Should It Be Illegal for a Pokie/slot Machine to Tease the Bonus Feature but Not Award It?

Understanding the Dichotomy: Teasing vs Near Misses

To a certain extent, it depends on what exactly you mean by 'tease the bonus.' If you mean literally indicating that you have won a bonus but then not actually awarding that bonus, then certainly, it should be and is illegal in every jurisdiction in the US. However, if we're just talking about the 'near miss' of showing almost winning something, such as 2 of 3 required symbols on screen, it should not be made illegal.

Again, speaking of the US land-based jurisdictions with which I am familiar, there is already regulation related to near misses. However, the practice is not banned outright. Extreme overuse of the 'tease' for highly valuable awards is deemed to be deceptive, so there are rules that limit their application.

Regulation and the Practicality of Making Near Misses Illegal

Extreme measures that make near misses illegal are not only impractical but also deceptive. If every position on a slot machine reel was equally likely to appear, an occasional near miss would happen naturally. Eliminating them entirely would be unnatural! Therefore, existing rules in the US relate to the defined frequency of premium symbols appearing without paying in the game.

These rules do permit the occasional premium symbol to appear more often than would be 'natural,' but not 'too often' as per the regulations. One may certainly quibble over how often is too often, but there are absolute limits.

The Role of Game Designers and the Selling of Hope

As a game designer, our job is to provide an experience that allows the player to believe in the possibility of interesting outcomes, such as bonuses or big jackpots. Although 'possibility' is a subtle line to walk and gets into issues of deceptiveness, the player needs to not just be able to win but also feel like they could win. Otherwise, they will walk away discouraged.

If you occasionally see a near miss and know that it's possible to win a given award, you have a reason to try again. If you never see a near miss, you may not realize the award is even part of the game and the award isn’t an incentive to play. Conversely, if you constantly see near misses, you intuitively learn that symbols show up all the time but never pay out. Even though you are well aware that the symbols are in the game, you just don’t believe that you’ll actually be paid for them.

And once the player loses the belief in the possibility of 'the big thing' happening to them in the game, they are no longer incentivized to keep trying. Overuse of near misses is fundamentally self-defeating, and game designers who rely too much on the 'tease' without offering sufficient value to the player will often find that players don't want to play their games, and those games will be removed.

Self-Correcting Problems

Which brings me to my other main reason for saying this should not be made outright illegal. If a manufacturer is bad enough at game design to overdo it, they will suffer the consequences and learn the lesson. This falls into a category of issues that I like to call 'self-correcting problems.'

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