page_title: Game design
section_title: Casino games
hierarchical_section_title: Game design / Issues / Casino games
caption_attribution_description: Slot machine.
context_page_description: Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in the form of gamification.
  Game design creates goals, rules and challenges to define a board game, card game, dice game, casino game, role-playing game, sport, video game, war game or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants and, possibly, spectators.
  Academically, game design is part of game studies, while game theory studies strategic decision making. Games have historically inspired seminal research in the fields of probability, artificial intelligence, economics, and optimization theory. Applying game design to itself is a current research topic in metadesign.
context_section_description: Casino game design can entail the creation of an entirely new casino game, the creation of a variation on an existing casino game, or the creation of a new side bet on an existing casino game.
  Casino game mathematician, Michael Shackleford has noted that it is much more common for casino game designers today to make successful variations than entirely new casino games. Gambling columnist John Grochowski points to the emergence of community-style slot machines in the mid-1990s, for example, as a successful variation on an existing casino game type.
  Unlike the majority of other games which are designed primarily in the interest of the player, one of the central aims of casino game design is to optimize the house advantage and maximize revenue from gamblers. Successful casino game design works to provide entertainment for the player and revenue for the gambling house.
  To maximise player entertainment, casino games are designed with simple easy-to-learn rules that emphasize winning (i.e. whose rules enumerate many victory conditions and few loss conditions), and that provide players with a variety of different gameplay postures (e.g. card hands). Player entertainment value is also enhanced by providing gamblers with familiar gaming elements (e.g. dice and cards) in new casino games.
  To maximise success for the gambling house, casino games are designed to be easy for croupiers to operate and for pit managers to oversee.
  The two most fundamental rules of casino game design is that the games must be non-fraudable (including being as nearly as possible immune from advantage gambling), and that they must mathematically favor the house winning. Shackleford suggests that the optimum casino game design should give the house an edge of smaller than 5%.
caption: All casino games are designed to mathematically favor the house. The house edge for a slot machine can range widely between 2 and 15 percent.[33]
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D70", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "QuickTime 7.1.3", "Image DateTime": "2007:01:03 17:30:56", "Image HostComputer": "Mac OS X 10.4.8", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "254", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "626", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6769", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:12:23 09:19:26", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:12:23 09:19:26", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "1", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Cool white fluorescent (W 3900 - 4500K)", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "50", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area"}