To say the horse-racing industry is up in arms about the planned removal of thousands of slot machines from race tracks is an understatement.
It marks a huge change to the industry. For more than a decade, the provincial government, raceways and horse owners have shared revenue from slots at race tracks. That revenue now stands at $1 billion a year.
[Taxpayer subsidies to the dead racing industry!]
But in March, the Ontario government announced the arrangement would end. The slots are to be removed next year, and the sharing will be over. According to the province, slot machine proceeds being shared with the racing sector are instead needed for schools and hospitals.
That’s a major blow to the sector. It’s predicting significant job losses, anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 jobs. Online petitions are imploring MPs to reconsider. The cover story in the latest issue of
Better Farming magazine, released this week, calls the decision “a catastrophe in the making.” It impacts our region — the slots at Elora are among those on the chopping block, as are those at Flamboro Downs.
This situation raises many nonracing issues, too, not the least of which is the hypnotic lure of slot machines. If they didn’t generate so much money for all parties, their pending departure would cause a lot less panic. But the reality is that for some gamblers, the mesmerizing effect of slot machines is stupefying. It makes players almost trance-like, pulling levers, pushing buttons, watching graphics spin, almost oblivious to either the win or, more troublesome, the loss they are experiencing.
This hypnotic effect of casinos and slots in particular has long interested and bothered University of Guelph marketing and consumer studies researcher Prof. Karen Finlay. From her laboratory on Gordon Street in Guelph, just south of the university, she carries out studies on casino environments in a room that mimics parts of an Ontario casino, trying to understand how gamblers can become disassociated from reality as they get caught up in the slot machine experience.
One reason she conducts research in a lab is because for years she wasn’t allowed by casinos to do studies there, even though they’re public places.
But then came a breakthrough, owing mainly to her persistence as well as support from the Guelph-based Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre. Last fall, both Elora, home to 400 slots, and Flamboro Downs, which houses 800 slots, gave her the green light to work inside their confines. She described the relationship as very co-operative, with both facilities as interested as she in enlightenment about gamblers.
At Flamboro Downs, over a 12-day period for eight-hour stretches, she and her graduate students studied ways slot machine gamblers could potentially be pulled out of their repetitive behaviour, by something called restorative images. These images — including a tropical beach scene (the most popular), a ballet dancer, horses galloping, mountains, bear cubs playing together — give slot machine gamblers a mellow, visual break from the machine’s repetitive graphics. It’s restoring reality, really. Finlay calls it “wiping the visual slate clean” for gamblers.
The research team showed these images on a big-screen TV just above a slot machine, and measured how much people looked away at them from the slot machines. Unfortunately, even they had little effect — despite being big, and directly above the machines, gamblers were still too absorbed in their activity, at least until the researchers brought the restorative images to their attention.
Finlay suggests slot machine manufacturers build restorative image provisions right into the machines’ video displays, so the images pop up periodically and give gamblers a visual break from slot hypnosis.
Slot machines, wherever they end up, will continue drawing gamblers. And researchers such as Finlay will keep trying to make sure measures are in place to make gambling fun, not addictive.
Owen Roberts teaches agricultural communications at the University of Guelph. His column appears Monday. Also, check out his Urban Cowboy blog off www.guelphmercury.com
http://www.guelphmercury.com/opinion/columns/article/735828--breaking-up-the-hypnotic-lure-of-slot-machines
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