With great hopes I head to casinos during my Las Vegas UAHCI trip.
I was looking for multi-player VR arcade games with advanced betting options. I found nothing like that ...
Instead, there were only tradional slot machines, thousands of them. Funny, nowadays you can only get credits (or a recipes) out of these machines, even the coins are missing. Anything else to play? Black jack, roulette and poker. OK. Still, what is the promise for younger customers and our generation?
In our Tampere University Hypermedia Laboratory my colleagues are doing research on pervasive gaming. The future perspectives are quite fantastic: games where the player is in continuous interaction with the environment and where experience shifts from traditional interaction with the computer to augmented reality. The gaming experience is v-e-r-y immersive. Professor Frans Mäyrä, one of the establishers of DIGRA (Digital Games Research Association) is our expert in the area. See Frans blogging about future games. What could be the gaming experience in Las Vegas that could go beyond slot machines and utilise those huge advertising screens?
Hopefully casinos and entertainment companies in Las Vegas catch up this or ... the younger customers have to move to other resorts where the gaming is more modern. I know that it is not easy to change the gaming concept while tampering of machines (systems) and cheating in money games are always issues. Still, new innovations can be built systematically (yes, I found for example the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) quite an interesting approach for that, not to mention many creative problem solving techniques, see my Couger book recommendation.)
Afterword: I still liked Vegas. Great Shows and nice hotels. Good place for conferences and golf. Kitsch at it's best :-)
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Posted by: Online Penny Slots | Penny Slots Machines | May 11, 2008 at 08:49 PM