According to the Internet, there are all manner of tricks that casinos in Las Vegas supposedly employ to keep you gambling.
These range from “temporal distortion” to pumping oxygen into the casino floor to keep gamblers alert and focused on losing their money on the slot machines. The latter is, of course, not true, given that extra oxygen would create a massive fire hazard, and raising the oxygen level by just 1 percent (in a typical casino’s 1 million cubic liters of air) would require pumping in 40,000 cubic meters of oxygen every day at incredible expense.
“Casinos do a number of things to encourage people to continue to play,” Tony Cabot, distinguished fellow in gaming law at the University of Nevada told Casino.org. “But pumping in oxygen is not one of them. It’s just one of those myths about Las Vegas that people like to spread.”
So, what do they do? You may have noticed that inside casinos, and sometimes other places like shopping malls, time tends to fly by. Or rather, you may not have noticed, as you haven’t checked the time.
Casinos know that the longer you stay inside, the more likely you are to part with your money, and removing clocks is part of the way some casino owners may attempt to stop you from thinking about the world outside and continue gaming. However, it should be noted that casinos do have clocks inside them in locations such as sportsbook areas, as bets on sporting events are time-sensitive.
According to casino insiders though, removing clocks in some casinos didn’t arise from a plan, but from gamblers complaining that they didn’t want to see the time. In 1931, when gambling was first legalized in Nevada, clocks were on the walls, but following complaints from gamblers they were removed.
That isn’t to say that casino owners are above doing these sorts of tricks. In the 1970s, Bill Friedman, who ran two casinos on the Las Vegas strip at the same time, noticed that every morning when the sun rose, 85-90 percent of gamblers on the floor would quickly leave the floor.
“They realized it was daytime and they had a world they had to go back to,” Friedman explained to The Hustle.
Friedman’s solution to this was simply to cover the glass of the casino with a dark plastic covering every day just before sunrise, stopping gamblers from realizing it was now daytime. Lo and behold, the morning stampede towards vitamin D stopped, and gamblers kept on spending money.
Other tricks are employed to distort your sense of time. Slow ambient music is often played in casinos, to the benefit of casino owners. One team of researchers took 160 participants and asked them to play the slot machines, before getting them to estimate the amount of time that had passed. While playing, the gamblers heard either ambient casino sounds or ambient casino sounds with music at varied volume and tempo.
“The findings showed that the typical ambient casino auditive environment, which characterizes the majority of gaming venues, promotes understated estimates of elapsed duration of play. In contrast, when music is introduced into the ambient casino environment, it appears to provide a cue of interval from which players can more accurately reconstruct elapsed duration of play,” the team explained in their study.
“This is particularly the case when the tempo of the music is slow and the volume is high. Moreover, the confidence with which time estimates are held (as reflected by latency of response) is higher in an auditive environment with music than in an environment that is comprised of ambient casino sounds alone,” they continued.
Casinos do employ these tricks to keep you gambling for longer – but how effective tricks like removing clocks are now that everybody carries phones is debatable.
Source Link: Do Casinos Really Use "Temporal Distortion" To Keep You Trapped Inside?