Not patient enough to wait for the reels on a social casino app to scroll to a stop on their own I viciously tap the spin key to speed things up.
My husband, on the other hand, gently taps the spin button on the slot machine once and waits for everything to take its natural course.
My perspective has always been that since everything should be random anyway whether I land one spin every 2 seconds instead of 30 shouldn’t make any difference.
His take is that playing fast takes all the enjoyment out of the game.
Why is that some of us must play fast while others approach things with more ease and does it really matter at all?
Impatient Entertainment
While hubby doesn’t write online I get to make all the calls on this one. The first issue is the definition of “enjoyment”.
Being numbers driven I’m always after pushing my coin count up. Waiting for the reels to land is excruciatingly painful to me. It’s like watching paint dry. I do not find it relaxing nor enjoyable at all.
I’m only driven by the end result and I can get there faster if I stop the reels by rapidly clicking the spin button.
My brain still processes the symbols that have landed and what they mean even though I’m already off and running to the next spin. Seeing the results and the impact those results have on my coins is the enjoyment.
It’s simply a form of impatient enjoyment.
For my husband it’s the excitement about what might land that drives him. He likes the suspense. Any symbol that comes across the screen has the potential to land and he’s eagerly considering all the options.
That may be the single most important difference between those who spin fast and those who don’t. The source of enjoyment is simply different.
It does also explain why when he suggests we play together on one phone and take turns spinning my eyes roll back into my head at the thought of how boring that sounds.
However, that sign of impatience could lead to other issues.
Impatience is what social casinos rely on to make money. They hope that you’ll be too impatient to wait for free coins to replenish your pile that you’ll buy virtual coins to keep playing.
I am able to wait for free coins, fortunately. I just don’t like watching reels slowly spin.
Is it Really Random?
One of the reasons I’ve convinced myself that spinning doesn’t impact the outcome of my results on a social casino app is that they are driven by a random generator which should mean that my odds of landing a winning spin or a losing spin are the same no matter when I click the spin button.
But is that really true?
Social casinos are not the same as real ones. They are not regulated and their source of income is different.
Social casinos need you to click adds or make in-app purchases in order to make money.
If they are not regulated and they are in complete control of the programming behind the scenes they can program the outcomes based on any number of desired results that work in THEIR favor.
For example, there’s no reason they couldn’t program these games such that those who have a history of buying coins receive fewer big hits than other players.
I am not saying that they do this – I don’t know. I’m saying that it is highly possible they could do this and we’d never know because there is no one regulating how these things are programmed.
Such programming could be used to keep players on the app, too. There’s even a name for this – it’s called Dynamic Game Difficulty Balancing.
IMGL shared a paper written by Professor I. Nelson Rose, a attorney in California, supporting the case for regulation of online social casinos. One of the supporting reasons for his case is specifically this use of programming that differs from what people believe is really happening behind the scenes.
Because game makers have the ability to program these slots in so many ways most of us could not imagine it is important that we think of them as NOT random.
It does perhaps mean that spinning fast vs slow has less of an impact on the final results than what your history with the app itself and how that history can be used by the game maker to increase their income.
Tournament Play
I started this post thinking that I had all right on my side in whether spinning fast or slow was an issue and have slowly convinced myself that while my reasons for doing so still make sense to me at least the thought that the games are random is flawed.
I have one last reason for playing fast and that is to win tournaments on these apps. In Jackpot Party Casino, for example, if you don’t spin fast it’s going to be very difficult to rack up enough wins to score well in the tournaments.
And winning those can lead to free coins.
Having said that I have noticed that the amount of coins earned in a tournament on that app has significantly dropped in the past several months.
Is wanting to win a bad thing? No, I don’t think so. It is natural to want to win whether that’s a promotion at work, a sport competition, a board game, or a mobile game.
However, if we don’t understand that many of the changes these app creators make are done with the end goal of increasing their own income – that they are purposefully playing on our emotional desire to win – then we open ourselves up to potential problems.