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Most mobile games nowadays are "designed" (read: made crappier) with such a feature. Just try and find a "free to play" game where the outcome isn't random... It's just not as profitable.
The content of this article is fantastic and frightening. However, viewing this page on mobile, you can’t help but appreciate the interactivity that feels as though it’s been designed with the mobile reader in mind. It’s marvelous.
And now the animations are stuttering as I scroll...
Oh, and the horizontal-border between the text and the animation shifts up and down depending on where i am on the page (literally obscuring the text I was reading at one point).
Maybe i'm not the kind of person that poker machine sounds appeal to...
I literally can't even get it to work on my desktop setup :(
I'm taking a learning psych course this semester, honestly you barely need to design them at all. Any random positive outcome will cause (on average) a non-interrupted repetition of the preceding behavior. Most mobile games nowadays are "designed" (read: made crappier) with such a feature. Just try and find a "free to play" game where the outcome isn't random... It's just not as profitable.
If you talk to slot designers, the word "volatile" is used about every 30 seconds. The virtual reel and near-miss concepts are designed to give the appearance of a less volatile machine, which converts into a player staying on the machine longer.
TLDR: fake near misses hide the actual randomness of the reward system.
Addiction by Design is a book that takes a really comprehensive look at slot machine design it’s pretty wild how much thought is put into it and this is before ML became practical, I’m sure casino company’s are leveraging it now.
I remember reading an article years ago where a video-poker machine manufacturer "trained" the machine using real playing behavior of famous poker stars... For German machines I can say they're not a target market for ML or other "experimental" stuff given the ultra strict regulations here. More or less illegal online casinos however are the new Wild West of the gambling industry.
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, by Natasha Dow Schüll.
It has research from every angle -- former addicts, the casinos, current addicts, game programmers, game manufacturers, anyone who has a hand in the industry.
It's incredibly comprehensive, and definitely worth a look, if a bit long.
When I played recently, I couldn't tell whether I had a near-miss or even a win until credits counted upward. I couldn't feel any excitement because I didn't know what was going on. It would have taken me several hundred dollars worth of play to even understand what was happening. Maybe this is part of the plan, or maybe their product gets used no matter how bad it is - as long as those rewards pay out randomly.
Many gambling games exploit a cognitive bias known as the gambler's fallacy (e.g: the fallacy that playing more will increase your odds of winning). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
In 10 years: How Facebook is designed to be addictive
1) https://www.google.com/search?q=how+social+media+is+designed...