Slot machines perfected addictive gaming. Now, tech wants their

 It is addictive gaming that slot machines are best known for. Technology wants their tech.

Las Vegas has a lot of slots machines that you can play before you get to baggage claim. There are little slot parlors in every McCarran International airport terminal. You can also stop at a convenience shop to get gas for your rental car. You can do all this before you get to your hotel-casino. It will allow you to fill up and play slots at a convenience store, while also allowing you to pick up your rental car. Mike Trask (the company's senior market manager) accompanied me into Bally's showroom in March to let me play some games. Bally's showroom is a stark contrast to the noise of a casino floor. It was almost monastic. There were no lights and only the gentle hum of two dozen hibernating machines.

Trask was a tall, dark-haired man in his 30s who showed me the company’s new Friends-themed video game. He had it installed on Bally’s ProWave console, a 42-inch curved, sleek cabinet. Friends celebrated its 20th birthday last year. The company hopes that it can tap into some of that nostalgia. Trask stood beside the cabinet and said, "That person, that little girl who watched every episode, Friends, when it came out, was our demographic."

I took a place in front of Trask, who touched a logo at the top corner of the screen, selected a box on display that guaranteed me a bonus round, then instructed me to hit the spin key. I did. The NBC sextet smiled at my from the prime years of their youth. Five reels of symbols scrolled down the screen -- a Central Perk Decal, a guitarist, screenshots of characters -- and I hit the spin button. One clip of Rachel wishing Grandma a happy birthday was part of the Wheel of Fortune-style bonus round. wearing a wedding dress.

Bally assembles its machines in a factory warehouse near its gaming studios. The warehouse is located behind the corporate headquarters of Bally, which is in Las Vegas. Bally's parent company Scientific Games sent out over 17,000 new units last year. My visit was accompanied by hundreds of newly assembled slot machine shells. They were all black with jutting dashboards and had the industry standard black exterior.

Each cabinet was marked with a tag that indicated its destination: Oklahoma (Washington), Michigan (Michigan), Canada. Few of the cabinets were intended for Vegas casinos. This is a sign gaming's global expansion. Scientific Games purchased Bally last January for $5 billion. 23 states had at that time legalized gambling to infuse their deficient coffers.

However, the expansion and popularity of gaming is also the expansion of slot machines. The modern casino makes 70 to 80 percent of its revenues from slots. This is an incredible increase over the 1970s, when it was only 50 percent. New York was the most recent state to legalize gaming. Pennsylvania is now the third-largest state for gaming after Nevada, New Jersey and Nevada. An amendment to Pennsylvania's legislation allowed table gaming later. Silicon Valley has been a magnet for the psychological and technological systems that were originally designed for slot machines. These systems include reward schedules, tracking systems, and trackers.

Trask and a friend of mine, Trask, passed by a ProWave Cabinet, which was released in mid-2014 by Bally. It has a 32 inch concave screen that looks like a more curved Samsung TV. Trask claimed that playing the exact same games on curved screen increased gameplay by 30-80 percent. I asked him why. I asked him why. He replied, in a tone that implied a good guess. It is the job of game designers to summon the irresistible lure of electronic spectacle. This means creating a system that is simple but engaging. The machine will draw and trap players into a delicately controlled cycle of risk/reward that keeps them on the seat for hours while their pockets slowly but surely empty. Trask spoke to me as we sat in front of the gaming console, describing the MGM floor that houses more than 2,500 machines, and hundreds of games. Trask's mission was clear: "Our job it is to get your vote for our game."

Brooklyn's mid-1800s saw the invention of the first slot machine. It was a cash register-sized machine that used actual playing cards. By inserting a nickel, pressing a lever, the cards were randomly displayed in a small window. Players could win items depending on which poker hand was revealed. Charles Fey created the Liberty Bell slot in 1898. This machine featured three reels, a coin payout, and was the first real slot. The reels had 10 symbols. Players had a 1 in 1000 chance to hit the 50-cent jackpot if they got three Liberty Bells on their reels. While the three-reel design became popular in bars and casinos, they were considered a standard for casino play. Gaming houses though considered them to be a distraction for table-game players for decades. The casinos were packed with table games, while slots were kept to the margins.

The 1960s saw the introduction of the electromechanical slots machine by Bally. With the new rig, players could insert multiple coins into a single wager, which allowed machines to multiply jackpots while also offering smaller but more frequent wins. Multi-line play was made possible: players could win with both diagonal and zigzagged combinations in addition to the horizontal lines. These new designs increased gameplay speed and brought life back to an industry that was struggling.

William "Si," a Mississippi native wearing a bolo tie, oversaw some Bally projects during that era. He was instrumental in this renaissance. "The player came to play," he stated, "he didn’t come to lose." So, speed it up, give the player more, be more liberal. Let him win more. But then, [you] make money still with the speeding down, because it wasn't as liberal. Also, the volatility of the slot machines was reduced -- this is the gaming term for the frequency with which a player has big wins or losses. Wire Guide For Modern Slot Machines