It’s no secret that casinos are predatory institutions that feed on people lured in by “striking it rich”. But you likely don’t know exactly how, which this article will hopefully rectify. Who knows–maybe your career will lead you to opening or managing your own casino!
Casinos manipulate you upon entry through a combination of architecture and psychology. The business model revolves around making people spend longer in its corridors, giving more time to take increased risks and spend money. The interiors in classical casino designs are dimly lit and intentionally designed to obscure where the exits are, making it literally harder to physically navigate away from the slot machines and towards the exit. Add the easily accessible bars to the equation, and you get an inebriated liminal space where livers, bank accounts, and mental stability go to die. More specifically, clocks and windows are prominently missing from these casino interiors, for the purpose of removing ways to keep track of how much time you’ve sunk into gambling. And say you need to use the bathroom while you’re in a den of hedonism: lots of flashy machines are en route to the lavatory, which the paths to are also labyrinthine in order to encourage distraction en route, thereby spending time on said machines. Smaller passageways limit your field of vision, so you’re more likely to explore and stumble upon another money-sucking game. For some casinos, rooms are made small because they’re proven to make people spend more by increasing the intimacy and making players more active by making them feel more relaxed and comfortable—we’ll get more into this under playground design. Many smaller rooms also allow different atmospheres to coexist under a single roof, thus appealing to a wider variety of people.
Casino design branches into two categories: traditional, Friedman-esque with heavy gamification aspects, & the playground design by Roger Thomas. In Friedman-esque design, there’s a purposeful absence of decoration to avoid distracting from the slot machines. These are the central focus of the casino, and everything else in the building is a potential distraction from profit-making; Anything else should serve to enhance the pull of the slot machines. Red and orange are colors used to incite visitors, and slot machines and tables are available in close proximity to the entrance. Friedman’s style gets to the point immediately—you aren’t meant to dawdle or dance around the reason you’re at the casino.
Below is an example of a casino with a Friedman interior—note the low ceilings and densely packed machines.
With Thomas’ playground design that began to flourish in the 80’s, the casino’s interior atmosphere is glamorous, meant to make the atmosphere more luxuriously comfortable and gamblers more relaxed and prone to risk-taking. The gambling environment and experience in of itself–not just the dopamine rush caused by risk–is made appealing. Friedman’s low, claustrophobic ceilings and small rooms meant to make visitors hone in on gambling were traded out for airy, high-vaulted ceilings. With this style, all senses are evoked to make the casino more appealing, be it ambient music, aromatic scents, or keeping the interior at the perfect temperature.
Research has shown that visitors prefer the playground style to the Friedman design—spending more time and money in the former than the latter. It goes to show that you need creature comforts to draw users in to then get them hooked to your product or experience. Take in the ornate decorations and spacious layout of the following image—you start taking a fancy to luxurious relaxation before the gambling addiction truly gets ahold of you.
Casino design has also been often compared to grocery store layout design, where essentials are placed towards the end of the user flow and are hard to access without first passing by more eye-catching, appealing products and experiences. Where grocery stores hide essentials like eggs, milk, and the like behind seasonal displays or floral arrangements, casinos obfuscate the path to the bathroom, elevators, or the lobby with slots and cheaper game tables. Both use psychology tricks to keep its spenders in the experience flow for longer, which explains why 85-102 is a required course for design majors–they need to learn how exactly to manipulate users to optimize the function of their designs.
Other than anchoring and availability biases, casinos also gain advantage off of gambler’s fallacy. Gambler’s fallacy is aptly named; in essence it’s the incorrect notion that previous failures will create an increased probability of success on subsequent attempts. A popular example used is thinking that if you flip a fair coin and it comes up tails several times then the likelihood of getting heads on the next toss increases with each consecutive tails. So many people also fall into the false patterns of thinking like: “since I’ve lost so many times already, the next bet will surely be successful!” This cognitive fallacy serves to entrap players in gambling dens, since they’re sure that their luck will turn around and they’ll compensate prior losses on the next turn. The promise of big winnings in the short-term outweigh long-term consequences in people’s minds.
Gambling also proliferates in society outside of these glittering, opulent veneers. Many gambling addicts get their start through sports betting, something that seems innocuous (e.g. March Madness, Fantasy Football). Though it’s been around since Ancient Rome’s gladiator arenas, sports betting has seen a recent spike in the U.S. following the 2018 Supreme Court case, giving states the option to legalize it. To quantify the results of this change, legal sports betting in the U.S. saw a total amount of bets valued at around $90 billion between May 2022 and April 2023. Apps and technology have also helped gambling proliferate, and anyone with an internet connection can quickly and easily lose their net value (and more) online. Said apps/sites are also designed to be extremely user-friendly, with easy-to-navigate interfaces and playful visual motifs like borrowing the classic imagery of cherries from traditional fruit machines.
All sports betting sites (like FanDuels or DraftKings) all utilize the natural feelings of competition and thrill of uncertainty of sports, which are only heightened by the more personal stake that betting adds. Sports betting also feels more skill-based than traditional slot machines might–whether it be through knowledge of team stats, individual players, or strategy understanding. Thus, users tend to attribute their successes to personal ability but blame failures on chance. This is similar to how people in quant & related fields have begun playing blackjack & poker recreationally—spiraling quickly into addiction. These individuals believe that their understanding of probabilities behind the game (similar to team stats for sports betting) will help them beat the system–which can be true, but can be a slippery slope towards bankruptcy. It’s no different from the idea that sports gamblers hold, where your certainty of your skillful understanding helping you to beat the gambling game leads to taking higher, unnecessary risks. In essence: best avoided.