The Psychology Of Casinos

The Psychology Of Casinos
By Jonah Lehrer

In a recent New Yorker, I profiled Roger Thomas, the head of design for Wynn Resorts. Thomas is a remarkably talented interior designer – he’s received nearly every accolade in the field – but I was most interested in the way Thomas has reinvented the modern casino, creating lovely and relaxing spaces that encourage people to squander their cash. (I’ve long believed that success in Vegas requires an intimate understanding of human nature – it’s not easy getting people to enjoy games that are stacked against them.) Here’s the lede:

On a clear December afternoon, Roger Thomas was completing a four-month renovation of the high-limit slot-machine room at the Wynn Las Vegas resort. Three assistants trailed him as he flitted around, scrutinizing details and shouting instructions. “We’ve got an hour until the ropes come down,” he yelled. “And we need more fluff now. We need it desperately.” The “fluff” consisted of ivy that he was using to hide the roots of a pair of giant agave cactuses. The cactuses framed a sizeable fountain that Thomas had designed. The center of the fountain was a colossal lotus flower, made of eighteen gold-painted panels, illuminated by pink lights. Thomas had fixed on a lotus-flower motif for the room after a Japanese sculpture of the Buddha caught his eye at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Thomas, who is the executive vice-president of design at Wynn Resorts, Steve Wynn’s gambling and hotel company, had done the original design for the room only a few years before. He had been told to create a space for older male gamblers, and so he had filled the gaming area with overstuffed leather armchairs, heavy curtains, and dark mahogany panelling. “It was all very clubby,” he said. “A place for bourbon, testosterone, and cigars.” But the Wynn Casino Operations department monitors the returns of every gambling device in every Wynn casino, and the room’s yields were falling short. After some investigation, it became clear that the problem was a demographic one. Men weren’t playing these games; women were.

So Thomas redesigned the room. He created a wall of windows to flood the slot machines with natural light. He threw out the old furniture, replacing it with a palette that he called “garden conservatory”—lime green, white leather, and gold. “I wanted it bright and shimmery and full of flowers,” Thomas told me. “A place where a lady might feel comfortable.” Now every available surface appears to be covered in something expensive. There are Italian marbles and carpets designed by Thomas. Bowls of floating orchids are set on tables; stone mosaics frame the walkway; the ceiling is a quilt of gold mirrors. Thomas even bought a collection of antique lotus-flower sculptures, which he placed near a row of blinking video-poker slots. “These gambling machines are basically big light fixtures—they scream for attention—and so you normally don’t try to compete with them,” he said. “You design around them. But I wanted this room to be the opposite of every other slot room.”

Doing the opposite of what is usual has become Thomas’s trademark. Beginning with the Bellagio hotel, fifteen years ago, he has reinvented the look of the modern gambling hall by deliberately violating every previously accepted rule of casino design. Since then, his interiors have been at the heart of Steve Wynn’s spreading empire, in hotels like the Wynn Las Vegas and the Wynn Macau. In a world of corporate hotels slouching towards similarity, Thomas’ designs insist on their uniqueness, and if anything are getting quirkier from year to year. His sketches for a resort still pending approval in Foxborough, Massachusetts, mix a basic hunting-lodge vocabulary of dark wooden beams and fireplaces with a passion for eighteenth-century France and fuchsia tones. “I don’t do focus groups,” Thomas told me. “I create rooms that I want to be in.”

Steve Wynn’s Vegas hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, five-star approach to a desert city previously known for cheap buffets and strip clubs. But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself, creating spaces that allow people to enjoy the act of losing money, and encouraging them to lose even more.

And here’s the science behind the design:

As conceived by Wynn and Thomas, the Bellagio’s casino represented a $1.6-billion bet on human psychology. The gamble paid off: the Bellagio generated the largest profits for a single property in Las Vegas history. And this income wasn’t a by-product of scale—the Bellagio was less than half the size of the MGM Grand—but a direct result of the way that Wynn’s guests spent money. Per guest room, the resort generated four times as much revenue as the Las Vegas average.

