Good Animation Should Be Encouraged
Many of us have owned pets at one point or another. Be it dogs, cats or gerbils, most of us have had a little, four-legged friend that we could turn to when we need some silent support and in turn care for and provide for. Yes, this is still an article about gambling, stay with me. Many of us have tried to teach our pets tricks, whether it’s sitting down and shaking hands for dogs or just pooping in the right place for cats. So, what do you do when your pet performs a trick successfully? You don’t just say “Oh, that’s very good”, because, in a truly shocking revelation, pets don’t speak English. Instead, you do it by giving them a treat, often combined with praise. Every time your puppy manages to sit down you say “Good boy” and give him a piece of dog candy, and then you go again. This technique is known as positive reinforcement, and can work on everyone and everyone. Numerous studies have been conducted on positive reinforcement, and all of them conclude that it is extremely effective on people of all ages. It’s most commonly used on children – “if you’re a good girl and eat your vegetables you get to watch TV before bed”, but it can also be used in the workplace to encourage office workers to do better. Most employers only use negative reinforcement (“If you don’t meet my quota you’re fired”), but positive reinforcement works even better (“If you surpass your quota by 20% you get a bonus with your next paycheck”).
So, what does all of this have to do with casino gaming? Well, allow me to go slightly off-topic (we’ll go back to positive reinforcement in a bit, I promise) and talk a little bit about animation and graphics in a slot. When you read a review, what are the things that the reviewers most focus on? Stuff like RTP, bonus games and jackpots, which I suppose are the most important parts of a slot, but animation barely gets a mention! Visuals are only brought up if they’re extremely good – if they’re just okay, or even if they’re subpar, they don’t even get a mention! As such, many (and I do mean many) slot providers have just started producing slots with visuals that are “good enough” as a cost-saving measure. That’s not the way to go about it! Just because, objectively speaking, the visuals are not the most important part of a slot doesn’t mean they’re not an important part regardless! The bread is not the most important part of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but stale bread ruins the entire thing! We need to start giving more positive reinforcement to the artists and animators working on the slots, and to the provides employing them. We need to start showing everyone that we don’t care about visuals that are “good enough”! So this is what we can do – reviewers, start talking about visuals more! It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge reviewer who gets paid to play slots or if you’re just writing your review as a comment somewhere, just start bringing up the visuals more! Commend slots with good visuals and condemn those with cheap, ugly symbols! And players, try to ignore slots that look ugly and start playing those that look pretty. Speak with your wallets! If we all work together to give the artists who actually put effort into their work some positive reinforcement, then maybe we’ll start seeing more slots that look beautiful in the future!