I was born and raised in Las Vegas. Actually, my family goes back to the '30's there. Some of the strategies mentioned in the article are a bit more complex than I've thought about, but are unsurprising. I've noticed more basic things like the round and meandering layout of casinos that make you (a) walk past the gaming areas to get anywhere and (b) make it difficult to navigate your way out of the gaming areas. Other techniques are the minimizing of natural light and absence of clocks so as not to remind people how much time is going by. This is all in addition to the inherent addictive nature of gambling. They've shown that rats in a cage, when presented with a lever that randomly delivers food when activated, will begin to obsessively trigger the lever and let the food pile up rather than hitting it only when they are hungry. In fact, B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviorist thought wrote a somewhat tongue in cheek paper in which he postulated that the gambling drive is so powerful that we could easily abolish all mandatory taxes if we instead encouraged people at a young age to gamble (on lotteries, etc.) - we'd have all the tax revenue we'd need.

I don't think most of these more exotic strategies (i.e. other than gaming itself and alcohol) were consciously employed when organized crime ran the industry. They made so much money skimming profits that they weren't too worried about squeezing dimes out nor were they sophisticated in that way (they were very sophisticated in other ways). In that time, the culture was marked by personal relationships (who you know), "comping" or giving free things, cheap rooms and food, more live entertainment, more well dressed adults going out at night rather than people walking the strip in the day pushing strollers, etc. Also there was a notable lack of violent crime in and around the casino areas. Organized crime wouldn't allow purse snatchers, card cheats, etc. (Of course I mean other than the crime committed by the mafia in enforcing this peace or crime among themselves).

This all changed as corporations began to run things and the mafia became more marginalized beginning in the '90's. The corporation's spreadsheet toting MBA's began calculating profitability on a per-square-foot basis. This resulted in less comping, more expensive food and hotel rooms, live entertainment replaced with more video poker, and many of the more esoteric strategies to induce gaming profits such as those mentioned in the article. It also resulted in some notable failures - for example the idea of appealing to families by adding huge kids rides and carnival style game areas. (This idea was taken from the Circus Circus Hotel which was the first to have that.) The idea kind of flopped and the hotels realized that people with kids don't spend 16 hours at a blackjack table (shocker). A spectacular example of this was the theme park behind the MGM that they eventually tore down. They shifted back to gaming and adult entertainment launching the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" campaign and we saw the rise of casinos like the Palms that appealed to young men trying to relive the cool sophistication of Hugh Hefner's days in the '60s.