Thomas’s sumptuous designs led people to spend as they’d never spent before, and, in the years since the Bellagio was completed, research has supported the psychological assumptions that went into its creation. Karen Finlay is a professor at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, who focusses on the behavior of gamblers. Her latest experiments have immersed subjects in the interiors of various Vegas hotels by means of a Panoscope, which projects three hundred and sixty degrees of high-definition video footage. There are slot machines and card tables in every direction.

Using the Panoscope method, Finlay compared the mental effects of classic casinos, with low ceilings and a mazelike layout, to those of casinos designed by Thomas. Subjects surrounded by footage of Thomas’s interiors exhibited far higher levels of what Finlay terms mental “restoration”—that is, they were much more likely to say that the space felt like a “refuge” and reduced their stress level. They also manifested a much stronger desire to gamble. In every Panoscopic matchup, gamblers in Thomas’s rooms were more likely to spend money than those in Friedmanesque designs. Although subjects weren’t forced to focus on the slot machines, the pleasant atmosphere encouraged them to give the machines a try.

Finlay refers to Thomas’s environments as “adult playgrounds,” since they provide an atmosphere in which people are primed to seek pleasure. “These casinos have lots of light and excellent way-finding,” she told me. “They make you feel comfortable, of course, but they also constantly remind you to have fun.”

She went on, “The data is clear. Gamblers in a playground casino will stay longer, feel better, and bet more. Although they come away with bigger losses, they’re eager to return.”

Finlay notes that the effectiveness of such designs comes at the expense of the guests, who have been persuaded by flowers and nice furniture to squander money on games that are rigged in favor of the house. According to her findings, Thomas’s designs have a particularly marked efect on those guests who normally don’t gamble.

The seduction of his décor, perhaps, is that it doesn’t feel like a gambling environment. The beauty is a kind of anesthesia, distracting people from the pain of their inevitable losses.

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Annals of Interiors
Royal Flush
How Roger Thomas redesigned Vegas
by Jonah Lehrer


ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF INTERIORS about casino and hotel designer Roger Thomas. On a clear December afternoon, Roger Thomas was completing a four-month renovation of the high-limit slot-machine room at the Wynn Las Vegas resort.

Thomas, who is the head of design at Wynn Resorts, Steve Wynn’s gambling and hotel company, had done the original design for the room only a few years before. He had been told to create a space for older male gamblers, and so he had filled the gambling area with overstuffed leather armchairs and dark mahogany paneling. But after some investigation, it became clear that men weren’t playing these games; women were. So Thomas redesigned the room. Doing the opposite of what is usual has become Thomas’s trademark.

Beginning with the Bellagio hotel, fourteen years ago, he has reinvented the look of the modern gambling hall by deliberately violating every previously accepted rule of casino design. Wynn’s hotels are famous for having brought a luxurious, five-star approach to Vegas.

But their real achievement may be psychological: they have remade the architecture of gaming itself. The received wisdom of modern casino design was codified by a former gambling addict named Bill Friedman in his book “Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition.” By the late seventies, however, the number of visitors to Las Vegas had plateaued and even briefly declined. Thomas, who was working as a designer there at the time, felt that the unattractiveness of the interiors was part of the problem. In 1980, Steve Wynn ran into Thomas at a charity event and invited him to join his design team. One of their first major projects was the Mirage. Thomas and Wynn’s next big project, the Bellagio, was notable not merely for its unparalleled opulence, but also for the design of the casino. Thomas created a casino that contravened all the rules of casino design.
The gamble paid off: the Bellagio generated the largest profits for a single property in Las Vegas history. Thomas’s sumptuous designs led people to spend as they’d never spent before. Mentions Karen Finlay.
Thomas is an inveterate sketcher. Before he starts planning a space, he pages through dozens of notebooks looking for things he wants to recreate. In 1999, Steve Wynn sold the Bellagio and his other properties for $6.4 billion, and set about planning a project—the Wynn Las Vegas—which would outdo them in opulence.
Thomas, for his designs at the Wynn, combed his notebooks searching for ideas so outlandish that he’d never been able to use them anywhere else. All this effort appears to have paid off.

The Wynn Las Vegas and a sister hotel generate fifteen per cent more revenue per guest room than the Venetian and its sister hotel do.



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