Casinos appear to be entertaining places for spending a Saturday evening with friends. Unfortunately, most visitors remain completely unaware that casinos are specifically designed to influence and manipulate visitors’ senses and emotions.
Casinos don’t typically display clocks, giving their patrons no sense of how long they’ve been there – enabling them to focus more on having fun than any potential losses.
Visual Cues
As soon as you enter a casino with plans of drinking and gaming, only to find yourself spending hours without knowing when or where it all went! It can quickly become easy to become disorientated about time, spending, and your bankroll – leaving you no clue of how your funds have vanished into thin air!
Gambling can be an insidious addiction that has lasting repercussions for those who become involved. Casinos understand this fact, which explains their careful design to encourage gambling behavior – from flashing lights and jackpot noises, to smokey rooms and complex layouts.
Friedman’s design uses windowless spaces that feel cozy and intimate to help players forget their real-world worries and be more likely to take higher-risk bets. Furthermore, he suggests placing playing stations directly inside casino entrances so they are immediately available.
Sound Cues
As soon as you step foot inside a casino, the sounds of slot machines ringing, people playing games and cashing out can be heard. These sounds evoke feelings of elation and anticipation among players; it’s no wonder casinos play soothing music and pump out pleasant aromas to ensure visitors remain relaxed; no natural lighting should ever enter most casinos as this would break their illusion of magic and make visitors feel out of place.
Bill Friedman’s book Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition laid out his philosophy that casinos should be designed to draw customers in and keep them gaming for as long as possible. As proof, he coined the term playground design, still used today by casinos like Las Vegas’ Roger Thomas who designed them again for Steve Wynn.
Taste Cues
As you walk into a casino with confidence and plans for some enjoyable, responsible gambling, your wallet becomes suddenly light with cash and your plans seem achievable. Yet hours later you find yourself wondering where all of it went-and not because time slipped by or your attention wandered somewhere else within this maze of slot machines.
Many casinos use scents, music and physical design elements to engage visitors. A study revealed that adding gaming machines along a corridor increased revenues by 45% when compared with similar spaces without them.
Casinos use another strategy to manipulate visitors: by eliminating clocks and windows from the gambling area. This prevents players from realizing how long they have been losing money while helping them continue feeding the machine in hopes that a win may soon come their way.
Touch Cues
The bright lights and sounding slots designed to capture your attention while keeping your thoughts from drifting toward how much money is gone forever are intended to use sensory marketing as a strategy to encourage gambling behavior by using visual, auditory, and tactile cues to motivate gambling behavior.
Casinos remove clocks and windows so you’re unaware of how much time has gone by while you play, because being aware that time is running out may lead to making bad decisions and quitting playing altogether.
Smell is an incredible sense and can play an influential role in our decision-making processes. According to one study on scented areas, scent boosted people’s slot playing rates by 44.5 percent – likely due to how familiar aromas evoke memories of past successes that provide motivation for further play.
Emotion Cues
Many casino visitors are unaware that casinos are specifically designed to manipulate their emotions. Although the glitzy decor and jackpot noise might seem fun, casinos’ purpose is actually to keep gamblers coming back despite losing money.
Casinos use many emotional cues to draw players back into gambling more. One such approach is loss aversion: as more losses accrue, you are likely to continue betting in order to stave off further ones.
Another emotional casino design trick involves creating the illusion of control. This is achieved by making electronic gaming machines appear as though your choices were being made directly by you rather than simply random chance; giving the impression that you can steer your destiny, like how leaves believe they direct wind currents.