I’ve been writing about slots for six years now. Originally my focus was on the ones found in casinos. I’d review pay tables so I could write about them for other players. The pay tables found on slots in person are generally very clear, if not overwritten to be overly clear. I’ve seen pay tables that go on for 30 pages, but the goal is to be complete and organized, even if the amount of reading varies widely.
It’s been an interesting transition to spend some time focusing on online slots. Of course, there are slots that have been ported over from those in-person versions, and the pay table information looks quite familiar. Those slot makers also can release online slots that are not in person, and the pay tables tend to be written similarly – they clearly use the same level of care for their online products.
Then there are the primarily online providers. The consistency for them is much more uneven. For an industry that’s still new and developing, perhaps that’s to be expected, but in a heavily regulated industry, I do find myself sometimes scratching my head about why some games’ rules are not nearly as clear as they should be to help instill confidence in players.
The rules are the way we know how a game works, and how various features play out. Sometimes with online slots what’s found in rules borders on marketing language as opposed to the clear cut rules, and that’s not really acceptable. The pay table is supposed to be a clear cut way to know how all the pays work, and if it’s not explicit, it can leave questions in our mind about what should happen. And that shouldn’t be the case.
Most of this simply comes down to wording. One example is a game that has a wheel. The wheel is available during the base game and during the free spins. But instead of using the word “during” to be crystal clear, it just wrote “Wheel Base Game” and “Wheel Free Spins,” which the latter looks like what many game makers title directions about a bonus. It initially read like there were two ways into the free games, because of the lack of clarity of the information.
In another, a bonus requires at least one special symbol as part of a combination to get free games. But the directions said one special symbol was needed for a chance at a bonus, and then way down in a completely separate part of the pay table it shows how many of each type of symbol triggers the bonus, clarifying how the “chance” works. The separation of information and the use of “chance” made it more difficult to discern the specifics.
In both cases, playing the game for a bit made it much easier to realize what they were saying, but it shouldn’t be that we have to play a demo or spend money to work through bad writing. I’ve certainly heard my share of criticisms when I use poor grammar, or something is unclear – and all of it is valid, really. I spent part of my career copy editing others’ writing, so it’s also fair to say clarity is an important element to me.
Game makers that aren’t investing in this should do better. Regulators should be more mindful of this, especially for game makers who are consistently coming up short. It’s not good enough for the casinos and regulators to have access to the under the hood data and sign off on it, while players don’t get a clear explanation of how things work.
