.” It was told to me on my first day on the new job, and it's something I told every new hire or candidate afterward. Like a storefront with a bad sign or a book with a bad cover, a very good math model can suffer if the art does not attract new customers. Yet what theme attracts one person may be entirely different than what attracts another. So not only is the art important, but it also needs diversity to ensure a wider net is cast.

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Putting a new art theme on the same math is called a SKIN. A new promising math model might be release on multiple skins. When I first started, we had a knee-jerk reaction to any time the lead theme tanked.

The assumption being that a good math model could withstand poor opinions about art. When we had a dud on an original math game, we'd pull skins in development off that math model and try to fix it or adjust the art to a different math model, which of course ate up time and killed our roadmap goals.   Then one time, a perfectly well executed Chinese-themed game tanked within the first month of its release.  

A skin of that math done by a completely different team with a unique pre-rendered 3D art style was already in the final stages of deployment. We were loathe to change it because it had just gotten approval by GLI, the industry watch-dog, and marketing and sales were eager to sell it.

So we released the skin, and wouldn't you know, it took off. Same exact math, same exact features, rendered differently produced widely different results. We had a hit, and the game was deployed everywhere in banks of slots. as the saying goes, "it's the math that keeps them." Eventually people grew tired of the math.

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The art couldn't sustain them, all it could do was attract more players. We tried skinning the math some more to give it new life, but none of them faired as well. Don't ever rely on a single theme to determine the viability of a math model, and don't underestimate the value of art to create a hit. So why not just skin a good math model over and over again? Some games are skinned a lot to keep them alive, but do it too much and it would be like having a block of various restaurants that all serve the same food or a shelf of books all telling the same story. They are what makes the VOLATILITY and PAY DISTRIBUTION unique. Players have different tastes and eventually get bored of their choices. When a feature is successful, it may be re-used in combination with other features or on a different set of reels with a slightly different volatility and pay distribution. Game Features When a player checks out a slot game, they look at the art first, then take in the game features – usually advertised with branded logos and feature text on the top screen or glass or in the splash screens for online. A feature is often a twist on a slot rule, which makes it look like the game is more likely to pay in your favor (it's not, it's all hocus pocus). It could be turning symbols wild , respinning or nudging the reels or paying side bonuses or increasing the number of free spins or picks, etc.

Whatever it does, it doesn't change the overall return percentage (RTP), just the perception of your odds of winning. This is the interaction, the engagement with the gambler, that makes slot games more complex than the simple SPIN button implies.