January 13th, 2010
Via Play No Evil, a report on some recent developments in regulations regarding online skill games. As the article notes:
“…Gambling is banned. Gambling is tightly regulated. But, if you are a “Not Gambling” gaming business you are not/rarely banned and not/hardly regulated.
Welcome to the world of skill games.
While skill games have had a limited impact online, they are becoming a bit more “exciting” in the non-virtual world:
Nebraska is in a serious dispute with American Amusements over its BankShot skill game as to whether the game is a slot machine or a skill game.
Ohio is fighting skill games by limiting them to having $10 non-cash prizes… a law that is being fought as being arbitrary by game operators and developers.
4 skill game arcades, also in Ohio, were raided as gambling operations.
What are these skill games? Are they “games of skill” or gambling games? What are the implications online?
At first blush, BankShot looks like a slot machine: You choose how many tokens to wager (which affects the jackpot), choose which way the balls are randomized (though this “does not affect the outcome”….. which is odd for a “skill” game), and hit the “Play” button to stop the balls and win or lose.
This is very similar to Pachinko Slot machines in Japan (actually, the Pachinko Slot machines are much more sophisticated in terms of game design, as far as I can tell). These machines are not considered “gambling” machines as they have an element of skill. They also look like three reel slot machines, but the player is able to “control” the outcome. Instead of a single button that stops the reels, each reel can be stopped separately (and, presumably, a skilled player can control the outcome). The games also have progressive and persistent elements to keep players playing and loyal to a single machine type.
In Nebraska, there are around 450 of these game machines installed. The state went after the company and the operators claiming that they are slot machines. The company argued that the machines were predominantly “games of skill”. The state sent the software to two companies to determine if the games were games of chance and has not disclosed the results (implying that the companies found the games to have a significant skill element). This has resulted in the company getting an injunction against the state (in October 2009).
The other approach that states have used to fight these games is to limit the prize amounts to small ($10), non-cash prizes. Companies have fought this is as being arbitrary. Companies have also gone towards a two-tier system where players can buy phone cards which can in turn be used for a random drawing for bigger prizes or just used for minutes (called “sweepstakes games”).
Lots of drama all around.
Why the fuss?
States do regulate gambling. All forms of wagering on games for money is sometimes banned as well – usually based on arguments that games are not a legitimate form of work (a moral objection to any form of gaming for money).
As a practical question, what is a skill game?
There are two types of skill games – ones where players are competing with each other and ones where they are playing against a machine.
For today, the interesting topic is Player vs. Machine.
Determining whether a game is a game of skill is much harder than determining if it is a gambling game. One has to prove that there is a “predominance of skill”.
To my view, looking at the code is not enough. You MUST assess the actual, physical machine.
Why?
Because the program itself will only provide proof that there is a way to play the game with some sort of control… validating that the changing state of the machine can be stopped in a controllable fashion.
The program might look like 2 processes – one listening to the buttons and the other running the continuously updating game state. The Button Listener would have “ON PRESS” stop the other process and freeze the game state.
… which would lead to the belief that the game has an element of skill in terms of timing when to press the button.
However, the actual implementation of the platform could make this apparently “human controlled” result quite random. If the platform is running on any sort of operating system, the flags, semaphores, or messages used to pass information between the two processes is at the mercy of the operating system scheduler and all of the other processes that are running. Also, in many cases today, keyboards and buttons are communicating with a separate micro-controller or processor which in turn sends messages to the main processor.
In other words, even if I hit the button at the exact same time with the display showing the exact same values, my results could vary substantially… in fact, it could be worse than with a slot machine in that I would “near miss” an awful lot and think that with more “practice” I could get better when, in fact, my performance was limited by the random variations introduced by the hardware and software.
The obvious side to this is if these were really “games of skill” certain players would become dominant and sit and play the machines profitably all day long…
Slot Farmers or Slot Campers, if you will… just like gold farmers in MMOs.
… and the machines would be pulled by the company and arcade operators in no time.
I am extremely dubious of player vs. machine games of skill. Either the games are mathematically “chaotic” so that arbitrarily slight differences in input can lead to huge differences in output or there is deep seated random processes that are not immediately apparent, but that have enough impact on the performance of the game that it has positive revenues for the developer and operator.
As I said earlier, player vs. player games of skill are another matter.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
