Before you can even get your luggage, you can play a slot machine in Las Vegas: There are small departure points at each terminal at McCarran International Airport. You can stop for fuel and play departure points at a convenience store after picking up your rental car. And before you even arrive at your hotel casino, which can own about 80% of its gaming platform for slot games and only 20% for table games if it meets the modern trend of online casino.

PERFECT Dependent gaming with slots

Bally Technologies, one of the world’s largest slot machine manufacturers, is located three miles south of the Strip. Mike Trask, the company’s senior marketing manager, welcomed me to the showroom to play games when I visited Bally in mid-March. Bally’s showroom was almost monastic compared to the cacophony of the casino floor, the lights low and the room quiet except for the soothing hum of the two dozen dormant consoles.

Trask, a tall, dirty-blond-haired man in his 30s, showed me the company’s latest Friends-themed game, installed in Bally’s ProWave cabinet, a sleek, 42-inch curved console. Last year, Friends celebrated its 20th anniversary, and the organization hopes to capitalize on nostalgia. “That guy, that girl who was watching all the episodes of Friends when it first appeared,” Trask said as he stood next to the closet.

I sat in front of the machine, and Trask touched the logo in the upper right corner of the screen, selected a screen on the screen that guaranteed me a bonus round, and told me to press the spin button. I did, and five rolls of icons — Central Perk sticker, guitar, character screenshots — scrolled the screen down as a paradised version of the show’s signature song was played, the NBC sextet grinned at me from the beginning of its youth, and a cut version of the play’s vibe. Rachel’s wedding dress was worn: “Happy birthday, Grandma!” During the Wheel of Fortune type bonus round, a casino bonus.

All of Bally’s computers are assembled in the factory warehouse next to its gaming studios and behind the Vegas Group headquarters. Bally’s parent company, Scientific Games, delivered more than 17,000 new units last year. Hundreds of newly assembled slot machine shells lined the storage walls throughout my tour, each with an industry standard black exterior and dashboards.

Each cabinet was marked with a destination: Oklahoma, Washington, Michigan, and Canada. Few were destined for Las Vegas casinos, indicating national and international growth in the industry. Scientific Games bought Bally last year for $ 5 billion. For the rapid infusion of destroyed cash registers, 23 states had at that time legalized gambling, a taxed industry.

Technology created especially for slot games

However, the general growth of games is accompanied in particular by the expansion of slot machines; Today, slot machines account for 70 to 80 percent of casino revenue, up from 50 percent or less in the 1970s. New York, the latest state to legalize gambling, does not allow table games, and Pennsylvania, the country’s third-largest gaming state after Nevada and New Jersey, only allows table games after a change in legislation. Psychological and technological mechanisms designed for slot machines, such as incentive systems and tracking systems, are quick to find fans in Silicon Valley.

Trask and I passed the ProWave cabinet at the factory, a Bally model released in mid-2014 with a 32-inch concave screen similar to an even more curved Samsung TV. According to Trask, playing the same games on curved screens improved gameplay by 30 to 80 percent. I asked why that was. “It looks cool; it’s amazingly simple, ”he said, and his voice suggests that a guess is enough. Game designers are tasked with attracting the unspeakable charm of an electronic spectacle – by creating a device that is both easy to use and relentless, a machine that pulls and earns players a nicely calibrated risk and reward loop that keeps them glued in place for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably empty. Trask told me about the MGM floor with 2,500 planes and hundreds of different games as we stood above the game cabinet. Trask’s goal was simple: “Our role is to persuade you to play the game.”